“I think you are.”
“I think you’re laughing at me more often than with me.”
He shrugs. “You’re still funny. And sweet, too.”
“This is getting really far-fetched.”
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, coming to stand in front of me.
I look at the edge of the field where it meets the water. Where the wet green grass turns to brown mud in a perfect rectangle that’s just long enough.
The laughter he built inside of me slips away.
“I came to say goodbye to someone,” I say hoarsely.
“Who is it?”
“Nats.”
“I’m so sorry, Joss. Do you want company?”
“I’m not going over there.”
“Okay. What are you going to do?”
“I never got to bury my parents,” I blurt out, my eyes still on the mound. I can feel Ryan’s surprise in the air around us, but he stays silent. Waiting. “I was too young to do it alone and I didn’t go back into the house after it happened. I was hiding in my dad’s car for a long time. Days. I probably would have died in there, but eventually a family found me. It was a mom and a dad and two kids. Both boys. They took me with them. It was stupid because I was worthless. I could barely walk I was so weak and I didn’t speak a word. Not for weeks. The first time I spoke was to tell them zombies were in the building.” I swallow hard, remembering how my throat hurt as I screamed, using my voice for the first time in too long. Using it too hard. Too late. “They all died. Even the boys. I didn’t see it because I ran. I left them. I tried to warn them, but I left them. Two more groups took me in after that. Two more times I saw everyone around me die. Torn apart the way Bryan tore apart that girl in the showers. I stopped talking again. I got quieter. Faster. I started moving alone because packs will get you heard and get you killed. People are dead weight. Even me. I knew I was worthless to whoever picked me up, so I stopped letting them. I started running from people and zombies and animals. Everything. Nothing was safe. I knew I had to be smart. I had to be fast and silent. A ghost.”
You need to choose whether or not you want to survive or you want to live.
“I didn’t want to die, but I knew I couldn’t live,” I breathe brokenly.
Ryan stands beside me silently, his hand clasped around mine, somehow warm despite the cold air.
“Can I show you something I found?” he asks, tugging on my hand.
I nod mutely, reluctant to pull my eyes from the brown earth. I feel like I’m failing her. I won’t go over there, I know that, but it hurts to think I’m abandoning my friend. She’s the first person I’ve lost in years, and while we weren’t that close, it still stings. It’s still an opening of a wound that should have been closed forever a long time ago.
It’s still a strike of flint, an itch in my veins that makes me want to run.
When I realize where Ryan is taking me, I want to dig in my heels. I want to root myself like those carrots out in the garden, buried under the ground and oblivious to the burn of embarrassment that’s building in my gut and on my cheeks. But I don’t back down because he’s right—I’m brave. And stupid. I’m beginning to think the stupid is getting stronger every day. Ryan doesn’t see it that way, though. Stupid to me is what sweet is to him.
When he stops in front of the wall at the back of the building, I cringe. It’s still there. The writing in white rock that I impulsively scrawled on the rough brick. The message I wrote to him in the hopes that it would find him someday. It was a moment of plain, simple honesty that was too big to keep inside at the time. Now standing here next to him, it seems too big to hide. It’s always been too much, this thing with him. It always has been and always will be more than I can manage.
I miss your kiss.
“That’s your handwriting, isn’t it?” he asks softly.
He’s doing me a favor by not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on the wall, his shoulder pressed up against mine.
“Yeah,” I admit weakly.
“You wrote it before you got out?”
“Yep.”
“Why did you write it?”
“Because I couldn’t say it.”
“Because I wasn’t here.”
“No. Because I’m broken.”
I feel him look at me, but I stare straight ahead. My eyes are fixed hard on the ‘m’ in my message. They keep following the lazy roll of it—up and down, up and down. Like waves on the ocean.
“You’re not broken, Joss.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re alive.”
I shake my head in silent protest.
“Every day when I saw your writing on the wall, I knew you were still out there. You were telling me you were still alive. Do you know what this message tells me now?”
I feel my chest tighten, my fear of the words I’ve told him not to say rising in my veins so thick they might burst. “No.”
“Even in here, even in prison when they had you trapped, you didn’t give up. You don’t know how to quit. You don’t know how to die. You may have been a ghost for six years, Joss, but you’ve always been alive.”
I close my eyes, a wave of dizziness rushing over me. I’m not surprised when he kisses me softly, lighting me up inside like the sun rising over the river behind him. I’m grateful for it. His arms around me, his lips on mine—it steadies me. It pushes away that dizzy, sick feeling in my head and my heart until I’m standing straight. Firm. Solid.
Until I feel more like me as I’m wrapped up in him than I have in a very long time.
Everything is changing. Everything is different than it ever has been before. I’ve always felt like Ryan was taking something from me, stripping away the layers of shadow and shroud that I’ve covered myself in while trying to hide. To survive. And I let him. I grudgingly let him do it, and now that I’m standing in the sun beside the water with him holding me, seeing me, knowing me more than anyone has in my short, painful life, I feel less afraid and more alive than I ever thought I could.
***
We sleep for most of the day. My schedule is getting all turned around. I’m going nocturnal and I don’t know how much I like it. I prefer the daylight. I like the warmth of the sun on my skin and light in the sky. I like seeing what’s coming. Too many shady things happen in the dark for me to ever trust it completely. I read once that up in Alaska there are weeks in the summer where the sun never sets. I thought that sounded like heaven until I got to the next chapter. Turns out in the winter there are times where the sun never comes out. Hard pass on that noise. Alaska can keep their wonky hours.
Once we get up, Ryan and I join Vin in his office again to talk about where we go from here. Trent is MIA—he was gone before we woke up—but I know he’s somewhere; he wouldn’t leave Ryan on his own, and part of me is pretty convinced he wouldn’t leave me either.
“Who do you have locked up?” I ask Vin.
He eyes me shrewdly. “Who are you looking for?”
“No one. It’s just a question.”
He stares at me, unmoving.
“Fine,” I groan. “Melissa.”
“Why Melissa?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Penance? Forgiveness?”
“No.”
“Yes. She was Caroline’s closest friend. Do you have some things you want to say to her? Or more importantly, do you have some things you want to hear from her?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Stop that,” I growl.
Vin sits forward in his seat, his arms coming to rest on his desk. “Melissa won’t forgive you and even if she did it wouldn’t help. You don’t feel bad for her. You don’t even feel bad for Caroline. You feel bad for yourself.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“He’s right,” Ryan says quietly.
I stare at him, shocked. “Are you siding with him?”
“He’s right,” he repeats.
“Even your boy knows,” Vin tells me. “And I bet if we brought your buddy Trent in here, he’d agree too. That dude has definitely killed a time or two, but you don’t see him wandering around all sad-faced and begging everyone who will listen for forgiveness.”