She didn’t want to think about what it might mean. Every little thing felt magnified, veering into too-sharp focus—the hum of the engine, the heat of the sun against her skin, Colton lifting up her paper swan and placing it gingerly atop the frayed nylon of her knee. He left it there, one fingertip balanced along the papery fan of the tail.
“This is a terrible swan,” he said.
“It’s a perfect swan, actually. I can also do a frog.”
“Impressive.”
“My mom’s homeschool approach was very crafts based,” she said as he nudged the swan just hard enough to flap its lopsided wings. “Instead of learning subtraction, I got macramé Mondays and watercolor Wednesdays. It was a little bit ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous,” he said. “It sounds nice.”
“At this point, it’s a fire hazard.” A ribbon of hair had come loose from one of her buns, and she worked to tuck it back into place. “She doesn’t throw anything away. The whole house is stuffed full of all the do-it-yourself projects she made my dad and me take on with her over the years.”
“My parents are divorced,” Colton volunteered after another minute of fiddling with the swan. “Neither of them could stand to stay in Boston afterward, so I’m at the house on my own until graduation.”
“Oh.”
She thought of the sparse décor, the doors all shut up like tombs. She’d thought maybe they were in the middle of a renovation, not that no one lived there at all. No one but Colton. Next to her, the brown of his eyes was concealed beneath his cap.
“My dad’s new wife has a tendency to burn through credit cards,” he said. “When they open a new one, they don’t always update their payment plans. That first night you came over, the electricity was shut off.”
He said it so casually. Like it was a normal thing, to be forgotten.
Understanding pierced her like an arrow. The wall of candles. His attempts to turn her away at the door. “God,” she breathed. “Why didn’t you say something?”
A crooked smile overtook one half of his face. “To spare myself the humiliation.”
“You let me make fun of you,” she said. “Now I feel like a jerk.”
Overhead, the fasten seat belt light clicked on. The pilot’s voice filtered through the sound system in an unintelligible garble.
“What did he say?”
“He said we’ll be starting our descent soon.” Colton retracted his hand, letting the swan flutter down into her lap. “You can still change your mind, you know. You don’t have to do this.”
“But I do,” she said. “There’s a reason Nate found me. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know if there’s an answer waiting for me in Chicago, but I have to try. My whole life, people have defined me by one thing only. I came to Godbole because I wanted to see if there was another version of me out there. Maybe this is her.”
Colton frowned. “A girl who can’t fold a symmetrical swan?”
“I have to see this through to the end,” she said, ignoring him.
“And what if you don’t like what you find?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess I’ll deal with that when I get there.”
The drive to the hospital was long and slow, hindered by the stop-and-go of traffic. An awful, crawling pace that made Colton sincerely consider opening the passenger door and throwing himself into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Sequestered in the back of a beetle-black town car, he and Lane sat with knees kissing, the city creeping past in cool concrete blocks and multifamily Greystones.
He shouldn’t have come. Already, he could feel the consequences of his actions taking root. A migraine bloomed behind his eyes. Minor avulsions tore at his tendons. Every time he thought he’d become desensitized to the pain, it deepened. He wondered how much further he could push himself before his body gave out.
He couldn’t help it. He went where she led, like a paper kite on a string. He was hopelessly caught, twisted in her branches. His line tangled. His spine splintered. His sail all in tatters. There was no clean way to work himself free.
Next to him, Lane stared out the window with wide, unblinking eyes. He liked the way she took the city in, lips pursed in a frown, spinning the braided ring on her finger round and round like a talisman. He’d been watching her do it for the past several blocks. Her hair was in twin buns, overlarge and preposterous. One of them was coming loose from the nap she’d taken during the final leg of their flight.
When they finally pulled up to their stop, the sun was big and round in the sky and Colton had missed seven consecutive phone calls in a row. His stomach was lead. His chest tight. The Apostle would be looking for him soon, and he was in exactly the wrong place, doing precisely what he’d been warned not to do. He didn’t want to think about the repercussions.
They stopped at the coffee kiosk out in front of the hospital, and he ordered a hot latte.
Lane frowned up at him as he slid the steaming cup into a cardboard sleeve. “I thought you didn’t drink coffee.”
