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All this time, there’d been a trapdoor waiting underneath my feet, and it just took the right press of a button, the pressing of a cork against the mouth of a stopped-up bottle, and the whoosh that came next was inevitable. The after was inevitable too.
And I was the one who’d need to make a decision about what came in that after.
His breathing evened out, his body lax in sleep after a few minutes, but I was wide awake. My mind refused to shut down, a tangled knot of thoughts that took me hours to sift through.
Eventually, he rolled onto his back, and I stared at his profile, unable to pretend anymore that this wasn’t a life-altering sort of relationship.
There was no going back from him, and I didn’t want to.
I eased out of bed and grabbed my phone, only crawling back into bed when I had a tentative plan in place. I slept fitfully for a couple of hours, waking long before Cameron.
While he continued to rest, I made coffee and changed, moving through the bathroom quietly as I put on a single coat of mascara and tried to tame my hair into something presentable.
My phone dinged.
Ruth: You sure about this?
Me: Absolutely.
Ruth: Okay. But if I get fired because of this, you better give me a job, young lady.
Me: Deal.
I stared down at the bed where he slept and thought about waking him.
He’d insist on coming with me. And if I thought about it too long, I might let him.
So instead, I took the note I’d written after drinking my coffee and tucked it firmly underneath his phone where I knew he’d see it.
Then I glanced at Neville, who was watching me from a pile of pillows at the foot of the bed, and gave him a narrow-eyed look.
“I don’t trust you not to eat that paper,” I whispered, and he twitched his ears and burrowed back into the pillows. I went to hunt down some tape from Cameron’s kitchen. Once the note was taped onto his phone, I felt a bit safer to leave.
It was eerily quiet when I left the house and drove to the airfield. The flight to Seattle was quick and uneventful, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d think when he woke up. If he’d worry.
No, he wouldn’t worry.
At the private airfield, a driver waited, just as Ruth promised there would be.
“Miss Lynch,” he said with a tip of his hat.
“My father’s house, please,” I instructed him.
With the press of a button, he closed the window between us, and I set my head back on the seat rest. As I thought it would, my phone dinged with a text from Cameron. Then another.
My eyes slammed shut, and I clicked the button on the side to turn off the sounds on my phone.
Arriving at our house set off a clanging, clumsy sort of reaction under my ribs. It didn’t feel wrong. But it didn’t feel right either.
Ruth opened the door before I could even reach for the doorknob, sizing me up with a quick glance from the top of my head to my feet. I couldn’t help but wonder what she saw, if I looked as different to her as I felt. I’d only been gone a couple of weeks, but my entire life—from top to bottom—had been upended as thoroughly as my heart.
All she did was shake her head, clucked her tongue, and pulled me in for a quick hug.
She smelled like cinnamon and coffee, and I sank into her familiar embrace.
“Your father is going to have my hide for this,” she said, brushing a quick kiss to my cheek.
“No he won’t,” I promised. The look she gave me had me grinning. “Calm down, Ruth. If he hasn’t fired you yet, he never will. Remember when you let me skip school that day even though you knew I was faking sick? That vein in his forehead almost burst.”
