Page 35

Her eyes stray to the side table he knocked in his escape attempt, jostling a book that fell on the floor, revealing the flowers he pressed to its pages. The same petals she offered him when he first returned lay dried and scattered on the carpet.

“You kept them,” she whispers, holding the tiny bouquet in her palm.

“It was the first thing I saw that felt real. Thought they still had me and then I saw that flower you left. No one woulda done that but you. I had to keep ‘em.”

She lays them carefully beside her to free both hands, one rubbing slowly from his elbow to shoulder and the other carding through soft hair.

“There’s an old wives’ tale,” he continues. “It says if you keep the first gift someone gives you, they’ll never leave.”

“You believe in that stuff?”

“Believe in all kinds of weird shit,” he deadpans. “Aliens, Bigfoot, vampires. I’m down for all the crazy stuff.”

“Right, I almost forgot you love a supernatural conspiracy theory. I still remember the first story you told me about the Mothmen.

“That was a bad day.”

Their foster parents of the hour had been fighting. Yelling and screaming, and tossing anything not nailed down at the walls. Their voices echoed in her room as she sat on the bed with her knees bent, staring at the door as if they’d blow through it to involve her somehow.

And then the door cracked open and Wade slipped inside, shoving a chair up against the doorknob before sitting beside her on the mattress. She was so relieved to see him that she almost hugged him, but even back then, she was reserved and cautious, always wary of taking too much from anyone.

“I felt safe with you,” she says. “I always have.”

He told her some crazy story while the chaos whirled like a tornado out in the hall, his voice gentle and calm until she tilted her head to rest on his shoulder and let his words block out the rest of the world.

He has always been offering her peace. She only wishes she could do the same for him now.

“Will you tell me what you dreamed of tonight?” she asks softly.

“Silas.”

She knew. Of course she did. He is haunted even in sleep by the one who left these marks on his soul.

“He can’t hurt us here,” she tells him, allowing the room to go silent as he begins to relax.

Wade falls asleep again before she can coax him back to bed, so she leans her head against the wall and settles in.

This will be how it is for him until something is done.

She had her doubts earlier, thinking it might be best to let this go.

But now, she knows the only way forward is to confront their past.

It would be easy to pack a bag while he’s in the shower and then head out the next night after he’s fallen asleep. Maybe the one after that. She hasn’t decided yet. All she knows for sure is that it’s up to her to deal with this, so he doesn’t have to.

She can’t sit by and watch him suffer. She can’t allow Silas to take anything else from them.

Kara promised she wouldn’t leave and meant it, but this isn’t leaving for good. This is righting a wrong, and she has every intention of coming back.

Planning on her own is simple. She’s used to it. What she isn’t prepared for is how guilty she feels about lying to him. If he’s caught on that’s something’s off, he doesn’t say, and when she fails to bring up Silas again the following day, he doesn’t do it for her.

She intends to leave that night, but then the what-ifs creep in, telling her that she needs to take her time.

Make sure this is right. Not rush into something she can’t take back.

So instead, she puts it off, vowing to decide tomorrow if she’ll follow the new plan or ask him to leave with her for some distant destination out west.

* * *

When she wakes up to light streaming through the curtains, she is alone. The bed is cold and empty beside her, and there’s a note on Wade’s pillow that has her heart thumping against her ribs.

It’s not right for you to risk your life fighting this battle for me. I can’t lose you. Can’t let him hurt you, too. I know what you were planning, but this is something I have to do alone.

I plan to come back, but if I don’t, you deserve to have this with you again.

If I don’t, this time you gotta let me go.

I love you.

The hair tie she gave him lies on the pillow, left behind as if that’s the one thing she can’t live without if he never returns.

For a fleeting moment, her only thought is rage at the fact that he wrote those last three words in a note. He told her he loved her in a goodbye letter. That’s enough to have her in tears.

Then, the rest of it catches up. Wade is out there alone, long before he’s ready, heading in Silas’s direction. All to keep her from putting herself in harm’s way.

She’d been foolish to think she could hide anything from him. Now they’re both paying the price.

He would have left with her on a road trip tomorrow if she had said yes, but she didn’t. Now, she can only hope that she’s able to find him before she’s lost him for a second time.