Chapter Fourteen
Molly
The cab ride lasted eleven minutes. I knew because I counted every second of every one of them with the same obsessive precision Xavier used to count my breaths, except instead of monitoring someone I loved, I was monitoring the distance between us as it grew block by block, turn by turn, the tether stretching thinner and thinner until I could feel it humming in my chest like a wire about to snap.
I didn't look back. I wanted to. God, I wanted to.
I wanted to turn around in the cracked vinyl seat and watch his house shrink in the rear window until it was a dot and then nothing, because some masochistic part of me believed that if I watched it disappear, the disappearing would feel more deliberate.
More chosen. Less like being ripped away from the only place I'd felt safe in months and more like the brave, autonomous decision I was pretending it was.
The cab driver was a woman in her fifties with a Saints bumper sticker and a pine-tree air freshener that smelled nothing like pine and everything like the chemical approximation of a forest designed by someone who'd never been outside.
She didn't try to make conversation, which was either professional courtesy or the result of one look at my face in the rearview mirror, blotchy, tear-streaked, wearing jeans I'd yanked on with shaking hands and a sweater that wasn't Xavier's.
I'd been deliberate about that. Grabbed my own sweater I'd left out instead of reaching for the black t-shirt that was still on the bedroom floor.
My own clothes. My own smell. My own body, contained within fabric that carried no trace of cedar or coffee or the particular warmth of his skin.
I hated every thread of it.
The apartment building looked different.
Not dramatically. Just the same brick facade, same narrow staircase, same crooked mailbox with my name on a strip of masking tape that had started peeling at the corners months ago.
But the difference was there in the details: new paint on the hallway walls, a clean, sharp white that made the corridor look wider and brighter and completely unfamiliar.
The floor beneath my feet had been refinished, and the smell of polyurethane and fresh latex hung in the air like a chemical ghost, overwriting every memory I had of this place with something sterile and new.
My door had new locks. A deadbolt and a secondary latch that Boris had apparently insisted on, because Boris's approach to problem-solving involved layers of steel and the unshakeable conviction that any situation could be improved by making it harder for people to get through doors.
I fumbled with the keys Katya had pressed into my hand last week during one of her visits, the metal biting into my fingers as I worked the deadbolt with hands that were shaking so badly it took three attempts to align the key with the slot.
The door opened.
The apartment was small. I'd lived here for two years, so I knew exactly how small it was, but knowing and experiencing were different things, and the experience of stepping into this space after eight weeks in Xavier's house was like stepping from a cathedral into a closet.
One bedroom. A bathroom barely large enough to turn around in.
A kitchen that was really just a counter with ambitions.
The window that had always stuck, the one I'd propped open with a copy of War and Peace because the irony amused me, had been replaced entirely, and the new one sat in its frame with the smug precision of something that worked properly and knew it.
Katya had been here. I could tell because there were flowers on the kitchen counter—yellow tulips in a mason jar, cheerful and defiant.
The fridge, when I opened it, was stocked with the basics: milk, eggs, bread, butter, a container of soup that had Katya's handwriting on the lid.
The bed was made with sheets I didn't recognize.
I stood in the middle of my apartment, the space I'd chosen and paid for and lived in before any of this, and I felt the silence close around me like water.
Not Xavier's silence. Not the comfortable, inhabited quiet of a house that held two people and often Doc and the faint hum of a coffee maker and the distant sound of someone breathing in the next room.
This silence was absolute. Depthless. The silence of a space that contained only one heartbeat, and that heartbeat was mine, and it was racing so fast that I could feel it in my temples and my wrists and the hollow of my throat where Xavier's lips had pressed not two hours ago.
I locked both locks. Deadbolt first, then the latch, then I checked them.
Then I checked them again. Then I stood with my back against the door and my palms flat against the wood and I breathed—in for four, hold for four, out for four—except the breathing didn't work the way it worked when Xavier counted with me, because the rhythm was designed to sync with another person's voice and without that voice it was just me, alone, counting to four in an empty apartment that smelled like paint and polyurethane and the absolute absence of cedar.
