The reminder hit like a hand on my chest. My kid. My anchor. The one piece of my life I couldn’t afford to shatter with my own choices.
“I’m picking her up after her lesson,” I said. “I’ll tell her the truth, enough of it anyway. Then she’s going back to her mom’s tonight like planned.”
Holt’s eyes narrowed. “And then.”
“And then,” I said, voice low, “I’m going to get Tessa back.”
Holt didn’t react. He just stared at me, like he was trying to see if I’d lost my mind.
Forty-One
Tessa
The apartment lights were off, the curtains half open. Late afternoon sun poured in and painted long stripes across the floor. Everything looked exactly the same as the day I left, but it didn’t feel like the same place. The couch, the throw blanket, the coffee table with its chipped corner. The little plant on the window ledge that should’ve been dead but stubbornly wasn’t. A stack of library books that Dani never returned.
Time moved without me. That was the strangest part.
Dani came out of her bedroom and froze when she saw me standing in the kitchen. “You’re home.” She blinked a few times, making sure I was real, and waited.
I tried to breathe, I pulled air in, felt it scrape down my throat, felt it catch in my chest, and then it came out in a shudder that made my knees wobble.
The sound I made wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even dignified. It was the kind of noise that came from somewhere deep, the kind you didn’t choose. My vision blurred immediately. My skin went hot, then cold.
Dani was on me in a second.
Her arms wrapped around my ribs, tight and fierce, and it should’ve made me feel held. It did, and it didn’t. Because the second she touched me, every single thing I’d been bracing against snapped at once.
I folded into her, face pressed against her shoulder, and my body started shaking so hard my teeth clicked.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say, the words tumbling out broken. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Dani demanded, voice thick. “For surviving. For coming home. For not being dead. Shut up.”
I tried to shut up. I tried to swallow it back down. But my chest heaved, and my hands fisted in her shirt like I needed something solid to keep me from floating away.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, and the anger in her voice was aimed at the universe, not me. “You didn’t. You did what you had to do.”
I wanted to believe her.
The problem was, my body didn’t.
My body still remembered the truck, the smell of cologne that didn’t belong, the way my stomach had dropped so hard I thought I might throw up. My body remembered the way my own voice had sounded when I tried to bargain like a frightened animal. It remembered the cabin walls breathing in the wind. It remembered the way relief could feel like nausea when it came too fast.
And now, standing in my apartment, I felt the same thing again. Relief, nausea, grief. All tangled together until I couldn’t tell one from another.
Dani guided me toward the couch, hands steady on my shoulders. “Sit,” she said.
I sat because I didn’t trust my legs.
The cushions dipped under me, and it hit wrong, that softness. The ranch had hard edges. Wood and metal and dust. Survival. Out there, everything was sharp enough to cut. Hereit was all upholstery and quiet, and my body didn’t know what to do with that.
Dani crouched in front of me, elbows on her knees, eyes level with mine. Her eyeliner had smudged a little. She looked tired. She looked older, somehow. Not in a way that made her less Dani, but in a way that said she’d been holding too much too.
“Do you want water?” she asked. “Tea. Food. Do you want me to put you in the shower?”
A wet laugh jerked out of me and turned immediately into a sob. My hand flew to my mouth like I could catch it.
Dani’s face cracked. “Oh, babe.”
