I had crouched in the cold for hours, listening to the cars drive overhead. It was only when the sun began to set and the sky turned red that I realized he wasn’t coming.
I had gone back home that night and my entire life had changed all over again.
I always wondered exactly what had kept Yoss from meeting me. Even after what I had seen, I still couldn’t understand. I had thought nothing would have prevented us from being together. We had felt like a force of nature. Unstoppable. Destined. We thrived on the passion and confidence of youth that left no room for doubt. We loved each other. And in the ugly world we had inhabited, it was a light we had clung to.
There were days afterwards when I thought he was dead. I was full of so much fear that I almost choked on it.
I went back to the bridge hoping he’d show up. Dreading the moment when I realized he was fine and just didn’t want me anymore.
But it never happened.
It was like he had disappeared. As though he had never been. A figment of my overwrought imagination.
There had never been a Yoss and Imi.
Our story ended with a thud.
But it turns out there was more to the story than I thought.
Because right at that moment, the love of my young adult life was lying in a hospital bed, clearly still held prisoner by the choices he had made long before I had ever met him.
I got to my feet angrily, balling my hands into fists. I felt like hitting something. Smashing things.
No one even knew who he was. No one was looking for him.
He was still the lost, forgotten boy.
I was so angry with him for becoming another damn statistic. For giving up on our dreams.
How could he do that?
I opened the door and stepped back into the hallway. I should return to his room. I needed to notify the police about who he was. I knew his name. I knew his history. I knew bits and pieces about his life that would help fill in the gaps.
But I was missing the big chunk. What had happened to him in the last fifteen years and how he ended up nameless and bleeding in a hospital bed?
I pressed my fist to my mouth and swallowed the enraged sobs that inched up my throat.
I should pass the case off to Tess. I needed to tell Jason that I knew him and thus working with him inappropriate.
I opened Yoss’s file and stared down at the black and white facts.
Homeless.
Found unconscious.
Significant trauma.
I closed the folder and headed to the elevator. There were some phone calls I needed to make before I did anything else.
“Hello, this is Imogen Conner, the ICU social worker over at Lupton Memorial Hospital. Is Detective Preston available?” I chewed on the end of my pen and waited as I was transferred.
I couldn’t stop re-reading Yoss’s admission paperwork. The extent of his injuries was significant. But he was expected to make a full recovery.
That’s what worried me.
After he was better, where would he go? What would he do?
I knew the horrible things he did to stay alive. I had tried to ignore them when I was a girl. I couldn’t ignore them now.
