No growled I’m fine while actively bleeding.
Growth, apparently, could be measured in pain-scale honesty.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
His expression changed.
Not nervous exactly.
Worse.
Hopeful.
“You said normal.”
“I did.”
“So I found normal.”
That was how we ended up at a fall carnival set up in a dusty lot outside the city, tucked between a church, a row of cottonwoods, and a street full of parked cars. Strings of lights hung between temporary poles. A Ferris wheel turned slowly against a bruised purple sky. Kids ran past carrying glow sticks and paper boats of fries. Somewhere, someone was frying dough, roasting green chile, and burning popcorn all at once, and the combination should have been terrible but somehow smelled like every fair I had never had time to go to.
I stared through the windshield.
Dylan shifted beside me. “Too much?”
I shook my head.
“No.”
“You sure?”
There were people everywhere. Families. Teenagers. Old couples. Toddlers on leashes. Music crackling from cheap speakers. The whole place glowed with a kind of ordinary happiness that felt almost obscene after hospitals, blood, and goodbye scenes.
But it was not too much.
It was exactly enough.
“You brought me to a carnival,” I said.
“You said no tortured biker poetry.”
“So your backup plan was funnel cake?”
“Funnel cake is structurally honest.”
I turned to look at him.
He shrugged. “It knows what it is.”
The laugh came easier this time.
Dylan watched it happen, then looked away before the moment got too big.
Good.
He was learning.
We got out of the truck slowly because Dylan refused help and I refused to hover, which meant I watched him stand with every muscle in my body locked and pretended not to notice the way his hand pressed once against his side before dropping.
