If she misses a chance at spotting Emma along the road, she’ll never forgive herself either.
There’s no right answer. She drops her head in her hands, elbows braced on her knees, and wishes for something, anything, to point her in the right direction.
“Go. I’ll be alright,” he says.
“But—”
“Not gonna die on you. Go, drive the road a while, keep looking. I’ll be here when you get back.”
In the end, she can’t refuse. She sets a glass of water by his bed with a promise she won’t be long, but they both know anything could happen when she walks out that door. It’s just aslikely that she’ll die out there and never return as it is that he might pass while she’s away.
The urge to give his hand another squeeze is overwhelming. She refrains. She’s already pushing her luck tonight.
Once she’s in the car, it’s difficult to see anything beyond the headlights, and she doesn’t make it thirty minutes before she’s on track to get lost. One or two wrong turns and she’ll never find the house again.
The gas tank creeps lower along with the sun. When darkness sets in, her frustration escapes in a scream as she turns the car around. She pounds the wheel with her fists, no doubt bruising them. Leans her forehead against the leather and lets herself wallow for all of ten seconds after parking, before rushing back in to check on Wyatt.
She finds him where she left him, propped against two pillows with his leg elevated and a grimace on his face.
It transforms into a brief flicker of relief when he sees her again. “You’re back.”
“It’s dark. Easy to get turned around. I can’t find her if I get stuck in a ditch. You need to eat those.” She points to two donuts left in the pack.
“Not hungry. Thirsty.”
He drank all the water, so she refills it. Left with nothing else to do, she curls up in the chair at his bedside again and decides this is where she’ll sleep tonight.
“You don’t have to stay with me,” he tells her.
“I know I don’t. Maybe I don’t trust you not to do something stupid, like not wake up, if I don’t shake you every half an hour.”
His half-groan, half-huff at her poorly timed tease feels like a victory until his next words come out pained and sad. “I’ve been through worse.”
“I’m sorry that you have.”
He blinks at her in shocked confusion, maybe having expected some sort of dry joke or flippancy. Anything but an acknowledgment that what he suffered must have been horrific. Peeling his clothes off exposed a part of his past, and she is eager for more pieces to his puzzle. “Can I ask what happened? You don’t have to answer.”
For a moment, she thinks he might ignore her. Tell her to mind her business or offer some made-up story. Then, he sighs, shifting his legs under the sheets and staring at the ceiling instead of her.
“When I left Alaska, the first place I went was to find my ex-wife. The whole back half of the apartment building was on fire. The whole thing was just going up in flames like a tinderbox. So I ran in there like a fucking dumbass, knowing she’d rather see those flames than see me, but not able to leave her there, and…”
Addison leans forward when he pauses, tucking her feet up under her on the chair.
“…and she had already shot herself. I stood there longer than I should have. Numb, in shock maybe, until the flames licked at my legs and back. I had to run through them to get out. Almost didn’t make it. I can still taste the smoke in my mouth sometimes.”
“You said ex-wife. But you still went back for her even though you were separated?”
“I’m an idiot?”
She raises a brow with a tilt of her head, not accepting his answer.
“We were together a long time before the divorce. I guess I felt like if I didn’t check on her, I’d never be able to live with myself. She didn’t have much family. I knew she was alone when the virus hit. The dating app guy she ran off with didn’t last. It was stupid of me to go in there. Earned myself a lung full of smoke and leather skin across my back for my efforts.”
“I don’t think it was stupid. I think it was kind. There isn’t much of that left these days.”
How strange it is that her own husband abandoned her so easily, while Wyatt possesses the kind of loyalty that would have him running through a burning building for someone he cares about, even after they’d betrayed him.
The cat appears with a birdlike meow to jump on the bed, offering them a buffer from a conversation that could get too deep, too fast.
