Twelve days of my father's hospital room and my mother's fear and Daniel's shadow. And Jace teasing words from a thousand miles makes me remember how it feels to laugh again.
I type the words before I think them through.
MAYA:I miss you. All of you.
I stare at the screen. My thumb moves to the backspace key. Hovers. The cursor blinks at the end of the sentence like a heartbeat.
I should delete it. It's too much.
I hit send.
The pause is long enough to hear my own breathing.
REID:We miss you too.
OWEN:Same.
I take a deep breath.
MAYA:Maybe when this is all over we can talk.
JACE:Why?
The word sits on my screen. One syllable. No punctuation.
My stomach drops.
I reread it.Why.The bluntness of it. The finality. I set the phone down on the couch cushion beside me and press my palms flat against my thighs, resisting the urge to bury my fingernails in the palms of my hands.
They've had twelve days to think about this. About the chaos I brought into their lives. I am a woman who comes with shame attached to her name and they are men who built something real and I threatened it by existing in their proximity. Of course Jace would be the one to say it plainly. He's always been the one who says it plainly.
Then the phone pings.
JACE:I meant why wait until this is over?
The air leaves my lungs in a single, uncontrolled exhale. I read it again. And again. The words rearranging the last forty-five seconds of dread into something that tastes like relief and smells like possibility and sounds like Jace being exactly, infuriatingly himself.
Why wait.Not rejection. Impatience. The particular impatience of a man who has never seen the point in waiting for things to be safe before reaching for them.
I'm still holding the phone when it pings again.
REID:Maya, open the door.
38
JACE
She opens the door and I forget every single thing I planned to say.
Twelve days. Twelve days of her silence filling the cabin like something with weight, pressing into every room she used to be in, sitting in the chair where she used to draw, occupying the space at the kitchen counter where she stood watching us through the window.
Twelve days of Reid not sleeping and Owen going quiet in the specific way that means he's hurting and me pacing like something caged because I couldn't reach her, couldn't do a goddamn thing but wait and I am not built for waiting.
And now she's here. Right in front of me.
The porch light catches the circles under her eyes. She's thinner. She looks exhausted and fierce and so beautiful that my chest cracks down the center like a log splitting clean.
She's looking at all three of us. Her mouth is open. No sound.
