I didn't touch it now.
The apartment felt smaller than it had four hours ago, and colder. I found myself at the fridge, drawn to the low hum simply because it was a sign of life. I opened it without thinking—habit, the thing you do when you don't know what else to do with your hands—and there it was. The prosecco sat on the bottom shelf, still trapped in its brown paper bag. I’d been in such a rush to celebrate that I hadn't even let it breathe. Now, the condensation was turning the paper soft and damp, a celebration rotting before it even started.
I stood there until the spill of cold from the fridge matched the air in the room. I let the door swing shut and sank to the floor, my back against the humming metal. It was the only thing in the apartment that still had a heartbeat.
The space heater was in the corner where Jack had left it, orange cord coiled on the linoleum. A temporary fix in a life that had finally run out of duct tape. Across the room, his coffee mug was still on the drying rack, a ghost from a morning that didn’t belong to this day.
His grey jacket was still draped over the back of the chair, sleeves empty and reaching for the floor. I’d spent two years asking him to hang it up. It had been our longest-running joke—the kind of small, domestic friction that felt like a foundation. Now it just looked like shed skin.
The apartment was very quiet.
I thought about a Sunday last winter when the heat had gone out completely and we'd woken up to a temperature inside the apartment that couldn't have been far off what it was outside. Jack had checked the thermostat, come back to bed, pulled me into him without a word and wrapped the duvet around both of us like that was just the obvious solution. We'd stayed like that for two hours. He'd fallen back asleep almost immediately, the way he could, and I'd lain there listening to him breathe with my cold feet against his legs and the grey light coming through the curtains and thought about how I'd spent most of my life not having this.
The Kellermans, who'd taken me in at seven, had been fine. Not unkind, just indifferent in that particular way of people who've done something good and consider the debt paid. After them there'd been two more placements, a group home for eight months when I was fourteen, and then the Reids, who were decent enough that I'd stayed until I aged out. I'd never unpacked properly in any of those places. Never put things on walls. You learned not to buy posters because tape leaves marks and marks mean you were there, and being there was always temporary. You learned to keep everything in the bag.
Jack was the first person who'd made me feel like I didn't have to keep everything in the bag. Him and Cassie both, if I was honest—Cassie who'd shown up at my door three weeks after Jack and I started dating with a bottle of wine and the kind of easy warmth that made you feel like you'd known her your whole life. She'd just decided, apparently, that I was hers now. That I was family. I'd never had anyone do that before.
That Sunday, with the cold outside and his arm across me and nowhere either of us needed to be—I'd thought, this is what people mean. When they talk about home. This is the thing they mean.
I'd never told him that. I'd meant to.
And now.
Now this.
I got up off the floor. My legs were stiff from the cold linoleum and I stood there for a moment until they remembered what they were for. Then I picked up the letter.
It was lighter than it should have been for something that had changed everything. I unfolded it and read it again, all the way through, standing in my kitchen at ten-thirty at night still in my work clothes. The same words as this afternoon. The same letterhead, the same date, my name spelled right.
I pressed it against my chest and stood there.
Baltimore. August. The plan had always been late June—find an apartment, get Jack settled, give him time to find a shop that would take him on before school started. We'd talked about it maybe a dozen times. Loose plans, nothing fixed. We had time.
We.
I looked at the grey jacket on the chair, the sleeves still holding the shape of him, and I realized ‘we’ was just a story I’d been telling myself to keep the cold out. But the story was over, and the cold was back in.
I didn't know what Jack had been thinking tonight. Didn't know what had happened between his phone going to voicemail and that alley. Maybe I'd find out. Maybe he'd come home and explain and there would be some version of this I could understand.
Except I wasn't sure I wanted to.
What I understood was Baltimore. The letter, the date, the life waiting on the other side of it. Jack—what had happened tonight, and what it meant—I couldn't get a hold of any of it. Maybe later. Maybe in a week or a month or somewhere further down the road.
But Baltimore I understood.
I folded the letter back into thirds and set it on the counter. Then I went to the bedroom, pulled my duffel bag down from the top of the wardrobe, and started to pack.
Chapter Four
Jack
Iwasn't thinking about where I was going. The bike just went and I let it, the cold coming through my jacket, the road dark and empty at this hour. I took a corner too fast somewhere on the edge of town and felt the back wheel slip and didn't do anything about it, just held on and let the bike find its own way back. The cold was good. It was the only thing cutting through the whiskey, the only thing keeping me on the road.
I didn't deserve it.
Moments later, a car flashed its lights at me from the other direction and I realized I hadn't turned my headlight on. I turned it on then and kept riding. I didn’t know where I was going until I did.
Cassie’s.