“She asked me for a ride to the mechanic this morning. I told her Sam doesn’t usually open until eight. She said she’d wait there, and if I didn’t give her a ride before I came to get you, she’d walk.”
“She can’t.” The words burst out of me. Not again. She isn’t about to leave again without a word. I can’t survive that again.
“I’m so fucking sorry, bro.”
“Take me to Sam’s auto shop,” I say.
Seth sighs, but he turns onto First Avenue. Sierra stands up when she sees Seth slow to a stop.
“Remember when we began this whole thing, and you said you needed closure?” Seth says. “I know you’re tired and emotionally distraught. But keep in mind, if you can’t convince her to stay, that this may be your last chance.”
“Don’t say that.” I’m not ready for this to be the last time I see Sierra.
“Go on. Get the fuck out of my car,” Seth says gently when I don’t move.
Seth takes off as soon as I shut the door. It’s early, the shadows making up the space around me. I walk over to her, where she has returned to her seated position against the shop.
I slide down the smooth metal groove of the shop, already growing warm from the sun. I don’t know what to say. I can’t seem to look away from my hands. Not at anything but the knots of my knuckles and the thousands of tiny, faint lines creased across my skin like a cracked, dry riverbed. Windrustles shrubby acacia and yucca plants while a handful of mourning doves coo despondently nearby.
“You were really going to leave again without saying goodbye?” My voice shakes on the wordagain, and I sink further into myself in disgust.
“I left a note,” she whispers, but I can hear the thread of shame running through her words.
Good. Sheshouldbe ashamed. A fucking note. As if a fucking piece of inked-up paper can make sense of this. My heart feels like it is cracking into pieces. Splintered, fractured. Lost.
“I don’t belong here, Logan,” she says defensively when I don’t answer.
Translation: I don’twantto belong here. You’re not enough to stay for.
“It was never going to work,” Sierra continues softly. Gently.
I want to smash my fist against the warm metal behind us. How dare she sound gentle as she breaks my fucking heart?
“I mean, look at what’s happened,” she continues. “We were pretending to live in an alternative universe where the past didn’t exist. But it does. And it has come back to bite us. Unless you’re willing to let yourself be blackmailed—”
I can’t keep my anger down anymore. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. We could have figured something out together. You’re not even going to try?”
“Try what? You heard what Caitlin said about me. What that recording confirms.”
That fucking recording. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, unable to keep the hurt out of my voice.
She sits there for a moment, silent, her hair falling partially across her face. My hands itch to brush it back over hershoulder.
“I—I don’t ever want to think about it. About theAfter.”
“The After?”
“TheAfteris…everything that happened once I walked away from you, all right? It’s easier if I skip over it in my mind. Call me a coward, but…I’ve been pretending that the moment I left you at school that day to meet Marshal Dawson, all the way until I got accepted into the transitional housing in Tucson…it just didn’t happen. Making that statement. Leaving here. Living on the streets. I’ve torn out those pages. I don’t want to go back, not even in my memories.”
“Oh.” How did I not see this? Every little thing has been glossed over, reduced to a handful of words. The boyfriends. How she left. Where she went. How she survived. Why she didn’t contact us. What her dreams were.
While I’ve been reliving my trauma over and over, letting it drive me, Sierra has been avoiding hers—burying it so deeply that I forgot to keep asking the questions that haunted me for years.
I suddenly recall the time her mom was in the hospital for overdosing, how I was too busy enjoying her using sex as an outlet to learn what she was feeling. I feel sick. I haven’t changed. I really believed I had.
“But I wanted to know,” I say quietly. It’s the truth, what little good it does me. “I wanted to share your pain.”
“I’m not ready,” her voice breaks. “Logan, don’t you see? I’ll always be tainted. And I don’t want to be. I can’t stay here, and you’ll never leave.”
