Chapter 29 - Wren
The suitcase is at my feet. The ticket is in my hand. I’ve been sitting on this plastic seat for twenty minutes, watching the departure board click through its destinations overhead.
Atlanta. Jacksonville. New Orleans. The letters flip and settle, flip and settle, each one a door I could walk through.
The station smells like diesel. I know this smell. I've lived in it, city to city, for five years. It's almost comforting, like a worn path — you know where to put your feet, you know how it ends.
Except my eyes are puffy in a way that keeps surprising me.
I caught myself in the bathroom mirror when I arrived and didn't recognize my own face at first — swollen and red-rimmed, five years of stored grief finally choosing last night to cash out.
I haven't cried like that in a long time. Maybe ever.
So I packed the replacement suitcase. It was one of the first things I bought with my fear-money, as though I always knew this would be how it ended. And I came here.
The familiar part is supposed to kick in now. The letting-go, the blank road opening ahead, the moment where the last city closes behind me like a book I've already read. I've done this enough times to know how it feels. You stand at the door and it swings shut clean, and you don't feel it close.
It isn't happening.
My chest is full of things that won't lie down — grief still raw from last night, fear that re-fires every time something bangs outside the station doors, the helplessness of watching Logan walk away with his face closed.
I sat in the penthouse until four in the morning.
Nico's driver had brought me back, the building code worked the same as always, the elevator rising through all forty floors, and I stood at the window watching the bay go from black to gray to gold, waiting for Logan's key in the door.
Called twice. Texted once. The silence on the other end was complete.
So I did what I always do. What I've done a dozen times in a dozen cities, the move so practiced it barely requires thought.
I came to the bus station.
What's new is that I don’t feel empty. Every step of this is tearing. Leaving used to feel like nothing. Now leaving feels like tearing.
My brace catches on the strap of my bag when I reach into it, and I work around it without thinking.
The cut on my forearm pulls faintly — just a reminder, the glass from the Gilded Lily windows marking where I was last night.
My body is full of small evidences of what I survived.
I'm sitting in a bus station instead of staying to find out if I can survive something harder.
A toddler three rows over throws a juice box at his father and laughs. I flinch at the sound. The flinching makes me angry at myself, and the anger just adds to the pile.
My hands find the notebook.
The spiral-bound cover is worn soft at the corner.
I flip through without looking — I know the order by feel now.
Street scenes I'll barely remember. The bay from the penthouse window at different hours.
Faces I've spent the last few weeks learning.
Marisol's golden energy, which I still haven't gotten right.
The Siren's impossible neck. Gunner’s monstrosity.
Then I stop.
Him in the water.
I drew it from memory, early on, before I had language for what was happening between us.
His body cutting through the pool at dawn, arms extended, head turned to breathe.
I got the line of his shoulder right — the swimmer's shoulder, lean and specific, built by repetition and discipline.
I got the vulnerability of that turned head, the extended neck. His one unguarded moment.
It's the best thing in this notebook. It might be the best thing I've drawn in five years.
Every city, I fill a notebook. Every city, I throw it away.
Drop it in a bin or leave it on a seat or forget it somewhere on purpose.
The point is not to accumulate evidence.
The point is to keep moving without weight, to seal the departure, to make the leaving final and clean.
You walk out of a city and you don't carry proof of it.
I stand up. The suitcase wheel scrapes against the tile.
The trash can is ten feet away. I walk toward it.
I hold the notebook over the opening.
My hands stop.
Not hesitation — stopped. Like the signal got sent and something between my brain and my fingers decided not to pass it along.
I stand there with the notebook extended over the trash, and I cannot let go.
The sketch is inside — the swimming, the turned head, the angle of his shoulder against the dark water. Evidence I was here.
I know what his world is. I've watched Gunner dismantle three men without raising his voice.
I've been in a room while a man died for having the wrong information.
I've heard Santiago Zayas say I'll remember you with blood on his shirt and mean it.
Going back to Logan means the whole world that comes with him — the one I've been moving through for weeks like it was only scenery.
My hands still won't move.
I step back from the bin. I sit back down on the plastic seat. The notebook is in my lap.
I close my eyes and my body provides what my mind won't. His hand at the back of my neck. The weight of him settling over me, his mouth at my temple — I have you — and the way that landed in me, low and complete. The smell of him after his swims, chlorine and warm skin. The way he says my name.
I want him.
Not the arrangement. Not the safety. Him. The man whose hands shake in the dark, whose voice has been in my head since the Setai. My body has been knowing it for weeks. My mind is finally catching up.
The wanting has weight. I can feel exactly how much of me it takes up.
