Chapter Forty-Two
Sloane
Ryan eyed the box and duffel bag Colonel Swartz had delivered sitting in the corner of my room.
“You’re already packed?”
“No, those are my things from camp that were delivered earlier this week. I didn’t see the point of unpacking them.”
I opened up the tiny closet in my room and pulled out the backpack they’d given me in Germany while Ryan opened the bottom drawer on the nightstand/dresser and took out a stack of clean shorts and handed them to me.
“So, are you happy to be out of here?”
“Yeah, I’m ready to go home.”
“You nervous?”
I cocked my head at his question. “About going home?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course not. Why would you ask that?”
He shrugged. “Going back to your old life is going to be an adjustment; it’s understandable you’d be nervous.”
“Come on, Ry. We both know there’s no going back to my old life.”
“Why not?”
I shot him a look, then waved my hand down the left side of my body.
“This is why not.”
“The people who care about you don’t care about that.”
“ I care.”
“So, does that mean you’re just going to cut everyone from your past out of your life?”
“Nope. I promised Missy and Dr. Noland I would see my friends and accept help.”
My friend snorted. “You also told them you were going to live with me while simultaneously trying to convince me to lie for you.”
“That wasn’t fair of me to put you in that position. I’m sorry. Thank you for working with Travis and arranging the beach house.”
“Not gonna lie, I’m jealous. Grace says that place is nice.”
“I just hope…” I stopped short, prompting Ryan to prod me to finish.
“You just hope what?”
“That I’ll be able to take advantage of being on the beach.”
He opened the top drawer. “You will. You heard Judy. You’ll be running before you know it.” His voice got lower when he asked, “Have you thought about calling Ashley?”
“I owe her an apology, that’s for sure. But maybe I just need to let sleeping dogs lie.”
He waved the unopened letter from her that I’d hidden in my underwear drawer.
“Is that what this is?”
I offered a sad smile. “No, that’s my Schr?dinger’s cat.”
Ryan furrowed his eyebrows. “Schr?dinger’s cat?”
“You’ve never heard of Schr?dinger’s cat? It’s named after a physicist who created a thought experiment. It asks you to imagine a cat in a box with a mechanism that has a fifty percent chance of killing it within an hour. Until you look inside the box, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Its fate is linked to an event that may or may not have occurred.”
“I know what Schr?dinger’s cat is. I just don’t understand what that has to do with a six-month old unopened letter.”
“Well, at the time I got it, there was still a chance that it was a love letter and not her telling me to go fuck myself. Although, enough time has passed that now it wouldn’t matter. The cat is dead, and she’d definitely tell me to go fuck myself.”
“Yeah,” Ryan replied wistfully. “You really screwed that one up. I was certain she was the one for you.”
Bittersweet memories of our week together came crashing back in my head.
“I was, too.”
Then, I pulled my shoulders back. “It’s for the best.”
“Is it, though?”
“It is. She deserves better.”
Ryan raised his eyebrows at me, so I replied defensively, “Look, I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’ve accepted this is how I look.”
“That’s great that you’ve accepted it. It doesn’t mean you’re not angry about it. And you know what? You’re entitled to be angry.”
“I’m not angry. Stop trying to manufacture drama.”
I was grumpy now though. It’d be great if people stopped trying to tell me how I should feel about the fact that my new nickname should be Two-Face.
~~~~
Missy had been working behind the scenes with Travis, so I was cleared to leave that afternoon on Travis’s plane bound for San Diego.
Yeah, the dude had his own private jet. I could only imagine how posh the beach house I was going to be staying at was.
Doubt began to seep in once the plane took off.
Hopefully the other guys were cool. How awful would that be, to live with bitter assholes like I used to be?
What if the PTA was a hottie?
A year ago, the idea of an attractive woman helping me would have had its merits, but today the thought made me want to puke. Women used to throw themselves at me—which I’d had my own issues with back then, but I’d never once wanted to be invisible.
Now that’s all I wished for. I’d even thought about growing my hair out to cover the left side of my face, like the emo kids used to do when I was in high school.
And what about the PTA’s daughter?
I still wasn’t sure about that. I liked kids and before the accident had even thought I’d have my own someday, but what if I scared her daughter? I didn’t even know how old her kid was. Would she be able to understand I wasn’t the boogeyman? The last thing I needed was to give some little girl nightmares because of my scars.
This is a bad idea.
Just as I was about to tell Travis I changed my mind, Ryan said, “Josh is taking Tank to the groomer, so he’ll be fresh and clean when I bring him over tomorrow.”
The thought of finally seeing my golden retriever after almost a year made me clamp my mouth shut.