Chapter 33
Nash
I'm in the kitchen with coffee when my phone buzzes on the counter. Ruby is still asleep in the bedroom, her hair fanned across the pillow, one arm wrapped around the spot where I was. Phoenix's name fills the screen.
"Nash."
"I'm in Willowridge." His voice is measured, controlled, the cadence of a man who runs conversations the way he runs rooms. "I need to see you before anyone else. Alone."
"Where?"
"The diner on Main. Thirty minutes."
He disconnects. I set the coffee down and look toward the bedroom. Ruby hasn't moved. Her breathing is slow, even, and her body is still deep in the sleep of a woman recovering from what I did to it twelve hours ago.
I pull on jeans and a shirt, then grab my cut from the chair. I scribble a note on the pad by the coffeemaker and leave it next to her mug.
Had to run out. Back soon. Drink water. Take the ibuprofen on the counter. Don't argue with the note.
The headband on my wrist catches the light through the kitchen window, the red faded to pink from years of wear.
The ride to the diner takes eight minutes.
Phoenix is in the back booth with an untouched coffee in front of him, dressed the way he's always dressed, dark and clean, the authority in his posture visible before he opens his mouth. He watches me cross the room and sit across from him.
"She's alive," he says.
The air between us changes. My hand goes to my wrist.
"Sera," I say. This is the first time I've spoken her name out loud in years, attached to every twenty-two minutes I've replayed since I was too late to the parking lot where she was supposed to be waiting.
"I found her three years ago," Phoenix says.
"She was in a recovery house outside of Atlanta.
One of my network contacts identified her through the intake records.
She'd been in the pipeline for two years before she surfaced at a shelter in Mobile.
From there, she moved through three programs before reaching ours. "
My jaw clenches. Three years Phoenix has known.
"She wasn't ready," he says, reading my face. "She wasn't ready for contact, for Naya, for anyone from before. The recovery took priority. Her therapists agreed. I agreed. That's why I didn't tell you."
"Three years."
"Three years of therapy, identity reconstruction, physical recovery." Phoenix lifts his coffee, doesn't drink it, then sets it back down. "She's ready now."
"Where is she?"
"Here in Willowridge, at the hotel on Birch Street." He holds my gaze. "She wants to see you."
The coffee machine hisses behind the counter. A waitress drops a tray of silverware in the kitchen. The bell over the door rings as someone walks in. The sounds reach me from a distance, but the table and Phoenix's steady face are the only things close enough to matter.
"When?" I ask.
"Now. If you're ready."
I leave money on the table for a coffee I didn't order and walk out into morning light sharp enough to make me squint. Phoenix's black SUV sits beside my bike in the lot. I stare at the bike for ten seconds, then follow Phoenix to the SUV.
He drives. I sit in the passenger seat with my hands on my thighs, trying to remember how to breathe in a pattern that doesn't match the counting I've been doing for years.
Twenty-two minutes. The time between the phone call, the empty parking lot, and the shoe on the ground.
One shoe, her shoe, the left one, the laces still tied because she'd been pulled out of it.
The hotel is a small two-story on the east side of town, the kind of place that caters to people passing through. Phoenix leads me through the lobby, up the stairs, to a door at the end of the hall. Room 214.
He knocks twice. A voice inside says something I can't hear, and Phoenix opens the door.
She's standing by the window.
Shorter than I remember, thinner, her hair darker now, the bright color she used to wear replaced by something closer to her natural brown.
She's wearing a sweater that's too big for her with the sleeves pulled over her hands.
The same gesture she used to do in high school: sleeves over fists, fists pressed to her stomach when she was nervous.
She turns and her eyes find mine.
"Nash."
Her voice is the same, lower and quieter, carrying something it didn't carry before, but the same.
"Sera."
Neither of us moves. Twelve feet of hotel room floor between us and the full weight of every year she's been gone pressing against the walls.
"You look the same," she says. Her eyes drop to my wrist, to the headband. "You still have it."
"Yeah."
"Naya told me. She told me you wear it every day, that you've never taken it off." Her voice thickens. "Nash. That was my scrunchie from ninth grade. I wore it because it matched my backpack."
A rough exhale pushes through my teeth. Half laugh, half something else.