I pull out my phone and dial a number I know by heart. My father's.
I haven’t spoken to him in five years. We spoke once or twice after Mom’s funeral, but then I stopped calling, and he stopped calling, and the quiet between us accumulated.
The phone rings.
"Wren?"
His voice is rougher than I remember. Slower.
My throat closes.
I should say something. I rang him, for God’s sake, but the words won’t come. My throat is thick and full, and I start shaking.
"I know it's been — I know," he says, filling the silence. A pause. "I've almost not-called about sixty times in the past year."
He doesn't say how are you. He doesn't ask where I am.
"I wasn't there,” he continues, like he’s rehearsed this. “When your mother was sick. When she died. I wasn't there, and I'm sorry, and I know sorry doesn't fix it."
A beat. Then, quieter, he continues.
"I found one of her sweaters last week. In a box I hadn't opened." Another pause. "I sat on the floor with it for a while."
The fluorescent lights hum. A child across the terminal explains something urgent to his father, both hands moving.
"I'm trying to get better. Get off the booze. I’ve got a sponsor and everything. I don't know if that means anything to you. But I wanted you to know."
I press my thumbnail into my palm.
"I've been trying to figure out how to call you for a long time.
I kept thinking I'd wait until I had the right words.
" A short sound, almost a laugh, broken at the edges.
"I still don't have them. I just — I kept your number under your name.
Never changed it. The picture's still the one from Christmas the year you were sixteen.
Your mom took it. You're standing in front of the tree and you've got tinsel in your hair.
" He stops. "She's in the background. You can't really see her face, but she's there. "
My throat closes.
"I look at it sometimes," he says, quietly. "That's all."
The departure board clicks through another destination.
I manage one word. "Okay."
"I love you. I know I haven't — I know that probably sounds strange. But I do."
He sounds like a man reading from notes he wrote to himself, words he rehearsed, then kept anyway when the real moment arrived. The love in it is real regardless. Imperfect but real.
He’s trying. That’s something, at least.
"Okay," I say again, because it's all I have.
"I’m proud of you, Wren. What you did for your mother. Thank you."
The call ends a minute later. Not cleanly — it just reaches its natural limit, two people with no practiced language for this, saying what they can and stopping before it breaks further.
I sit with the phone in one hand and fifteen minutes on the clock, and something assembles itself in my chest.
He said I love you. He knows it might not mean anything. He said it anyway.
Logan never said it. But neither did I.
If the man who failed me most completely — who drank while I managed her medications, who disappeared while I held her hand through a dying that took six years — if that man can reach across five years of silence and say I wasn't there, I'm trying to be different —
What exactly am I doing on this bench? Other than shaking and, now, crying.
Running from emptiness is just motion. When you feel nothing, leaving takes nothing from you. You drift to the next city and you don't miss what you left because you never let yourself have it.
Running from love is different. Running from love is amputation. Cutting away the part of yourself that finally woke up, that finally came back online after years of static — and carrying the wound with you city to city.
I can feel the cost of it already. The loss that would follow me now, because I'm not numb anymore, because I don't have that protection left.
And underneath that: I have things to say that I didn't say. The safeword I held in my mouth and never used — not from fear of him but from something else, something I need to explain if he'll let me. Why I froze. How I feel. Those things are still mine. Still unsaid. Still worth saying.
The departure board clicks. New Orleans.
I pick up the ticket. Hold it for a moment — the thin paper, slightly damp from where I've been gripping it, the printed destination already going abstract. I set it face-down on the plastic seat beside me.
I stand up.
I don't look at the ticket again.
The suitcase wheel catches on a seam in the tile as I turn. I tuck the notebook into my bag, the worn spiral cover settling at the top where I can feel it. I'm keeping it. For the first time in five years, I'm keeping a notebook.
The woman behind the ticket counter is helping someone else. The toddler from earlier is asleep against his father's arm, the juice box on the floor beside them. Ordinary. All of it ordinary.
I push through the door.
The heat hits first, then the light.
January in Miami and the sun is already working hard, bouncing off every pale surface. I stand on the sidewalk for a moment and let it land on my face — just that, just the warmth — before I start moving.
The city moves around me. Traffic, a woman on a bicycle, someone's music from a passing car. I roll the suitcase to the curb and pull out my phone.
The penthouse is twenty minutes by rideshare.
That's where I'm going first — the pool, my pool, the place I've watched him move through the dark water at five in the morning like the only person awake in the world.
If he's not there I'll try La Sirena, and if not there then I'll keep looking, because he has to be somewhere.
I have nowhere else to be and all the time in the world.
I have things to say.