Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
TRIGGER
ONE WEEK LATER
I'm on horseback, but really, I'm not here. I'm still sitting on those station steps with Warrick.
Yesterday, I'd parked outside the police station, hands gripping the steering wheel like it was the only solid thing left in my world.
I was ready to make it official, to turn her absence into paperwork and send out search parties.
I was tired of feeling helpless. There was literally nothing else I could do to bring her back, so that was my solution.
But Warrick was there on the steps before I'd even killed the engine, waiting for me.
I remember asking how he knew where to find me. ‘I've walked in your shoes,’ he said, as if that explained everything. And maybe it did.
The week Maya got her diagnosis, she disappeared too, vanished the same way Asha has now.
No note, no warning, just gone. Two weeks, Warrick told me, sitting on those station steps.
She was gone for two weeks, the longest two weeks of his life.
And he'd had a daughter to take care of then, who needed her father to hold it together even as his world crumbled around him.
I try to imagine the weight of it, and I can't. I don't have anyone else depending on me. Just this emptiness where she should be.
My horse, Knickers, shifts beneath me, adjusting to the terrain, and I shift with him.
We sat there, on those station steps, for what felt like hours. Maybe it was. Maybe it was only twenty minutes. Time has lost all meaning. Hours feel like days. Days stretch into small eternities without her.
I'd asked where Maya had been during that time.
It was possible Asha was destined to run to the same places, but Warrick couldn't say for certain.
He suspected she drove, mostly. Maya loved road trips.
They cleared her mind, helped her think.
He said it so simply, like it was just a fact about his wife, not a confession that he'd let her go without demanding answers. He told me that when she returned, they never talked much about where she had been. It didn’t matter.
What mattered was the time she had left.
‘That's another reason I know she'll come back.’ He'd looked at me when he said it, really looked at me, and something in his expression had shifted. ‘She's her mother's daughter. Stubborn as hell. She'll come back if for no other reason than to tell you how to feel and how to go on without her.’
The thought of being without her. It had stolen the air from my lungs. Still does.
‘Is that why Maya reached out to Daruka Arora?’ I'd asked. ‘She didn't want you to be alone.’
He'd nodded. She always believed she knew what was best. ‘It's why I couldn't trust her letters.’
He'd gone still at that. I remember that stillness.
‘I'm surprised you kept them at all,’ I confessed.
‘I considered that,’ he'd said, his voice careful. ‘Opening them and resealing them, that is. But I couldn't. I didn't want confirmations. Didn't want to be angry. I just wanted to find peace.’
Peace. As if such a thing exists when the person you love has already written your ending.
It had seemed strange to me then. Warrick, of all people, hadn't demanded answers about her whereabouts. Hadn't needed explanations. Hadn't torn open those letters to know what she thought their daughter deserved to hear.
But sitting here now, facing the same fate, swaying with Knickers’ steady movement forward even though I have nowhere to go.
..I understand. If she came back tomorrow, I don't think I'd demand answers either.
I think I'd just be grateful. Grateful she was back.
Grateful that I was still worth coming back to.
The reins go slack in my hands, and all I can do is trust that Knickers knows the way home. And hope that wherever Asha is, she's finding her own way back to me, back to us.
The thought lands heavily in my chest. Us.
Not just me and her anymore. There's a third heartbeat now, barely formed, barely real, but real enough that she ran, not from the new life itself but the math of it.
The possibility that this child might one day feel their own time running out.
I know this terrifies her—I know this because it terrifies me too.
Sprinkles hit the back of my neck, and Knickers doesn't wait for direction. He turns off the muddy trail and carries us under the canopy where the leaves catch most of the rain.
Warrick never told Asha about the diagnosis that could be in her future.
Instead, he bartered with his wife and sent his daughter away when he thought she was getting too close to the truth.
He let Asha grow up believing her mother had died of something sudden, something that couldn't be passed down like a family heirloom you never wanted.
