Page 78 of All the way home

Zach shakes his head. “If anyone should apologize, it’s me. Which is kind of what I’m trying to do.”

“Well, I doubt he’s coming back here,” Lucas says.

“Do you at least know what direction he went?”

“That way, I think.” Lucas points right. “If you see Rena, will you send her back?”

“Sure.” Awkwardly, Zach asks, “Are you . . . okay?”

At first, Lucas just gives a flippant, vague wave of his hand. But then, after a long moment, he heaves a sigh. “If you knew something about someone, but they didn’t know it, would you tell them, or would you wait for them to figure it out?”

Zach says, “Um. I guess it would depend on if it—whatever it is—was hurting them.”

That response seems to take the wind out of Lucas’s sails. He sits back, nodding, then rubs at his eyes. “Yeah. I guess.”

“Do you . . . ?” Zach winces. He does not want to offer, because he knows that whatever advice he might have is going to be probably mostly useless, but it seems like the thing to do. “Do you want to talk about whatever it is?”

At this, Lucas smiles a little, weary and tense. “Nah. Thank you, though. Good luck looking.”

Relieved and slightly unnerved, Zach gives him a nod and walks back out into the terminal.

Carefully, he scans the area for the familiar teal coat, but all he sees is a sea of unfamiliar faces.

Zach curses every decision that led to him ending up here without having even gotten Kieran’s number. He pulls his phone out anyway, willing the universe to provide him with some kind of miracle. A sign. Anything.

As Zach is running his fingers along the fresh crack in his screen, another text rolls in.

He freezes.

Seth.

His stomach lurches.

Seriously, what is this? Zach can’t remember the last time he got this many messages from different people in such a short span.

He never got around to changing Seth’s contact, so it still has a green heart next to his name, which is like a slap of unwanted memories.

The message is too long to see at once, but what’s visible is enough to send his stomach plummeting.

Hey, Z. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to listen to my voicemail, but I wanted to get a chance to say what I never got to when we talked, and I . . .

It’s formal, and way too stilted. The whole time they were together, Seth texted like he does everything else: haphazardly and without much attention to detail. By the end, Zach would get sporadic, vaguely coherent texts, misspelled more often than not, ideas strung together without a clear direction. So this is . . . odd. It might not even be Seth.

Zach texts Mara.

oh also since everything else is awful and this might as well happen

seth called me

HEY???

WHAT

do i need to kill him

i could soooo easily hit him with a car

i’d enjoy it, even