“Just snatched it right off.” She lifted one hand to demonstrate. “Maverick’s got a thing about hats. We think his previous owner wore one when—well. That’s his story to tell, not mine. But Beckett just stood there looking so personally offended. Like the horse had insulted his grandmother.”
I laughed. It came out thinner than I intended.
The highway stretched ahead, mountains rising in the distance. But underneath Lark’s easy chatter, my mind kept circling the same impossible fact like water around a drain.
Coop was back under. No contact possible. No way to know if he was safe. Just this hollow ache of waiting.
The not-knowing had teeth. Sharp, painful ones.
“You’re doing that thing again,” Lark said.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you laugh but your eyes stay frozen.” She glanced over. “You haven’t really been here for the last twenty miles.”
I hadn’t really been here for any of the other miles either. I felt like I hadn’t been in my own body since Coop had left this morning. Which was why I’d asked Lark to come with me to get some more stuff from my apartment.
Anything was better than sitting around doing nothing.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Sorry. I’m just?—”
“Coop’s good at what he does,” Lark said quietly. “I know this isn’t his normal work, but he’s good at it.”
“I know.” The words felt inadequate.
We drove another few miles in silence. The landscape shifted from open highway to the outskirts of town, familiar landmarks sliding past. The grocery store where I’d bought my sad single-serving dinners. The coffee shop where I’d edited photos surrounded by strangers, pretending their ambient noise was company.
I followed the familiar streets to my building. Three stories of beige stucco, practical windows, zero architectural personality. The kind of place you rented when you didn’t care where you lived, only that you had somewhere to sleep between jobs.
We climbed the stairs to the second floor. My keys jangled too loudly in the quiet hallway. I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and stepped inside.
My chest went tight.
Small. So much smaller than I remembered. A couch I’d bought at a secondhand store because it was cheap, upholstered in a gray I’d never liked. A kitchen with exactly enough dishes for one person, the cabinets half empty. Walls bare except for a single photograph I’d taken of the mountains at sunrise—the one beautiful thing in the whole place, and I’d made it myself because no one else was going to.
This was where I’d spent the past few years of my life. Standing here now, with Garnet Bend still warm in my memory, I could barely recognize the woman who’d existed in these rooms.
“This doesn’t look like you.” Lark stood in the center of the living room, turning slowly, her eyes cataloging every sparse detail.
“It wasn’t.” I dropped my keys on the counter, the sound jarring in the stillness. “I was just existing here. Going through the motions. Working, sleeping, working again.” I ran my hand along the back of the couch, feeling the rough fabric. “I never bothered making it a home.”
Because home had meant something else. Someone else. And after I’d lost that, nothing else seemed worth the effort.
Lark didn’t push. She just nodded, that quiet understanding in her expression. She’d been through something too—I didn’t know the details, but I recognized the shape of old wounds when I saw them.
“Well.” She clapped her hands, breaking the weight of the moment. “Let’s pack up what we can fit.”
We started in the bedroom. I’d grabbed boxes from a storage place on the way, and we began the process of dismantling a life that had never really felt like mine.
It went faster than expected. I didn’t have much—a few years of accumulated possessions that fit easily into cardboard containers. Clothes I barely remembered buying. Toiletries. Camera equipment, most of which I’d already grabbed on my quick trip last week. The furniture I’d get rid of another time.
“So what’s the plan?” Lark asked, taping a box closed with efficient movements. “Once you’re really settled in Garnet Bend? I mean, I assume you and Coop will be living together, but what about work-wise?”
“Photography, still.” I folded a sweater into the box I was packing. “But different from before. I’ve been thinking about what kind of work actually matters to me.”
“What kind is that?”
The idea was still new, still taking shape. “Survivors. People who’ve been through something terrible and found their way back.” I smoothed the sweater flat. “There’s beauty in resilience. I want to capture that.”
