Page 96

I turn around too fast, hope outrunning caution, and find nothing but an empty garage and my own ragged breathing for company.

“Please,” I say, to the empty garage, to the space where her laugh just was. “Please, if that’s you, do it again. Give me something. Anything.”

Nothing answers. The bulb overhead hums the same steady hum it always has. The bike stays exactly as impossibly upright as it was thirty seconds ago, offering no further proof, no second miracle to confirm the first one wasn’t a trick of my own unraveling mind.

With a shaking hand, I reach out and push the kickstand back down, locking it into place myself. The click sounds wrong, too ordinary a sound for something I have no way of explaining.

I’m losing my damn mind. That’s the only explanation that makes any sense anymore. Grief doesn’t kick up a stand on its own. Grief doesn’t laugh behind you in an empty room. Grief doesn’t smell like black vanilla.

Whatever’s happening to me, it’s not healing. It’s not moving forward. It’s just my brain finding new ways to keep me tethered to a version of my life that doesn’t exist anymore.

Or it’s really her.

I don’t know which possibility scares me more, the idea that I’ve broken something in my own mind that isn’t coming back, or the idea that she’s still here.

There’s a bottle of whiskey behind the parts shelf, tucked behind a stack of old oil filters that nobody’s touched in years. I have it in my hand before I let myself think too hard about what I’m doing.

The seal cracks easy under my thumb, that same familiar give, and the smell hits me half a second before the guilt does, sharp and awful and comforting all at once.

One drink. That’s all I want. Enough to make the last ten minutes stop feeling like proof that I’m coming apart at the seams.

I bring it halfway to my mouth.

My hand’s shaking too hard to get it the rest of the way, or maybe that’s just what I tell myself. The truth is harder to admit. Somewhere in that half second I thought about her laugh. About the kickstand and how the bike stood upright when it had no business doing either.

I don’t know if I believe any of it’s real. If there’s even a chance that some part of her found a way to reach me tonight after months of her being gone. But I’m not going to be the reason it stops. It’s an insane thought, and I know it, but it’s all I have to hold onto.

The bottle leaves my hand before I can talk myself out of it. Glass shatters loud enough that I flinch, and whiskey spreads dark across the concrete, soaking into the same spot where my knees hit the floor a few minutes ago.

Afterward, I sit there breathing hard and staring at the mess I just made instead of the mess I almost made worse.

Whether it was the right thing to do, I don’t know. Only that it wasn’t the wrong one.

With my hands still shaking, I pull the sheet back over the bike, tucking the edges down tight like that’ll be enough to keep whatever I just felt contained in there with it.

It isn’t enough. I know that much.

But it’s all I’ve got.

Astra

Astra

Knox lets me drive for the better part of an hour by the time we turn onto gravel road, weaving through back streets and practicing three-point turns in an empty church parking lot until my confidence outpaced my competence by a comfortable margin.

“Parallel park it,” he says, nodding toward a gap between two orange cones he set up himself in that same lot, “or we’re doing this for another hour.”

“That’s not a real threat. You’d get bored before I would.”

“Try me.”

I ease the truck back, checking my mirrors the way he drilled into me the first week, and slide into the space with maybe six inches to spare on either side.

“Not bad.” He says it as if it costs him something to admit.

“Not bad? I nailed that.”

He almost smiles, the kind he tries to hide and never quite manages. Something about it feels like winning an argument I didn’t know I was having.