I was ready. I was just hoping to do this without fighting my way out.
“See you soon,” Tarik told me, clapping me on the shoulder. He wandered out to say goodbye to Lyria, and I slipped into my room to print everything that needed to be printed, sending the rest of the files to my phone.
I had everything saved into folders, and I stared at the dates on my ticket. I was staying on Pierce Island for seven days. Seven glorious, long, lush days. And if I met him—my nameless hero—that would be icing on the cake. If I didn’t have any of that, at least I would have warm weather that didn’t make the pins in my spine ache and the chance to prove to both myself and anyone else watching that I could do this.
That I could be me.
That in spite of everything that had tried to wreck me, I wasn’t fucking broken.
In both airports, no one recognized me, which was something I’d been dreading. We didn’t often fly when we were on tour, but when we did, it was always the worst part of the trip. Having people stalking us through the terminal, taking videos, trying to get close enough to overhear conversations, and having my one solitary moment with a cup of coffee interrupted by a request for a selfie was hell on earth.
And I didn’t think I could handle that now. There was a small part of me that missed it. The frenetic, frantic energy that followed us as we tried to escape prying eyes, but I was too tired for that now. I couldn’t run even if I wanted to, and if anyone recognized me, they’d have questions for me that I wasn’t ready to answer.
I still hadn’t put out a public statement, and I wouldn’t until I had some idea what I wanted to say. But as much as my lyrics had been flowing over the last few months, the rest of my words felt dried up.
How did I tell people what happened? What my life was like? What my future would be? How could I manage them when I couldn’t even manage my own family?
I’d escaped my house without my brother knowing, got on the plane, but Tarik had been right: the fact that I had to sneak out at all was a problem. I needed to fix it, and this felt like the first step.
This was the first taste of freedom I’d had in nearly a year, and I kind of wanted to cry.
Dragging my suitcase behind me, I made my way outside, into Savannah’s chilly winter dawn to the row of hired cars, and looked around for the one that was supposed to be mine. Thephone signal inside the airport was kind of crap, but as I stepped up to the curb, all my notifications hit at once, and my phone began an almost melodical buzzing of texts and emails pouring through.
And by now, I knew most of them were probably from Tollin. I’d left a note so he didn’t panic, but there wasn’t a chance in hell he wasn’t raging pissed at the way I’d handled it. And yeah, it was kind of a dick move, but I needed him to understand that part of that was his fault.
He’d made it so fucking impossible to talk to him about anything this last year, and once he was in a place to understand, he would have to come to terms with the fact that I would not feel like a prisoner in my own home. Or his.
I’d spent half my childhood letting him boss me around for my own good, and now it was so much worse. A year had changed our dynamic to something entirely unrecognizable and, frankly, a little terrifying. But it was ending now.
Everyone who controlled me said it was for my own good.
And I was done believing them.
“Ride for Atlas?” I said to the driver when my app pointed me in the right direction. It was a large black SUV with tinted windows.
The driver looked at me and grunted, then pushed the button to open the trunk so I could throw my things inside. My legs were feeling strong at the moment, but I had no idea how long that would last. I had my cane, and my crutches were in my suitcase, and I was wearing my sturdiest orthotics. I hadn’t brought along my wheelchair after reading a thousand horror stories about airlines that returned them broken beyond repair, but I didn’t know if that was the right choice.
I couldn’t trust my legs, but I wanted to. Or maybe I wanted to push myself and see how far I could go.
I slid into the back seat and confirmed the address of the ferry. It was only a twenty-minute drive, so I laid my head against the window and closed my eyes, feeling lulled by the motion of the car as the driver pulled out of the airport circle and onto the main road.
For the first time in a while, in spite of my phone still buzzing in my pocket, I felt at peace.
A few hours on the ferry, I stared at the rising sun over the water and wondered if this was the right decision after all. There were little snow flurries from a storm the boat was supposed to outrun, which gave the Atlantic an almost surreal look. The sun was a deep, Meyer lemon yellow, peeking through a single break in the clouds on the horizon.
There was almost no one on the boat, so I closed my eyes and tried to picture my EMT with his family. He wouldn’t have been happy, I didn’t think. Though my memory was spotty, I recalled the way he spoke about them. The bitterness in his voice had stuck with me.
I still couldn’t be sure that the whole thing was real, but it felt too detailed to have been a pain-induced hallucination.
“Coffee?”
I jolted and almost lost my footing as I turned to see one of the café workers staring at me. She had a look in her eye that told me she knew who I was. I offered a smile. “Thanks, but I’m alright.”
Her gaze darted down to my knees, then to my feet, before going back up to my face. Yeah. She knew. I hadn’t bothered refuting internet rumors about what had become of me. Articles with journalists who claimed to have a source saying that I wasparaplegic and would never walk again. Some saying I had been paralyzed from the neck down and typed on my phone using a mouth stick.
A couple said I had died and it was all a big conspiracy.
One said that it was all faked so I could get out of my contract.
