“I’ll feed him. And when he’s old enough, he’ll go back with his kind. Like the plan always was.”
God.
Oh, God.
My hand rose to my chest, rubbing over the skin, trying to ease the ache, trying to fend off the pain.
But there was no use.
Even as I noticed it in my chest, it was spreading outward, overtaking me completely.
Ranger was making me leave.
I was losing him, losing what we had been building.
And on top of that, I was losing my sanctuary, my new home, my new life.
Captain.
Gadget.
Everything.
I was losing everything.
And it hurt more than I could have known.
I moved on numb feet, dropping down onto the couch, throwing my arms around Captain when he came to sit beside me.
The tears didn’t come.
Couldn’t, maybe, while Ranger just kept moving around me, pressing the coffee, chopping up something on the counter, then – when I proved incapable of doing it myself – packing up all my things into the backpack Miller had brought and one of the bags Finn had.
Finished, he set it beside the door with my pair of shoes.
The other ones were suddenly missing.
With that, he stormed outside, the dogs following him.
And, what was worse, he forced Captain to come too.
Leaving me utterly alone.
Falling back against the couch, I curled onto my side, forcing my face so deep in the cushions that it was hard to breathe.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that, my brain racing around in endless circles, with a hollow place in my chest that once held my heart.
But the next thing I knew, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I knew it wasn’t him.
I knew he wasn’t coming back.
His goodbye was no goodbye.
I guess maybe that was his way.
And right then I thought, well, his way freaking sucked.
It was bad enough that he was making me go. He should have had the balls to watch me leave, at least.
“Honey…” Miller’s voice called, sounding sad for me as I took a deep breath and turned from the cushions to find her standing there in the bright sunlight from the open door.
Bright sunlight.
You always pictured heartache on rainy days or in the dark of night.
But here it was, in the brilliant yellow of early morning.
“I don’t know if you want to hear this or not right now,” she said, storming around the room, collecting things up. “But he is the biggest mother fucker,” she declared, voice rising with anger. For me. This woman who I barely knew. “I mean, what the hell was he even thinking? You must have fucking whiplash right about now,” she added, dropping her butt down on the coffee table as I moved to sit up, finding she had collected a little pile of things in her lap. One of Ranger’s flannels, some soap, a baggie of something that had been left on the counter. Some kind of food, I imagined.
“I have to go home,” I said, voice nothing like my own. At least to my own ears.
“Yeah.”
“If I still have a home.”
“You have a home. Your apartment is just as you left it,” Miller told me, giving me a reassuring nod. “I know this sucks. I won’t pretend to know how you’re feeling right now. But I think that the sooner we get moving, the better, right? It’s a long walk. And then, once you’re away from this all, you can give in to whatever you’re feeling.”
I was barely aware of standing, of slipping on the pants she handed me, then the shoes.
I didn’t feel the warm sun on my cold skin. I didn’t feel the ache in my muscles as we trudged through the woods on the way to her car.
Apparently, when faced with something my body, my brain, didn’t want to process, it simply shut down.
Which made the walk, then the ride much easier.
Maybe not for Miller, whose gaze I felt on the side of my face often during those hours up the coast, then in, further up, until everything started to become familiar in an oddly distant way. Like revisiting your childhood town as an adult, seeing it through different eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Miller asked for about the tenth time, this time as she stood before me on the stoop to my building after I had taken my things from her.
“I’ll be fine,” I told her. Even sounding convincing of it. Even though I had no such certainty inside me as I turned, let myself in, rode the elevator up, and found myself outside my door.
Like hundreds of times before.
Like absolutely everything hadn’t changed since I had last seen it.
But this was my life now.
Whether I wanted it or not.
And with it, all the pressures, all the stresses, all the everything that I had been protected from in the woods.
A heavy feeling settled on my chest as I unlocked my door, as I moved inside.