His voice sounds unfamiliar. The mischievousness is gone. The affection is gone. The emotions are gone. Everything gone, gone,gone.
With numb fingers, I feel for the door handle and get out of the vehicle. Before I close the door and turn away, I look at him one last time.
I look at the broad shoulders I leaned against. The strong arms with the tattooed hands that touched me. The straight nose in the handsome face. The lips that kissed me so gently and whispered my name. The raven-black hair and storm-gray eyes that shine like liquid silver when the light refracts through them.
"Take care of yourself, darling."
Darling.Never has anyone made a word sound like that. Never again will a voice give me goosebumps the way his can. Never again will I feel what I felt with him.
I close the door.
Cole starts the engine.
The pickup drives off.
And disappears.
For good.
FORTY-TWO
SOPHIE
As if in a trance, I walk toward the red brick house because I don’t know where else to go. I open the door, enter the building, and stop in front of a high table behind which a young man is sitting.
"How can I help you?"
His voice sounds wrong, so terribly wrong…
"I’m Sophie Reed." My voice sounds wrong too, but I force myself to keep talking anyway. "I ran away from home a week ago."
There are people everywhere. They talk to me. They touch me. Hold my hand, speak soothing words to me, tell me everything is going to be okay. They ask where I’ve been. What happened. Whether someone did something to me.
I don’t know. Nothing. No.
I can’t say any more. Because no matter how much my heart aches, I couldn’t betray him. He didn’t do anything to me. He only shook my world, made me fly, let me fall, gave me everything, and then tore it away from me in the cruelest of ways.
"You can tell us anything. Nothing will happen to you, darling," says one of the officers in a soft voice.
Darling.
It’s the wrong voice. Every voice is wrong. No one sounds like him, so I eventually tune everything out.
My mother is crying when she enters the police station. She pulls me into her arms, then pushes me away again to examine me. She asks what happened to my hair, where I got the clothes from, then pulls me back in. But I don’t say a word. I can only think of his voice.
Open your eyes, little darling.
The silver of his eyes is all I see. It’s everywhere. Liquid silver that swallows me whole and never lets me surface again until I’m completely lost in it.
I’m no longer here, not even as my mother leads me to her car. I sit in the passenger seat and wonder how many times I may have driven along this road with him. Was it this forest where he showed me how to shoot? Was it here that he held my hand? Was that a lie, too?
My gaze lands on the intersection with the traffic light where he always waited. I see his pickup, but it’s just an illusion. He’s not there and never will be again. He’s gone.
We enter our house, which is so different from his place. It should be warm and friendly, but I feel so terribly cold without him…
My mother won’t stop talking. She was worried about me, she says again and again. How could I do that to her, she wants to know. Where was I, she asks.
I say that I don’t know.
