“Chris.” Callie sharpens. “Did you hear what I just said? You show up at her door looking like that?—”
“I heard you.” He’s not arguing. He’s just done listening. He heads for the door.
Callie looks at Mason. Mason looks at me. Nobody stops him.
He’s already through the door, closing it behind him.
“He’s going to make it worse,” Callie says.
But I’m already on my feet. Because Chris is wrong about a lot of things tonight, but he’s not wrong about this—Nina is alone, and she shouldn’t be. And if he’s going, so am I.
“Wyatt—”
“He was right. She needs us,” I say. I grab my jacket and follow Chris into the night.
24
Wyatt
The night air is cool against my split lip as we step outside. Chris’s car is parked at the curb right outside the gate, a generic sedan with rental plates.
We get in without speaking. The leather seats smell new, impersonal. Chris starts the engine, adjusts the mirrors. His hands are steady on the wheel, but his shoulders are bunched with tension.
“You know where she lives?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
Of course he does. He was there last week.
We pull away from the curb, heading toward the 10. The freeway is busy with its usual flow of evening traffic streaming through the city. Chris merges smoothly, the rental sedan anonymous among the river of taillights. The silence in the car thrums with everything we haven’t said, everything we’re both afraid to face.
“That night,” Chris says finally. “In Denver. When you were packing her things.”
I wait.
“What happened between us—it wasn’t just about her.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I look at him in the dim light from the dashboard. His profile is sharp, focused on the road, but there’s vulnerability in the set of his shoulders.
“I know,” I say. “It was her bed, but I was the one you needed, wasn’t I?”
He casts me a longer look that reveals a crack in his armor—a glimmer of the vulnerability from that night. He just nods once and turns back to the road.
We drive in silence for a few more miles. Chris flicks on his blinker and merges toward the National Boulevard exit, then shakes his head and utters a soft curse as if he just realized he forgot something important.
We stop at a red light at the bottom of the off-ramp. Chris turns to me while we wait.
“What Callie said back there. About Nina being afraid we’d mourn a future she never wanted.”
I tense, waiting for another argument.
“She wasn’t just being poetic.”
“What do you mean?”
