“Thanks.” A silence fell between them, laden with all the things she didn’t know how to say, but waited patiently for the disparate pieces to fall into a sentence. “I just felt so abandoned by you both that I started assuming everyone would leave me. It’s why I was so mad that you tried to come back into my life after so many miserable months, and why I keep fucking things up with Milo. I’m trying to unpack those things and relearn them, but it really sucks.”
“I have to ask one more thing about him.”
“Fine,” she steeled herself, though the more they talked, the better it felt to hear his name. It meant she hadn’t imagined it all.
Logan braced himself on the steering wheel.
“Let’s just be really, brutally honest, I guess. Obviously, I got the full show, even if I’ve done my best to repress it… you never sounded like that with me.”
She had to laugh at that, mostly because he was right, but also because it was just like him to be worried about that when her mom’s literal ashes were rolling around in the back seat.
“Don’t take it personally,” she said, waving a hand as he groaned. “I don’t know how to say this to you, Logan, so I’m just going to rip the band-aid off. What Milo and I had in that department was just on another level. I can’t even describe it?—”
“And I would prefer you didn’t.”
“Fair. It had nothing to do with you. I always enjoyed things with us, I promise.”
“So I’m not terrible at sex?” Logan laughed, but he was serious. “I’ve had a bit of a complex since that night.”
Hanna patted his arm. “You are not terrible at sex. And I’m really, really sorry you had to see that. We thought you guys were gone for the night and never would have imagined one of you would walk in. I actually never even found out what Matty wanted.”
“Oh god,” Logan sighed. “He was actually coming to invite Milo out with us. Ironically, he wanted to test the waters between the three of us before Vegas. It’s been a long time since Milo and I had to be in the same room together. The last time I really spent that much time with him, we were kids and he was a fucking disaster, understandably, but I never gave him a chance after all the shit with Michaela happened.”
“Oof,” she groaned. “Well, I can confirm that of the three of us, he’s the mature and well-adjusted one. Painfully well-adjusted.”
Logan snorted. “So well-adjusted that he fumbled you?”
“He didn’t fumble me,” Hanna insisted. “I fumbled myself.”
“Regardless, I’m sorry. I hope you guys can work it out and I mean that, sincerely.”
She waited for the shift in his tone, or even a sneer, but his lips held steady. He really did mean it.
“Thanks, Lo.”
He released her knee and turned the volume up.
“Now let’s take Lisa on one last road trip.”
When she’d brought her mother to the Grand Canyon once she’d stopped treatment, Hanna had been acutely aware it would be the last thing they’d ever do together.
She’d felt it in her bones, the same way she’d felt that something was wrong when her phone rang in the middle of her workday.
The same way she’d felt her mom whispering through golden petals as she chased sunflowers across San Francisco.
There were some truths about death that couldn’t be explained, only survived.
When she sat beside Logan on a bench on the South Rim, a black box tucked between them, that familiar knowing crept over her—this would be the last thing they’d ever do as the versions of themselves they clung to.
On the drive up, they'd worked through just about every argument they'd ever had, peeling back the layers of where they'd gone wrong, and what they'd each leave as an offering in the canyon's red dust.
She shuffled the box between them. It was heavier than she’d expected, but also didn’t seem as heavy as it should be.
“Are you ready?”
She chuckled. “No.”
“I think you are,” Logan said gently, and that was enough to spur her on. She stood, leaning against the safety rail, and pulled the top of the box back. A small bag sat at the top, at her mother’s request, which she’d denied long enough.
