So I did what I always do. What I've done a dozen times in a dozen cities, the move so practiced it barely requires thought.
I came to the bus station.
What's new is that I don’t feel empty. Every step of this is tearing. Leaving used to feel like nothing. Now leaving feels like tearing.
My brace catches on the strap of my bag when I reach into it, and I work around it without thinking. The cut on my forearm pulls faintly — just a reminder, the glass from the Gilded Lily windows marking where I was last night. My body is full of small evidences of what I survived. I'm sitting in a bus station instead of staying to find out if I can survive something harder.
A toddler three rows over throws a juice box at his father and laughs. I flinch at the sound. The flinching makes me angry at myself, and the anger just adds to the pile.
My hands find the notebook.
The spiral-bound cover is worn soft at the corner. I flip through without looking — I know the order by feel now. Street scenes I'll barely remember. The bay from the penthouse window at different hours. Faces I've spent the last few weeks learning. Marisol's golden energy, which I still haven't gotten right. The Siren's impossible neck. Gunner’s monstrosity.
Then I stop.
Him in the water.
I drew it from memory, early on, before I had language for what was happening between us. His body cutting through the pool at dawn, arms extended, head turned to breathe. I got theline of his shoulder right — the swimmer's shoulder, lean and specific, built by repetition and discipline. I got the vulnerability of that turned head, the extended neck. His one unguarded moment.
It's the best thing in this notebook. It might be the best thing I've drawn in five years.
Every city, I fill a notebook. Every city, I throw it away. Drop it in a bin or leave it on a seat or forget it somewhere on purpose. The point is not to accumulate evidence. The point is to keep moving without weight, to seal the departure, to make the leaving final and clean. You walk out of a city and you don't carry proof of it.
I stand up. The suitcase wheel scrapes against the tile.
The trash can is ten feet away. I walk toward it.
I hold the notebook over the opening.
My hands stop.
Not hesitation — stopped. Like the signal got sent and something between my brain and my fingers decided not to pass it along. I stand there with the notebook extended over the trash, and I cannot let go. The sketch is inside — the swimming, the turned head, the angle of his shoulder against the dark water. Evidence I was here.
I know what his world is. I've watched Gunner dismantle three men without raising his voice. I've been in a room while a man died for having the wrong information. I've heard Santiago Zayas sayI'll remember youwith blood on his shirt and mean it. Going back to Logan means the whole world that comes with him — the one I've been moving through for weeks like it was only scenery.
My hands still won't move.
I step back from the bin. I sit back down on the plastic seat. The notebook is in my lap.
I close my eyes and my body provides what my mind won't. His hand at the back of my neck. The weight of him settling over me, his mouth at my temple —I have you— and the way that landed in me, low and complete. The smell of him after his swims, chlorine and warm skin. The way he says my name.
I want him.
Not the arrangement. Not the safety. Him. The man whose hands shake in the dark, whose voice has been in my head since the Setai. My body has been knowing it for weeks. My mind is finally catching up.
The wanting has weight. I can feel exactly how much of me it takes up.
I pull out my phone and dial a number I know by heart. My father's.
I haven’t spoken to him in five years. We spoke once or twice after Mom’s funeral, but then I stopped calling, and he stopped calling, and the quiet between us accumulated.
The phone rings.
"Wren?"
His voice is rougher than I remember. Slower.
My throat closes.