The panic came on fast.
Not the gradual, building kind that Doc had taught me to identify and intercept.
The ambush kind. The kind that detonated without warning, a flashbang in the center of my chest that sent my heart rate into triple digits and turned my breathing into something shallow and useless and wrong.
My vision narrowed. The apartment walls pressed inward, and for one terrible, disorienting second I was back in the room with the fluorescent lights, and the silence wasn't empty, it was waiting, and someone was going to come through the door with a clipboard and a needle and that flat, clinical smile that meant—
No. No. I was here. I was in my apartment. The tulips were yellow. The locks were locked. Boris's locks. Two of them. Steel.
I slid down the door until I was sitting on the new hardwood floor with my knees pulled to my chest and my phone in my hand, and my thumb was already hovering over Xavier's name in my contacts, automatic, gravitational, the path of least resistance between terror and relief and I was ten seconds away from pressing it.
Maybe five. Maybe two. One tap and he'd answer before the first ring finished, because he always answered before the first ring finished, and he'd hear my breathing and know, and he'd be in his truck before I finished the sentence, and he'd be here in minutes, and he'd hold me and the panic would stop and I'd be safe and I'd have failed.
I called Anna instead.
It rang three times. Each ring lasted approximately one interminable time distance, and during each one, my thumb drifted back toward Xavier's name with the helpless, magnetic pull of a compass needle seeking north.
I physically moved my thumb. Pressed it against my knee. Held it there like a prisoner.
"Molly?" Anna's voice was calm and warm and completely insufficient.
It wasn't the right voice. It wasn't the voice that called me little one, that dropped into the register that lived somewhere between my ribs and my spine and made the world stop spinning.
It was a professional voice attached to a professional woman who was very good at her job and who was not Xavier and therefore could not fix this with the simplicity of her presence.
"I'm in my apartment," I said, and my voice came out in pieces, the words tumbling over each other like they were trying to escape my mouth before the panic swallowed them whole.
"I moved back. Tonight. I'm sitting on the floor, and I locked both locks and I can't—Anna, I can't breathe, and I almost called him, I almost—"
"You called me instead." She said it like it mattered. Like the distinction between the call I'd made and the call I hadn't was significant enough to be noted, cataloged, entered into evidence. "That was a choice, Molly. You're making choices right now. Can you tell me five things you can see?"
The grounding exercise. I knew it. I'd done it countless times in her office, sitting in the leather chair with the box of tissues on the side table and the window that looked out onto a parking lot that Anna had once described as "aggressively mundane, which is therapeutic in its own way.
" I'd done it while crying. I'd done it while shaking.
I'd done it while describing things I'd never said out loud before and watching Anna's face remain steady and open and utterly without judgment, and every time, every single time, I'd walked out of that office and gotten into a car that took me back to Xavier's house, back to his heartbeat, back to the weighted blanket and the chamomile and the gravitational certainty of his presence.
There was no car waiting this time. There was no heartbeat at the end of the exercise. There was just me and the five things and the floor and the silence.
"Yellow tulips," I said. My voice was shaking so badly the words barely held their shape.
"New window. My—my suitcase. The kitchen counter.
The—" I couldn't find a fifth thing because my vision was blurred with tears and the apartment was small and everything in it was either new or unfamiliar, and nothing, nothing in this entire space carried the imprint of the man I loved, and the absence of him was so total and so physical that it felt like a wound—not metaphorical, not poetic, but an actual wound, a place in my body where something had been removed and the nerve endings hadn't gotten the message yet and were still firing signals to a limb that was no longer there.
"The floor," Anna said gently. "You're sitting on the floor. That's your fifth thing. What does it feel like?"
"Hard," I whispered. "Smooth. New. Boris had it refinished."
"Good. That's five things. You're here, Molly. You're in your apartment. The locks are locked. You are safe."