I don’t know if she did report me, but I think she might’ve. I think that’s why Chek sent me to Nick.
If Nick had me, then Santos couldn’t get me. They are brothers, after all. And maybe Nick wasn’t in charge, plus he was on the run with baby Lauren at the time, but Santos wasn’t gonna mess with Nick.
He needed Nick.
We all needed Nick.
Because Nick isn’t just a person, he’s a requirement. He’s an essential worker. A necessity. Not because he’s so smart, though he probably is smart. But because… I dunno. There’s just something about Nick that feels specific. As in specifically necessary.
But back to the doctor.
She said something else before Chek came out and took my hand and led me out of that tall building, never to return. She said there was no cure for me.
Like I had a disease.
No. Like I was the disease.
There was no cure for me.
This was why I was so interested in what Johnny Boston was doing down in Key West. Because his woman, Megan, was making the cure.
And hello? I wanted that cure.
I was tired of being the disease. And even if Carter never got me, or Santos didn’t kill me before he got himself shot in the head in Kansas, I wanted Chek to know that I was not a disease.
That I am not espeluznante.
I am just Wendy.
That’s why I did all those things that day.
That’s all I was after.
I just wanted my chance to be cured.
If I could do it over, would I do it differently?
Well. Yeah. Of course.
Of course I would.
“Does that mean you feel regret?… Wendy?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
“The exact meaning of regret.”
“Would you like me to define it for you?”
“OK.”
“Regret. To feel sorrow or dissatisfaction on account of the happening or the loss of something. As in, to regret an error.”
“Oh. Hm. Then no, I don’t feel regret about it.”
“But you just said you would do it differently.”
“I did say that. But I lied.”
Anyway.
It’s last Christmas.
I go home a day early.
I pay attention to everything.
The lane in the woods is covered in snow. Snow deep enough that my truck barely disturbs the almost peaceful, picture-postcard imagery when I look in my rearview.
I see smooth, white trunks of paper-white birches—their boughs heavy from last night’s storm, a smoky-gray sky thick with the threat of another storm off in the distance, and a rabbit scampering from one side of the woods to the other after the danger of me passes by.
It’s so perfect.
I miss this place so much. And even though Chek and I never really lived here for any continuous length of time, it was still home.
It doesn’t feel like home anymore. It feels like a waystation. I only come by here when I’m meeting up with Nick. Christmas and birthdays. Though we’ve been mad at each other for a couple years now, so there have been no Christmases and birthdays.
Until now.
Well, tomorrow.
If he comes.
I want to be here a day early to get things ready. I have presents this time. I think, after twenty-four years, I might be getting the hang of this holiday shit.
But when I come around the last bend, just before I get to the cabin, I see that Nick had the same idea. Because his black truck sits off to the left side of my little house. In his spot, I realize. He always parks there. I park on the other side. And that’s where I am when the front door opens and Nick Tate appears with a dish towel slung over his shoulder and a wide grin on his almost too-handsome face.
He still looks a little bit like the teenager I met when I was five. He’s not as lean as he was back then. He’s filled out a lot, his shoulders are wide and muscular. He’s taller too, and his hair is darker now. And his face—while perfectly proportioned with a square jaw and those brown eyes that look into my soul—his face is that of someone who knows things. Has seen things.
He is wise.
We’ve always been almost fourteen years apart in age, and of course that’s never going to change, but he’s gotten wiser over the years and I’ve only gotten more confused.
He makes me want to lean on him and that scares me.
I don’t get out of the truck. Not yet.
I just need a minute to enjoy him. Because these visits, they always end the same way. With a fight. With us mad at something. Each other, specifically. We’re like that scene in Ghostbusters. Don’t cross the streams—it would be bad. All life as we know it stops instantaneously when Nick and I are together. Every molecule in our bodies explodes at the speed of light when we are close.
That’s always how it ends.
And usually it’s me who causes this rift in the fabric of spacetime.