After #3
“And Tom?” she asked softly, her voice clear through my headphones. “How was he with the inventory?”
“He seemed okay,” I said, the relief still tasting sweet in my mouth. “He’s stepping back from the company; he gave me a photograph of my mother on the porch. One I had never seen before. He seemed lighter, Lucy. Happy, almost.”
Lucy looked at me through the camera for a long beat, her gaze scanning my face through the digital feed, checking the micro-expressions, doing the silent mental math she always did when I reported an interaction from West Bridge.
But there I had no tells today. No flat left eyebrow, no defensive posture.
I was presenting her with a clean bill of health, a domestic victory years in the making.
“It sounds like he’s finally allowing himself to inhabit the present,” Lucy said, her voice dropping into that validating register.
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand, looking out from the little video box on my screen.
“You have spent a long time anticipating a storm every time you crossed that county line, Seren. But sometimes, people change when we aren’t looking.
Sometimes things are just what they present as. ”
The sentence settled into the quiet room like a truth.
“Yeah,” I murmured, leaning back into the couch cushions, looking out at the bright May beyond our window. “I think that’s true.”
“And how are you doing, outside of the West Bridge dynamic?” Lucy asked, her pen finally appearing in the frame as she hovered over her pad.
I looked down at my hands, then back up at the camera, my shoulders dropped, my chest open and clear. “I’m doing well,” I said.
The words felt solid. They felt earned. I was doing well. I had a blue apartment, a boy who held me until the dark staircase disappeared, and a father who was finally learning how to look at the afternoon sun.
I closed the laptop twenty minutes later, letting the plastic lid click shut.
The apartment was still empty when I finished, the quiet of the rooms holding the lingering warmth of the noon sun.
I needed to move. I needed to let my feet touch the pavement while my mind was still light before the gravity of doing well had a chance to pull me back down.
I grabbed my keys and went down to the park three blocks over.
By two o’clock, the light had turned hot and bright, filtering through the massive oaks creating small pauses of shadow.
It was almost the hour where those same shadows began to grow teeth.
I walked the gravel perimeter, my hand slipping into my pocket to check my phone.
No texts. I dialed Zane, but it went straight to voicemail, his phone was likely dead or buried at the bottom of his gym bag after his post-final run.
A cold, familiar prickle started at the base of my neck.
The park was too quiet. The trees were too still.
Ahead, where the path bent around a dense thicket of old bushes, a lone figure appeared.
He was walking slow, his head down, his posture obscured by the deep, violet shadows of the trees.
My chest did that sudden, high stress tighten.
The thriller instinct, the one West Bridge had spent years cultivating in the marrow of my bones, told me the perimeter was compromised.
I tracked the distance between us, my fingers locking around my keys in my pocket.
The figure stepped out of the shadow and into a bar of light. It was Finn.
He was wearing his same faded red hoodie, but instead of a biology textbook, he was being dragged forward by a ridiculously small, extraordinarily fluffy white dog with a pink rhinestone collar.
“Seren?” Finn stopped on the gravel, blinking at me. “Hey.”
The dread vanished so fast it left a hollow, ridiculous echo in my ribs. I let go of my keys. “Hey. Finn.”
“I didn’t think anyone else used this park,” he said, his voice entirely sincere as he looked down at the tiny creature currently vibrating against his sneaker.
“I do sometimes,” I said, looking at the fluff ball. “Is that… your dog?”
“My sister’s,” he explained, a faint, slightly embarrassed color hitting his cheeks. “She’s working a double shift at the clinic. His name is Sir Reginald. He looks like a loofah, but if I don’t walk him every thirty minutes, he chews the baseboards.”
An involuntary laugh broke out of me. For the next ten minutes, we walked the loop together.
We didn’t talk about communications theory, or warehouse shifts, or the people who had died before there was an us.
Finn talked about the schedule of feeding the eight-pound dog, and how Sir Reginald was terrified of plastic bags, and how the four-fifteen bus had been four minutes late today.
It was weightless. It was ten minutes of unengineered normalcy, a casual conversation with someone who did not need me to explain the shape of my ghosts.
When he turned off toward the street, Sir Reginald trotting beside him, my chest was completely clear. I sat down on a green bench near the exit and pulled out my phone again. The promise from last week was sitting in my head like a small task on a checklist.
He picked up on the third ring. The background noise on his end was a chaotic, industrial symphony, the high-pitched whine of a pneumatic impact wrench, the heavy clank of iron, and someone shouting about a nail gun in the background.
“Seren?” his voice came through the speaker, a low rasp that sounded like he had been shouting over someone. Or maybe at someone. “Hey. Everything okay? You’re not in a ditch, right?”