Dante followed us to the porch, his boots thumping heavily on the boards.
We did an awkward shuffle by the car, cramming bags in the trunk and slamming the lid too loudly. Dante gave Caiden a long look, then offered me a hug that was all bone and muscle and not nearly as sad as I’d braced for.
“You take care of yourself,” he said into my hair.
“I’ll try.” I clung tighter than I meant to, then stepped back, blinking hard. I almost wanted to stay. Almost.
Dante reached out to Caiden, and for a second, I thought they might skip the handshake entirely. But they did it. Messy, uncoordinated, a collision of aggression and unspoken respect.
“If you fuck this up, I’ll find you,” Dante said, not even trying to make it a joke.
Caiden just nodded, jaw flexing. “Yeah. I know.”
We got in the car. I buckled up, staring through the windshield at a spot just above Dante’s head. The engine coughed into life, the heater breathing frost-laced air across my knees.
As we pulled away, Dante stuck his hands in his jacket and watched the road until he shrank in the mirror, until there was nothing left of him but a dark smudge on the ice.
For the first hour, we didn’t say much. Caiden stared out at the endless highway, one hand on the wheel, the other drumming slow and steady against his thigh. I watched the way the sunlight cut through the windshield, the way it painted his cheekbones with gold.
I wanted to say it, I wanted to tell him I’d chosen, that I wasn’t going to run anymore, that whatever we were or would be was enough. But every time I opened my mouth, the words stuck.
We passed out of the woods and onto a four-lane divided by dead grass and billboards for tractor dealerships and debt consolidation schemes. I watched them slide by, the names and numbers blurring into one long, meaningless line.
Every so often, Caiden would clear his throat, as if about to speak, but then think better of it and let the silence repopulate.
A few hours into the drive, he braked hard for a deer that ghosted across the shoulder, barely a shadow against the scrub, but it was enough to jolt me out of my daze.
“You good?” he said, not taking his eyes off the road.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Good thing you saw it in time.”
He made an agreeable noise, but didn’t say anything more.
The cold and controlled Caiden was back, not the wild and passionate one I had been with at the lake, and before that.
At some point, we crossed a state line, and the light got buttery, wild, and more forgiving. He reached for the radio, paused, then let his hand hover over the dial.
"You can put on whatever you want," I said, my voice a little too bright, like a girl on her first date.
He flicked through the stations, settling on classic rock. It was familiar enough for both of us to pretend that we were just two people with nowhere particular to be.
Fields turned to foothills, foothills to blue ridges, and still I said nothing.
The further we got from Pathosbury, the more I wanted to look back. I craned my neck at every turn, half-hoping to catch a last glimpse of the lake, or Dante, or even just a road sign that saidhomein a way that meant something.
I shouldn’t have missed it. There was nothing left for me there but the pieces of a family that had dissolved years before. But grief kept coming back like a relentless tide.
I thought about my mother, about how she’d once joked that if she ever died, she wanted her ashes scattered from the back of a moving train.
Funny how in the end, she chose to be buried.
Was that all any of us were, at the end? Just a rotting corpse left to return to the earth, or ashes spread into the wind, forever lost in the space between life and death.
I could feel Caiden watching me from the corner of his eye, gauging how close I was to splintering. There was a tenderness in it, a patience that I almost didn’t trust.
When I was little, I thought grief was supposed to fade, like a fever or a bruise. That it would bleed out of your system until there was nothing left but a dull story to tell at parties, a “remember when” you could laugh about.
But it didn’t fade. It calcified. It hollowed out a space inside you and then never left, a roommate you could never evict.
