Page 14 of Coming Home

"Forget it," she mumbled before I could manufacture a lie, shaking her head and waving a hand to dismiss the question. "It doesn't matter. I'm sorry. Thank you for the cocoa. And the ride. And... just thank you for everything."

I stood up and walked to the doorframe. Stopped at the threshold, my palm resting on the wood casing.

"If you need anything else, I'm at the end of the hall. And Emma?"

She looked up, her blue eyes reflecting the hallway light.

"You stay here as long as you need. There's no timeline."

She gave me a single nod. I pulled the heavy door closed until the latch clicked.

I stood in the dark hallway for ten full seconds, my hand still gripping the brass knob, running my other palm hard down my face. The house was dead silent except for the rain clawing at the glass, and the faint, muffled sound of a woman on the other side of the drywall, sighing in a way she desperately thought I couldn't hear.

I went into my master bath and turned the shower valve as far to the hot side as it would go. I stood under the steaming torrent with my eyes closed, letting the night play back in reverse. Her on that concrete doorstep. Soaked through, knees locked to her chest, vibrating.

Then I thought about James. My hands clenched under the spray. The bastard had stood in a dry, heated apartment and watched her freeze through his blinds. When I walked into that place and saw his face, part of me wanted to end the conversation with my fist. I didn't. But Emma's suitcase had been sitting two feet from the threshold, like he'd packed it for her in advance—like he'd engineered the exact choreography of this humiliation—and getting her out of that house mattered more than getting even.

I uncurled my fingers, letting the water slick my hair back.

I dried off, threw on a pair of gray shorts, and opened the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. Hidden deep behind the oversized protein tubs and the standard vitamin bottles, tucked inside an old magnesium container where my housekeeper would never think to look, I kept the real arsenal. The high-dose prednisone my neurologist had prescribed to suppress the swelling around the optic nerve. I shook one out, swallowed the bitter pill dry, and slid the bottle back into its exact hiding spot.

I sat heavily on the edge of my mattress. My phone vibrated with three consecutive texts from Theo.

I didn't need to open the apps to know the internet was tearing my flesh off. I could feel the heat of it without reading a single sentence. Millions of strangers deciding who you are based on a ten-second clip they watched over breakfast. That's the deal. I signed up for it. Doesn't mean it doesn't grind.

I flipped the phone face down on the nightstand, plugged in the cable, and killed the lamps.

For the first time since my diagnosis, when I closed my eyes, the darkness behind my lids wasn't the thing that terrified me. I wasn't calculating exactly how many degrees of peripheral vision I'd lose by morning. I wasn't mentally tracing the path from my bed to the bathroom door in case I woke up and the world had shrunk to black overnight.

I was thinking about damp black hair drying against a gray fleece hoodie. Dark eyes looking up at me over the rim of a ceramic mug. The specific sound of my name in her mouth after three years of dead silence.

Emma Carrow was sleeping exactly twelve feet down my hall, and I didn't know what to do with that.

CHAPTER 6

Emma

"Get back here, little mermaid. Theo's already eyeing your half of the watermelon."

The water was warm.

I was floating on my back, my arms spun out wide, my hair fanning around my face. My body was weightless. Long, lean, unbruised. There was no dull ache in my joints, no leaden weight sitting squarely on my chest. I was sixteen, and the water just loved me.

"Let him have it. I'm not getting out of here," I called back.

"How generous." A voice cut through the haze from the shore. Deep, rumbling, bright with a laugh.

I tilted my head back, the water lapping softly at my temples, and there he was. Standing at the edge of the weathered wooden dock, the sun positioned right behind his head like a halo. He had those broad, golden-brown shoulders and wet blond hair that stuck to his forehead, flashing a grin so wide I could see it from three lanes away. He was eighteen, maybe nineteen, wearing nothing but faded board shorts, holding a dripping slice of red fruit in one hand while shielding his eyes with the other.

"You're gonna prune, Em."

"Good. Mermaids are supposed to look like raisins."

He laughed, a rich, clean sound that traveled straight across the surface of the water, blending into the cry of the gulls and the distant, rhythmic crash of the surf. I closed my eyes and let myself sink just an inch deeper, keeping only my nose and mouth above the line, the entire universe reduced to warmth.

Then the water turned.

One second the world was honey; the next, it was ink. The warmth bled out of the cove as if someone had pulled a plug in the ocean floor, replaced by a violent, paralyzing cold that locked my thighs. I tried to kick, but my legs felt like stone. I opened my mouth to scream for him, but the black water rushed the gate, filling my throat, my lungs, heavy and freezing. I was dropping. Fast. The sky above shrank to a coin of white, getting smaller.