Chapter 8 #2
Outside, the evening has not quite committed to dark yet—that heavy, bruised hour when the sky sits between the end of the day and the beginning of the night, amber and gray bleeding together. The streetlights are already on but not yet necessary.
I breathe out when I reach the parking lot and find it empty of anyone I know. I get in my car, lock the doors, and sit with my hands on the wheel, staring through the windshield at the street beyond the lot for a long moment.
I should go back to the apartment.
By now, Cassie will have music playing, something on the stove or in the microwave. Something genuinely terrible on television that she will, without shame, describe as research into human failure, and that we will both watch for two hours without moving.
I start the car and pull out of the parking lot.
The city moves around me.
Horns and crosswalks and the hiss of a bus pulling away from a stop.
I drive without a plan, without any destination in mind.
I tell myself that I’m just clearing my head.
That the drive will help. That by the time I loop back around, I will feel the edges of myself settle the way they sometimes do when there is movement beneath me.
I pass the corner store on Hewitt, where Cassie once stuffed two chocolate bars into the pocket of her jacket at thirteen and walked out with the expression of someone doing absolutely nothing wrong.
I pass the school I walked into every morning, wearing armor made of eyeliner, rage, and boredom.
Past the library, where I once sat near the steps with my bags and no idea where I would sleep.
I keep driving.
My hands tighten on the wheel before my brain fully registers what my eyes see. My foot eases off the gas on its own as I pull up to Dolores’ house.
It sits back from the street, behind a sagging fence that has never, in my memory, been repaired, only leaned further into its own slow collapse. The porch is still chipped at the corners. The yard is still patchy where the grass gave up years ago.
I pull over on the opposite side of the street and sit with my hands still on the wheel and my eyes on the house.
Dolores.
Even her name tastes stale. Tastes like cheap margarine, hollow threats, and the specific, suffocating air of a house that was never a home and never tried to be. A woman in cheap cardigans and holy threats. A woman who collects foster kids and cashes state checks.
There used to be kids everywhere in that house. Crying near the entrance. Screaming from the kitchen. The older boys at the end of the hall, their dead eyes and fists always ready.
I stare at the windows now.
No faces press against the glass. No shuffle of small bodies through the doorway with their eyes hollow. The house is quiet in a way it never was when I lived inside it.
When I got my job at New Ground, one of the first things I did was file a complaint.
I sat down and wrote everything I could remember.
Dates. Names. Rooms. The overcrowding. The food.
The threats. The particular theater Dolores performed in every time an inspection was scheduled.
That extraordinary transformation of neglect into something that could pass a checklist.
It took time.
Everything in this system takes time, but eventually, Dolores no longer had a house full of kids.
That should feel like an achievement in itself, but I know that for every Dolores I help bring down, there are ten more operating in houses I have never walked past, doing the same quiet damage to kids who do not have the courage to report it.
Then I see him in my mind. Memory has always been an asshole with impeccable timing. Zane fucking Rivera.
He doesn’t walk into my memory. He arrives there, the same way he did that first day.
The leather jacket, all that swagger, storm-gray eyes, hair falling into his face, mouth curved with enough arrogance to make a girl want to slap him or climb him, depending on how committed she was to making poor decisions.
I remember the way the air changed.
How absurd is that?
A grown woman in a parked car, sitting across from a house she spent years building a case against, and my body still carries the memory of the first second Zane looked at me.
That stupid, beautiful, catastrophic boy saw me when no one else did.
The one who took me to rooftops and showed me that being seen did not have to feel like being hunted.
The one who made me believe, for a time, that I was worth another person’s attention.
The one who broke my heart so cleanly and completely that I spent all these years mistaking the silence that followed for healing. It was not healing. I know that now. And I filled it with all the wrong things.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “What the hell are you doing?”
I put the car in drive and pull away from the curb.
For the first few blocks, I just drive with no direction in mind. I pass a gas station, a laundromat, and a row of shuttered stores with their metal grilles down.
My hands know the way before my brain has the courage to admit where they are taking me. The thought arrives too late to argue with. Rainer’s workshop. My heart starts pounding before the sign even comes into view.
Rainer’s Custom Restorations sits at the end of the block, the sign slightly crooked, as it has always been. The roller door is halfway up, spilling warm yellow light across the concrete out front.
I pull up in front of the garage.
The car idles. I don’t turn it off, just simply sit with both hands glued to the wheel, eyes fixed on the building.
Zane is probably in there right now.
Not the boy from my memory, frozen at eighteen, leaning in doorframes with busted knuckles.
“He’s quieter now,” Cassie told me. “Hotter, too. Not that you asked.”
I grip the wheel until my fingers ache.
For seven years, I have replayed this moment of seeing him again in my head.
In some versions, I hit him. In others, I scream at him. And sometimes I hate myself for letting him put his hands on my face and love me the way he used to.
In none of those versions did I sit frozen in a parked car outside Rainer’s workshop like a coward, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest.
Every nerve in my body wants to see him. That is the most honest sentence I have said in months, and it costs me something real to let it stand without immediately burying it beneath the carefully maintained fiction that I have moved on.
“Get out,” my mind whispers.
My hand loosens from the wheel for a second, then tightens again.
What if I walk through that roller door and the man inside really did kill the boy who loved me?
What if I look at his face and find a stranger wearing familiar features, and I have to grieve him all over again?
My throat closes around the thought.
I am twenty-six years old, newly homeless by choice, emotionally bruised by a man I never loved enough, and still, after everything, undone by the one person I let myself love too much.