"You've been wearing my ninth-grade scrunchie on your wrist for years." Tears run down her face, and she wipes them with her sleeve-covered fist. "I need you to take it off."
"Sera."
"Take it off. Please. You carried it long enough. I'm here and I'm alive. I'm standing in this room. You don't need to carry it anymore."
My thumb presses against it one last time.
I slide it off.
The skin underneath is pale, a groove pressed into the skin. My wrist bare for the first time since the night I found one shoe in a parking lot.
Sera crosses the room and takes it from my hand, holding it against her chest.
"Thank you," she says. "For looking for me and not stopping.
For carrying this when there was nothing else you could do.
" She looks up at me. "But you didn't fail me, Nash.
You were twenty-two minutes late. The men who took me had been planning it for weeks.
If you'd been on time, they would have taken you too.
Or killed you. Then nobody would have looked. "
The air touches skin that hasn't felt air in years.
"Go be happy," she says. "Phoenix connected me and Naya by phone a couple of days ago.
She hasn't seen me yet, but she told me about Ruby.
" The tears keep running but she's smiling.
"She says Ruby is loud, funny, and she looks at you the way I used to look at the last slice of pizza. That was a compliment. I love pizza."
Phoenix appears in the doorway. "Naya's here."
Sera's hands shake. Her whole body tightens, her shoulders drawing up toward her ears, and she presses the scrunchie against her chest with both fists.
I step to the side of the room, against the wall.
Footsteps in the hallway. Slow at first, then faster, the rhythm of a woman who was told to walk and started running. The door is open. Naya fills the frame.
She's breathing hard. Her hand grips the doorframe and her knuckles go white.
She's dressed in gym clothes, her hair pulled back, her face bare.
Strong, sharp, the older sister who turned grief into fists and fought her way through every year Sera was gone.
But her chin is trembling. Her jaw is clenched against the tremble, the muscles working, and her eyes are locked on Sera with the focus of a woman who is afraid to blink because blinking might make this disappear.
"Sera."
"Hi." Sera's voice is barely audible, her fists pressed to her stomach. "I'm sorry it took so long."
Naya doesn't speak. She crosses the room in three strides and wraps her arms around her sister.
Sera folds into her, her face disappearing into Naya's shoulder, and the sound that comes out of Naya is something I've never heard from her.
It's low. Broken. Torn from somewhere beneath the muscle and the fury and the years of holding herself together in a world where her sister was gone.
I press my back against the wall. My throat tightens. My hands hang at my sides, and I realize they're shaking.
They hold each other. Naya's arms wrapped around Sera so tight her knuckles go white against Sera's sweater.
Sera gripping Naya's shirt with both fists, the scrunchie crushed between her fingers and the fabric.
Both of them are crying. The sound of quiet sobs fills the room.
The kind that come from behind clenched teeth, the kind people make when the grief is so old it calcified and the crying is the calcification cracking open.
I watch. My eyes sting. For years I wore the elastic on my wrist. And I replayed the twenty-two minutes. For years I saw Naya at the fights and read the accusation she never spoke out loud every time she looked at me.
And now Naya is holding that girl. Alive. Breathing. Thin, different, and wearing a sweater too big for her body, but here. Standing in a hotel room in Willowridge. Breathing against her sister's shoulder.
My vision blurs. I blink it clear. Blink again.
Phoenix stands in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame. He watches without moving. The man who found Sera three years ago, kept her safe, and brought her here. He doesn't need credit. Doesn't need acknowledgment. Phoenix stands in the doorway and lets the sisters have the room.
Naya pulls back. She holds Sera's face in both hands, tilting it, turning it, her thumbs wiping tears from Sera's cheeks. Looks at Sera's eyes, her mouth, the line of her jaw. Naya pushes the hair back from Sera's forehead, then touches the scar above Sera's left eyebrow that wasn't there before.
"You're thin," Naya says. Her voice is wrecked.
"I'm getting better."
Naya's thumbs move across Sera's cheekbones again. Her chin trembles. She pulls Sera back in, pressing her sister's head against her shoulder, her hand cradling the back of Sera's skull.
"You're here," Naya whispers.
"I'm here."
They stand in the middle of the room, holding on, while I watch from the wall with my arms at my sides and tears running down my face. I don't wipe them. There's nobody in this room who needs me to be composed. There's nobody in this room who needs me to be anything at all.