Again, I look out the window at the familiar street. “Raven said—”
“Sophia.” Her voice is gentle but completely certain. “Why would you listen to a woman like Raven? She’s jealous. She wants him, she can’t have him, and she said the cruelest thing available to her because that’s what people do when they’re hurting and have nothing left to lose… but he chose you. Not her.You.” She lets that land for a moment. “The heart wants what it wants. And as long as you’re doing this because you genuinely care for him and not because you’re lonely, not because he was simply there, there is nothing wrong with what you feel.”
The tears arrive before I know they are coming. “What if Raven’s right?” I say. “What if I’m just—”
“You’re not,” Annie says with no hesitation or qualification. “I’ve known you your whole life, Sophia. I know the difference between you being lonely and you being in love.”
Looking at her, I ask, “Which one is this?”
She meets my gaze steadily across the darkness of the car. “You already know the answer to that.”
Holding her gaze for a long moment, I say nothing.
Because the answer is there, it has been there for weeks, sitting underneath everything Raven said, underneath all the doubt, fear, and particular grief of not trusting yourself,but not ready to say it out loud yet. Not tonight. Not in a parked car outside a Vixen Falls apartment with the streetlights coming on and everything still raw.
Annie doesn’t push.
She just puts her hand over mine on the center console and leaves it there.
That is enough.
***
My apartment smells like absence.
That particular closed-up stillness of a space that has been empty for months, the air flat and stale, the surfaces lightly dusty, everything exactly where I’d left it and somehow more unfamiliar for it. Annie had been checking the mail, a neat pile of it organized by date on the kitchen counter in the particular way that only Annie organizes anything. I stand there looking at it and feel the distance between this kitchen and the one in Vegas sitting in my chest, like something physical.
No flowers on the island.
No painting on the wall.
No Memphis clicking across the floor toward his bowl in the morning, pausing to look up with those amber eyes like he has something important to say.
Putting my bag down, I go to the bedroom.
Ryan’s photograph is on the bedside table where it has always been. It’s the one of us at the Blood Brothers’ yard, him laughing at something off camera, his face completely unguarded and entirely himself. I sit on the edge of the bed and look at it for a long moment, feeling its familiar weight and something else underneath, something quieter and more complicated.
I’m sorry, I think.I love you. I will always love you. But something has changed, and I think if anyone would understand that, it would be you. I think you’d want this.
Lying back on the bed, I look at the ceiling of my Vixen Falls apartment, still white, and nothing at all like the one in Vegas with the pool light moving slowly across it in the dark.
Missing it.
Missing him.
The way you miss someone who became essential before you understood what was happening, so gradually and completelythat by the time you noticed it, they were already woven into everything.
Reaching for my phone, I see them immediately.
Two missed calls. Both from the same night and from the same name sitting at the top of my screen.
Tate.
Lying there looking at them for a long moment, I put the phone face down on the bedside table, and I lie in the dark with the full weight of what I’d run from pressing down on my chest. He’d come home, found the note, and called. Of course, he had. And I can’t listen. Not yet, when his voice would undo everything I am still trying to hold together.
Not yet.
The days settle into something that looks like routine from the outside.