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The front door is right there. Three steps.

"Dinner at Dad's is still at seven." She doesn't look at me. "If you're coming, you're coming. If you're not, I'll tell him you had a work thing. He won't believe it, but he'll let it go."

Three steps. Door handle. Hallway. Stairs.

The truck starts on the first try. My hands are on the wheel, and the road unspools in front of me, and Mira's apartment gets smaller in the rearview mirror until the road curves and it disappears.

My house is cold when I get there. The thermostat set at sixty because nobody lives here anymore. Coffee maker clean and dry. Bed made with military corners that nobody sleeps under. A house with no mess, no smell, no evidence that a living person occupies it.

The box in her closet had two items. A card and a photograph. Not a shrine. Not a wall of obsession. Two things, kept quietly, tucked beside her nursing diploma, held onto the way people hold onto anything that mattered to them during the years they were becoming who they are.

She kept a card I sent from a war zone because it was the first time I'd written her name.

She kept a photo from Ben's graduation because it was the last time she saw me before I disappeared for twenty years.

Two items. Sixteen years.

And I just called it a fixation and walked out of her apartment.

My phone sits on the kitchen counter. No messages. She's not going to chase me. Mira Cross has been chasing me for twelve years, and I just told her the chase was pathological, and now she's standing in her apartment with Mabel's takeout going cold and her professional mask locked in place because I taught her that the man she loves will always choose distance over honesty.

Ben's voice in my head, from the phone call last week: Don't hurt her, Reid. Or I'll kill you.

I close my eyes. Stand in my cold kitchen. Breathe.

Ray Cross's house at seven. If I'm coming, I'm coming.

If I'm not, she'll make an excuse for me. Because that's who she is. She'll protect me from her own father's judgment even after I just gutted her in her own kitchen.

The house is silent. The mountains through the window are turning gold with the late afternoon sun. Somewhere across town, a woman who loves me is putting away takeout she bought because Mabel told her I'm too thin.

I don't go to Ray's at seven.

I don't text.

The silence in this house, the one that used to feel honest, feels exactly like what it is.

Empty.

Chapter Six

MIRA

Sunday morning. Empty side of the bed. Cold pillow where his head would be if he were the man I thought he was last week.

My eyes are dry. They've been dry since he walked out yesterday afternoon. Twelve years of wanting Reid Holloway, and the tears I expected didn't come. What came instead was a hard, clean anger that settled into my ribs and stayed there all through dinner at my father's house, through the pot roast I couldn't taste, through Dad's careful silence when the empty chair at the table spoke for itself.

"Work thing," I said when Dad looked at Reid's empty place setting.

"Mmhm." He passed the bread. Didn't push.

Ben texted at nine.

Ben:

Dad says Reid didn't come.

Me: