“Do you have a choice? Will they let you stay here?”
I blinked. I could hear the hope in his voice. The worst fucking human emotion to exist.
“You want to risk your life to, what? Be friends?” I asked incredulously.
“If you’re willing to,” he pleaded. “I want the chance to rebuild our friendship. Just don’t leave because of us. You shouldn’t have to leave because we ran into each other.”
“You don’t understand, Enoch. There are terrible, horrible, awful people out there that want to hurt me. And they will. It’s inevitable. If they find out—”
“Shiloh, your secret is safe with me. With us.I promise.Just give me a chance, yeah?”
I stifled the urge to scream. I was torn, being ripped in two by the future I wanted and the past I couldn’t escape.
“I…I don’t want you to leave,” Enoch chuckled half-heartedly at himself, “and maybe that’s selfish, but I feel it in my bones, Shiloh. We were supposed to run into each other again. God put us on this path again—”
“God?” I parroted on a whisper.
“Yes. It’s the only explanation for how we’ve come to this point. And I’m not going to mess with His plans. I just…I feel it, Shiloh. I feel this connection and I don’t know what that means, or what that looks like, but I just know that I want to give this a chance.”
The hope in Enoch’s inflection was enough to make me pause.Fuck. He can’t be serious.
“But…Jae, he said you hated me. He said you wanted nothing to do with me.”
“I can’t speak for Jae, but hate is the farthest thing I feel for you, Shiloh.”
A kernel, a seed, it was there. Blooming in my chest like I deserved any right to have him in my life. Like I wouldn’t be better off dead. Like I might actually want to keep living. Like all the risks I was taking would be worth it to have him again.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this. I needed to load the gun and finish this once and for all.Why? Why did he have to give me some hope?
“Enoch,” I sighed.
“Can you at least agree to meet me in person one last time before you leave? Can we say goodbye properly this time?”
I rolled one of the bullets between my fingers.
“Fine.”
“Okay.” I could hear it. The excitement in his tone and the guilt had me dropping the bullet back to the coffee table.
One more thing. For Enoch, I could do this one more thing.
“When did you want to meet?”
“Will you still be here this weekend?”
Fuck. This weekend? That’s forever away.
“Sure.”
“Saturday evening? I’ll text you my address.”
I let out a silent scream. “Yeah. Okay. Bye, Enoch.”
???
“I’m gonna miss you, kid. I’m…” Bradley took a deep breath. “I’ll be thinking about you, hoping for the best for you. Take care of yourself, okay? I mean it. Keep seeing your therapist and don’t waste away out here. Keep safe, keep vigilant, and don’t be a stranger. I know I can’t exactly help as a deputy, but I’m here if you wanna talk to someone who knows the truth about your past.”
I stared at my hands in my lap. The room had gotten dark at some point, as dark as it could get when the sun didn’t exactlyset, and I was still glued to the same spot I’d taken when Bradley had left with the paperwork.
