“There are worse ways to get arrested,” I said.
“Go,” she repeated, softer.
I opened the door and grabbed my duffel. The cold hit hard. I stepped out, then leaned down to see her one more time. She looked small in the driver’s seat.
“Milly,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I love you.” I said it one last time, then walked into the building, leaving her behind.
Inside the terminal, a breeze ran from the doors to the check-in counter. I checked in, went through security, and sat at the gate with my duffel between my boots and the knowledge I’d just done something both necessary and profoundly stupid.
Boarding was called. I took my seat by the window and buckled in. The plane’s engines whined to life. As we lifted off, Everwood shrank below. Then the clouds swallowed it.
Somewhere over the mountains, turbulence hit, and I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the sound of my past haunting me, the yells, the gunfire, the turbulence before the crash. I jammed my hands into my jacket pockets to quiet my fidgeting fingers.
My fingers brushed metal.
I fished it out.
Keys.
My copy of the ranch keys—house, barn, clinic, gate, padlock on the old shed. All of them threaded onto the ring with the little brass tag that saidE.T.in Penny’s neat, bossy handwriting.
I closed my fist around them and saw it—the slight bump of her hand against my side when she’d kissed me, the way she’d pressed in a little harder.
You sneaky, brilliant woman.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or swear. I laughed under my breath and held onto the keys like a talisman all the way to Denver.
From there, everything was a blur. I barely remember the landing or the cab ride to my old apartment. I registered it all when I pulled out the keys to the Montana ranch instead of my Denver apartment. The contrast between the two sets of keys was laughable. The ranch keys were chipped, dinged, scuffed, dirty, and scratched. The apartment keys were shiny and almost untouched.
I opened the door to a past I’d forgotten about until a few weeks ago. It looked exactly the way I’d left it—perfect lines, the same gray couch, the same black coffee table, the same half-empty bookshelf with more manuals than novels. One set of dishes and the sound of a humming refrigerator and non-stop traffic outside. Everything looked the same apart from the small layer of dust from months of neglect, but it felt hollow and foreign.
“Your orphan,” Mrs. Worthington said from the doorway, in her cardigan, hair piled up in curlers. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten him.” The plant I’d dumped on my neighbor seven months ago sat in her arms, greener than it had ever been with me.
“I’d never forget about him,” I smiled, taking the pot. It smelled like generic potting mix, instead of hay or goats.
“You look different,” she said, squinting at me over her glasses.
“How so?”
“Softer,” she said. “In the eyes. And less like you’re about to leap out of your skin.”
She sniffed, “Hmm.” It was a universal sound. She knew I was lost, and she was too polite to say it outright. “Well. Water that plant.”
“Thanks for taking care of him,” I said.
“He needed a home,” she said, and then, pointedly, “Everyone does.”
After she left, the apartment sucked in around me.
Even with the traffic right outside the window, it was too quiet. No chickens, or horses, or noisy goats. The hum of the fridge and the tick of the wall clock echoed.
I set the plant on the windowsill. Outside, the city moved—cars, buses, people in puffy coats hunched against the cold. It was familiar, but it felt anemic.
No rooster announcing the dawn. No goats arguing over hay fences. No soft clatter of Milly in the kitchen, talking to herself and asking Penny for advice. No creak of the third stair. No cat trying to trip me, and no Milly humming a tune no one knew.