I've contemplated that choice countless times over the past week.
When I think about Asha, all I see is that honesty is the only right answer because people deserve to know what they are carrying.
But when I think about my unborn child, my answer wavers.
It's not so black and white anymore. All I see are timelines, a future on borrowed time.
Do I want them counting down to some invisible deadline?
Seeing every birthday cake, every Christmas morning, every scraped knee, and first day of school through the lens of how many of these do I have left?
The rain hits the leaves a little harder now, and I can't be sure which way we're going, but without Asha at home, I have nowhere to be, and right now getting lost feels like the only place where I can begin to be found. So, I let Knickers lead the way.
Warrick didn't want fear to be Asha's inheritance. He wanted her to live, not just survive. And there's a difference. A life lived in dread of its ending isn't really lived at all. And survival isn't the same as living.
I can't help but feel like, in his own misguided way, that's what he was trying to accomplish with his secrets.
Days that weren't overshadowed by diagnoses and statistics.
He gave her the peace of not knowing. The freedom to believe that life was something coming from her—her choices, her dreams, her own two hands building something—and not something happening to her, some predetermined script she had no say in writing.
I think about our child. The one Asha is carrying right now, wherever she is.
If they have the gene, and, years from now, they start showing symptoms, would I want them to have known all along?
To have spent their childhood, their teenage years, their twenties under that shadow?
Or would I want them to have what Asha had, at least for a while?
Knickers suddenly stops and blows a sharp burst of air through his nose.
The sound snaps me out of my thoughts, and I scan the trees for an animal.
My spine straightens, and every one of my senses goes on alert when I spot a shadowy figure, about fifty feet ahead, moving through the clearing.
I click my tongue to signal Knickers to keep walking, my eyes keenly tuned on the figure.
The closer we get to the edge of the trees, the faster my heart beats.
I can't trust my eyes or this desperate thing in my chest that's been summoning her in every dark-haired woman I pass.
But this shadow…it's definitely female, dressed in white, and hell if she doesn't move like her.
I'd know that hourglass shape on that slender frame anywhere.
I'm either seeing her, or I've finally lost my mind.
We move through the short span of woods, branches catching at my shoulders, dampening my already wet clothes more, and then we're in the clearing, and I see it.
There's no more question of if. She's there—really there—standing with her back to me beside a patch of trees.
Her white dress clings to her, soaked through and nearly transparent from the rain.
I don't call her name as I approach. I'm too scared to say it out loud, too worried that speaking might break this spell, because that has to be what this is.
There's no way I took a ride to clear my head, wound up lost, and stumbled upon my missing wife.
With each step closer, I grow more confident she hears me, Knickers’ breathing, the creak of the saddle, the pound of his hooves against the sodden grass, but still, she doesn't move. She just stands there in that rain-soaked dress like a ghost I've conjured from grief.
I'm still several feet away when I swing down from Knickers, my hands fumbling through the motion of tying him to the nearest tree. I move toward her slowly, afraid that if I rush, she'll vanish. Afraid she's not real at all.
It's not until I'm right beside her, close enough to see the delicate olive veins beneath her skin, the rise and fall of her chest, that I finally speak.
"Asha." Her name comes out like a whisper as I send up a silent prayer that this moment isn't just my mind. That the edges of my vision won't start to fade, signaling the cruel end of a dream.
She blinks, and water droplets fall from her lashes. She's real.
Slowly, so slowly that I feel every second of it, she turns to me. And God, her face. Sadness doesn't even begin to cover what I see there. It's devastation. The kind that lives in your bones and changes who you are.
"I'm sorry." Her words crack down the middle, and then tears come, sliding down her cheeks to mix with the rain.
"Don't be sorry." The words tumble out as I close the distance between us, pulling her into my arms for the first time in seven days, four hours, and a lifetime of minutes I counted in the dark. I don't let go. I can't. I won't.