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Mina.
She’s there, in the picture, smiling for Danny, looking relaxed and happy and…
Timothy: Tell Freya I love it.
This pain is never going to lessen.
We finish dinner and head out. My heart is too heavy to do anything other than follow Nic through the crowd. He has a car waiting, and we climb in. I barely notice the lights on the strip or the tourists out for a good night. Normally, I love this shit. The energy of the place. There’s always something new to look at even though I’ve been here dozens of times.
The car ride is short. Or long, I don’t know.
I miss Mina. I am going to love her as long as I breathe. A part of me doesn’t exist without her. I know I need to move on, but I don’t see much of a point.
I’m so lost in my misery I don’t realize where we are until Nic stops us at a fence.
We’re standing next to the landing pad at the Strat’s SkyJump.
“Mr. Fontana,” a woman with a pleasant voice, an earpiece, and a clipboard says as she joins us. “On behalf of Golden Entertainment, thank you for—”
I stop listening to the corporate spiel. A controlled descent would probably be okay for my head, but I don’t want to do it and I know Nic sure as hell doesn’t want to. Still, it was nice of him to try to cheer me up with this.
“Excuse me, one moment,” Nic says the instant his phone rings. He swipes what must be a video call and grins. “Hey, Danny. Ready?”
Danny? He’s supposedly in LA with Mina. I narrow my eyes at Nic.
“Ready and terrified. You?” Danny doesn’t sound scared at all. But why would he? We’ve been skydiving a bunch of times and this is a controlled descent. This shit is child’s play.
“We’re here.” Nic hands me the phone.
I take the phone slowly, suspecting a trap. An extreme close-up of Danny’s face greets me. “You need to exfoliate,” I tell him. “What’s going on?”
“Someone here has something to say to you,” Danny says, and the camera flips to someone in a brightly colored jumpsuit. Her dark hair lofts about her face in a breeze, obscuring it before she pushes it back.
Not that I don’t recognize her the second I see her.
Mina.
What the fuck is she doing up there? My heart knocks around loud in my chest, in sympathy. She must be terrified.
“Timothy.” Her voice is shaking. She’s shaking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look so pale. “Hi.”
“Hey. What are you doing?” I know what she’s doing, she’s wearing the jumpsuit, but this doesn’t make sense. Mina wouldn’t do this. This is the opposite of child’s play to her.
“Um, the last time I wore a harness was much more fun,” she says with a nervous laugh.
I can’t laugh. Can’t do anything except stare at her and try to make sense of this.
“I made a huge mistake,” she says in a high voice as they hook a cable to her harness. “I was scared and upset and I don’t want to spend my entire life like that. I didn’t listen to you, didn’t give us a chance to work it out. I turned my back on you. I’ll never do that again.”
The woman on the platform asks her to turn. Mina does slowly, looking over her shoulder at the camera. “Except right now, I guess, because they needed me to turn, but you know what I mean.” Another cable is attached, and the first one is removed. Danny must be strapped in to get a shot this close.
My throat goes tight. I want to race up there and wrap my arms around her, tell her everything is okay, but before I can tell her to hold tight and step away from the platform, she’s talking again.
“I watched you, all the videos I could find, all the things I was too scared to look at before, and you’re amazing. I love you, Timothy. All of you. Even the parts that scare me. And maybe I need to be scared sometimes, so I can learn how to live with it. I’ll do that. For you.”
The checks are happening in the background while Mina takes a deep, trembling breath.
“Baby,” I finally manage to say. “Go inside and wait. I’ll—”
