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“Someone’s here to see you.”
“I don’t really want to see anyone,” I admitted.
Anna appeared in the doorway, and the sight of her was a point of light I hadn’t expected
“Okay, you can stay,” I said and sank back against the pillows.
“I thought she might be welcome,” Ava said, forcing a smile, but her eyes were filled with worry. She and Noah were both stressed about the depression I’d sunken into since I’d come back from the trip.
“How are you feeling?” Anna asked, climbing onto the bed with me.
I frowned at her. “Did you cut your hair?”
“Oh, yeah,” Anna said and touched her hands to the bob that sat just above her shoulders. “I needed a change, you know? After everything…”
“I know,” I said, nodding. I could relate to that part. I’d needed a change, too. I just hadn’t known what to change to make this feeling go away.
“It looks good,” I said. “You don’t regret cutting it?”
Anna shrugged. “A bit, but my hair grows so fast, it will be long again in a blink. Time flies.”
“It does,” I said.
“You didn’t answer me when I asked how you’re feeling,” Anna pointed out.
I sighed, reached for the television remote and switched on the flat-screen TV on the wall.
I turned on some show, and we sat and watched in silence for a while.
“Have you talked to Lorenzo?” I asked Anna when the silence became unbearable. She’d just accepted my resolve not to talk, which made me want to fill the silence, and that pissed me off.
“Yeah, a short while ago,” Anna said, glancing sidelong at me. “He told me you two called it quits.”
I snorted. “You meanhecalled it quits, if you can even call it that. He just stopped talking to me.”
“He stopped talking to you?” Anna asked with a frown.
I nodded. “Yeah.” My eyes stung with tears. Fuck, I hated crying. “He left me in the forest to get help, and when he got it, he didn’t come back. He didn’t come to see me, talk to me… nothing. He just disappeared as if nothing had ever happened.”
“Oh, my God, Celine,” Anna said. She looked shocked. “I don’t get it.”
“I hoped he told you something he didn’t tell me, some kind of reason that makes sense…” I stopped talking, partly because my voice caught in my throat and partly because I didn’t want to be that girl—the one who cried over the guy and pined for him and looked for answers.
Anna shook her head. “He didn’t tell me any of that. All he did was check in to see if I’m okay since we hadn’t talked since the trip, and that was pretty much it.”
I let out a breath with a shudder, trying to keep it together.
“Did you get hurt?” I asked, trying to turn the conversation away from the jackass who stole my heart.
“No,” Anna said. “When the storms hit, we hid in the tents until the worst was over. We looked for you guys for a while, but when we saw the way the forest got ripped up, we decided to pack up and head to town to alert emergency services as quickly as possible. We didn’t want to waste time trying to look for you when people are trained for it, you know?”
“That’s very wise.”
“It still took way too long,” Anna said softly.
When she’d come to see me in the hospital after we’d been found, I’d been so high on pain meds that I couldn’t remember any of the conversations we’d had, only that she’d been there in the first place.
“What matters is that it’s over,” I said. “And that you were safe from the start. I was worried about Wes.”
