It doesn’t matter that I know, deep down, that this isn’t how it happened with me and Jess, or with this story. It doesn’t matter because I know what the dread in my gut was about now—I can see it on Jess’s face. It’s not simply pale anymore; it’s practically ghost white.
What her mother has said to her—in this cramped, mildewy boat, in the middle of all this mess and shock and her sister’s furious sadness—there’s a part of her that believes it.
I know what’s happening here. I know what comes next.
“I don’t ever want to hear from you again,” Jess says to her mother.
But somehow, it sounds as though she’s saying it to me. To Salem, too, but I can’t get myself to care about that. Everything from early this morning comes back to me in a rush: the way she kissed me and clung to me before she whispered her wish. This is what she wanted, me in here with her from the very beginning, and I haven’t managed to protect her at all. All I’ve managed in this room is to become a man her mother could use against her. A man her mother used to blame her for how this has all turned out.
I got her to do the interview. I asked the questions. I got her to connect her mom to this place, and I got her and her sister here.
“No postcards,” she adds. “I’ll burn them if they come, do you understand me? No phone calls.Nothing.”
“It’s the same for me,” says Tegan. She’s holding on to Jess’s hand, white-knuckled. “This is done.”
They start to move toward the door, and of course—of course, I follow.
I have to get Jess to see the truth of this. Ofus.
“Hawk,” Salem says, and maybe I would’ve ignored her, except that Jess stills where she stands. As though hearing this stupid, awful nickname is an added blow, an added reminder.
“I’m going, Salem. I need to take them—”
Jess turns to look at me. She speaks quietly, but firmly. “Stay,” she says. “Do your job.”
This is my job, I think.My job is being with you.
I know as I think it that it doesn’t make sense. Jess isn’t a job to me in any kind of way, but I guess that’s the problem. That’s always been the problem, from the second I first saw her. From the second I fell in love with her.
She stares up at me, her eyes wild and desperate, and begs me—in a broken, private whisper that I’m sure I’ll never forget the sound of—to let her go.
“Please, Adam,” she says. “Please, just leave us alone for now.”
Chapter 28
Jess
My heart is a clock.
It’s been counting time since we walked out of Mom’s front door. Seven minutes from when we stepped off the ramp to when our ride share arrived. In the car, it’s seventeen minutes to the hotel, time enough for me to check and see that it’s six hours, forty-three minutes until we can get on a flight in Seattle, and I’ll need to build in the forty-nine minutes it’ll take for another ride share to the airport.
Once the car drops us off at the hotel, it’s under two minutes—cross the parking lot I walked through with Adam only this morning, hustle through the lobby where I put on his big sweatshirt, ride up the elevator that goes well past the floor I know his room is on—to the door of the one I’ve been sharing with Tegan.
Inside, it’s twenty-four minutes that I sit on the bathroom floor with her while she gets sick twice, tears streaming down her face as I hold her hair and set a cool washcloth to the back of her neck, murmuring to her that she’ll be okay, that this part will pass soon.
Afterward, when she’s calm enough, when she’s had water and when the trembling in her fingers has stopped, she takes a shower for nine minutes while I come right up against the credit limit on one of my cards to buy the tickets for the flight I found. She comes out in a cloud of steam, wrapped in a white towel with her hair wet and tangled, the mascara she put on so carefully this morning still a little smudgy beneath her eyes, and it only takes me six minutes to help her pack up most of her things, setting out a pair of leggings and an oversized long-sleeve shirt for her to put on.
Eleven minutes to comb out her hair, to put it in a thick French braid, while she sits on the bed numbly.
It’s still two hours, ten minutes until we should comfortably leave for the airport, probably enough time to watch a movie, but she doesn’t want to, same as how she doesn’t want to talk yet. She wants to curl on her side and look out the window that shows a view of nothing special, so I lie down with her, and it’s a full thirty-one minutes until she falls asleep.
When she does, I don’t need to look at my phone to know how long it’s been since we left Mom’s.
Since I left Adam.
I feel every second.
I’m going to feel it for so long.
