Thank God she was alone, that there was no one to witness her tears and her breaking down. She couldn’t bear to be touched and couldn’t handle any sympathy, to hear words and phrases that were impossible to digest. All she knew for sure was that she couldn’t stay in this house, where she could still smell him…
If she stayed, she’d crack wide open. And if she cracked, she’d fall apart completely. So she did what she always did best.
She moved. Fast.
Launching herself to her feet, she ran down the stairs and out the front door. After engaging the lock, and slamming the door closed, she turned left, and jogged down the path toward H-Town, then realized she’d stumbled into Blackweather Green’s large meadow. The park was still full of people setting up for tomorrow’s festivities. Shit.
Shit.
The sights and sounds of people working the festival blurred around her, and she felt like she was caught in an inescapable vortex. Jack-o’-lanterns turned malicious, their grins creepy and spooky, and the eyeless sockets of the many skeletons seemed to follow her flight through Blackweather Green.
She couldn’t feel her hands, and her heart thudded, skipping a beat now and again.
Whirling around again, she bolted into the woods, looking for the path that would cut through the trees and bring her out closest to Luna’s house. As she made her way through the darkness, mostly through muscle memory, the thought that Dane was leaving … no, he had already left … bombarded her.
She’d known, intellectually, that he would, that they both would leave. That their lives were bigger than these couple of months in H-Town. But, hell, leaving the way he did! Did she not deserve more, better than that? At the very least, an explanation or a conversation?
Yes, yes, there was an earthquake, but would a half hour make such a huge difference?
Her chest ached. The world tilted slightly, and it narrowed, and she reminded herself to breathe. She caught herself against a tree trunk. She was now quite a way from the green, and it was dark and a little creepy. She closed her eyes, trying to breathe past the burn.
Be rational, Wren. Step away from the emotion.
She drew in a few deep breaths, and the panic ebbed—only to be replaced by a sharp, persistent ache. On some level, she could admit she was glad Dane was ready to go back to work, glad he felt mentally strong enough to handle the constant shitstorms his job sent his way. He was going to do important, life-saving work. Amazing work.
But the voice in her head wouldn’t quit.
He’s gone. And you weren’t enough to make him stay. Not even enough to make him talk to you. You are what you proposed—a summer fling, a fuck buddy.
And there it was—the old choreography she knew so well, the steps she returned to, again and again. Panic. Retreat. Control. She’d danced this dance a hundred times; she knew what came next. Push it back. Step away. Blink back the tears. Pretend you never got your hopes up, that it doesn’t matter. That he doesn’t matter.
Keep moving.
She stepped away from the tree, chin lifted, eyes dry.You’ve been here before, and you handled it then. You’ll handle it now.
But the lie burned in her chest, a fire she couldn’t extinguish.
* * *
Dane arrived in Boston shortly after three in the morning, and even at that time, headquarters buzzed with activity. He checked in with Jack, got the newest update—the situation just got shittier with every passing hour—and met with others from his team who’d come in.
He’d done this a few times, and once you checked in and took care of some formalities, there was nothing to do but wait. Wait for the flight details, the planned route, the where, when and how.
Needing some air and knowing that there was no point in hanging around getting in everybody’s way, Dane headed for the Cambridge side of the Charles River. Leaving his car, he walked along the bank, idly noticing that the city looked peaceful, in direct contrast to how he was feeling. Boston was across the water, and at this time in the morning, it looked like it was made up of hard, dark lines, black paper blocks glued onto a vivid sunrise. Dane stood with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans and watched the sky bleed.
His heart did the same.
Finding a bench to sit on, he stretched out his legs, and his phone buzzed. It didn’t surprise him that he was receiving a message at 4:45 in the morning. The coordinators responding to natural disasters didn’t stop to check whether it was a convenient moment to send info. He pulled his device from the back pocket of his jeans and saw it was an email update from the logistics team at Humanatus Global Relief. He knew what to expect: a precise but detailed report on the quake, the casualties, and the timeline.
He watched the static screen for a long time before opening the message. As usual, emotion was absent, and he was focused on practicalities. Who, what, when, how. It was the only way to deal with the enormity of the disaster. Jack and therest of the management team at HGR were waiting for the official request for help through a relevant channel, possibly the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. While they waited, the logistics team were gathering personnel, equipment, and supplies. Most of them were facing several sleepless nights.
The memories of his first earthquake site rolled over him, still as viscerally powerful now as reality had been back then.
He’d arrived in Kathmandu wide-eyed, unable to process the destruction. The air had been thick enough to chew, more smoke and dust, blood and diesel, than oxygen.
Somewhere nearby, a woman howled—a raw, animal sound that still haunted him today. The ground squelched beneath his boots, mud laced with glass and body parts. He had taken it all in: twisted steel, piles of bricks and crushed concrete, a toddler’s shoe, pink and glittery, the metallic tang of panic. He’d been tossed into a makeshift operating theater, and from that moment on, he spent his time running from patient to patient, trying to save a life, a limb—some faces would register, some not. For hours, days, there had only been noise, ruin, and the relentless rhythm of cutting, suturing, resuscitating, dying.
He was signing up to go back to that, to dive head first into trauma. Into the chaos, the blood, the relentlessness of it all. Hefelt like many days had passed since he heard about the earthquake, like he’d already done more operations that he could count, that the faces of people he’dyetto treat had started to blur, a never-ending train of helplessness.
