Chapter 26
Tessa
The Greyhound terminal was in Savannah.
I’d been there for an hour. I had the ticket in the pocket of my jacket.
I had the bag at my feet—the bag that had sat in the back of Mrs. Thompson's closet, then the back of mine, then the back of the apartment closet, for eight months and three apartments. I had a sweater that had been Cole's pulled around my shoulders, which I hadn’t meant to take and hadn’t realized I'd taken until I was already on the highway.
The bus to Jacksonville left in twenty-six minutes.
I was looking at the departure board. The board didn't need to be looked at. I’d been looking at it for forty minutes anyway because the board was easier than the people, and the people were easier than the floor, and the floor was easier than the bag.
The bag I wasn’t looking at.
The terminal on a Tuesday morning was the kind of place that didn't have many people in it.
A man in a windbreaker reading a newspaper at the far end.
A girl in her twenties on her phone with one foot up on her suitcase.
A woman with a small child asleep against her shoulder.
The fluorescent lights overhead were the kind that made everyone look gray.
I looked gray. I'd caught my reflection in the glass of the ticket window when I'd bought the ticket, and I had not recognized the woman buying it.
I’d bought the ticket with cash.
I’d bought it under a name I hadn't used in seven months.
The cashier had not looked at me.
The departure board updated.
The bus to Jacksonville moved up to platform six.
I didn't move.
I had been doing this since three eighteen.
The next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing, with a part of my head that had been doing this work for eight months and another part of my head that had not been allowed to speak.
Drop Noah at Jamie's. Drive home. Pack. Leave the ring.
Leave the note. Park the car at a long-stay lot at the airport.
Cab to the Greyhound. Cash. Window seat. Move south.
The part of my head that had not been allowed to speak was getting louder.
Twenty-six minutes.
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, he was at the end of the row of plastic chairs, walking toward me.
He had his coat over his good shoulder. The sling was visible underneath.
The gauze at his eyebrow was still there.
He had a bruise along his jaw that had darkened since the hospital.
He was walking carefully—not slow, careful, the way a man walked when something inside him was broken, and he was trying not to make it worse.
I should have stood up. I should have grabbed the bag and gone for the back of the terminal where the buses were. My body had been planning to run for hours.
I didn't move.
He stopped two feet from me.
"Cole."
It came out small. The padding rose in my throat before I'd thought about it.
"You shouldn't be here. You should be in the hospital. You—Cole, you have three broken ribs, you can't—"
"You shouldn't be here either."
He didn't say it loudly. He didn't say it angrily. The flat register, in a Greyhound terminal in Savannah, in the body of a man who should have been in a hospital bed two hours away, was the thing that broke me first.
I made my mouth keep going.
"How did you find me?"
"Noah told me about the palm trees."
"What?"
"Once. A long time ago. He didn't know he was telling me anything. I figured it out this morning."
I closed my eyes.
Of course, Noah had told him. Of course, Noah had said it offhand at the kitchen table, the way Noah said everything, and Cole had filed it away and remembered it this morning when he needed it. Of course.
I opened my eyes.
"You shouldn't be driving."
"I know."
"Quinn shouldn't have let you."
"She didn't let me. I went."
I had nothing to say to that.
He sat down.
He did it slowly. The chair next to mine. He didn't look at me while he was sitting. He kept his face the way he did. He set his good hand on his thigh. He breathed in once, slowly, through his nose. He breathed out.
When he was settled, he turned his head and looked at me.
"Tessa."
"Cole."
"Talk to me."
He sat there and waited.
I had had a speech in my head all morning.
I had been rehearsing it on the highway.
The version where I told him in plain words why I was leaving, and he understood, and he let me go.
I had rehearsed it well enough that I could have said it in the bakery to Mrs. Thompson, in Miranda's office, in front of a courtroom.
Cole had walked into the terminal, and the speech had gone out of me.
I made myself find it.
"He's not going to stop."
Cole didn't say anything.
"Nicholas. He won. The hearing. The order.
He lost all of it. He doesn't lose, Cole.
He doesn't let things go. He sent men with a pipe to Sean's parking lot, and he made me watch.
He's not going to stop. He's going to keep going until someone is dead.
Until you are dead. Or Sean. Or Quinn. Or one of Sam's kids.
Or Mrs. Thompson. He's going to keep working through the people I love until there's no one left, and then he's going to come for me. "
The words were coming faster than I wanted them to. I was talking through tears now, and I could not get the tears to stop.
"If I leave, he stops. The whole thing stops.
He doesn't have a reason to hurt anyone if I'm not here.
I did this before. I left him once, when I left Virginia, and he didn't hurt anyone for seven months because I wasn't there for him to use them against. I just have to keep moving.
I just have to be far enough away that the math doesn't work for him. "
"Tessa."
"Noah deserves a mother who doesn't bring this with her.
He deserves a town and a school and a—he deserves a normal life.
Not me. Not this. He has Sam and Jamie. He has Aunt Jenna.
He has you. He has more people now than I ever gave him.
If I'm gone, he gets to have that. He gets to be a kid.
He doesn't have to be a kid who waits at a window for his mother because his mother brings men with pipes to her parking lots. "
I had not meant to say waits at a window. The phrase came out before I'd thought about it. I had heard it in his voice two weeks ago, and it had come out of me now in mine.
His face didn't change.
He let me finish.
"Tessa."
"Cole—"
"You done?"
I nodded. I didn't trust my voice.
"Okay."
He looked at the floor for a beat. Then he looked at me.
"Your son needs his mother."
It was the surface answer. It came out plain. The flat register doing the flat thing it did.
"Cole—"
"No. Let me say it."
I closed my mouth.
"I waited by the window when I was Noah's age.
My mom used to leave for days. Then weeks.
I'd sit by the window and wait for her car.
Sometimes, she came back. Most of the time, she didn't. The waiting taught me what kind of woman she was, and it taught me what kind of man I was going to have to become to make up for it. "
He didn't look away from me.
"I'm not letting Noah become that kid. Not for any reason. You don't get to make him that kid."
I started crying harder. I made my hands stay in my lap. I made them.
"I know you think leaving is the brave thing, Tessa. It isn't. I know that because I spent thirty-four years thinking the same thing about not letting anyone in. I had a list of reasons. They were good reasons. They were the kind of reasons that hold up as long as nobody pushes on them."
He stopped.
"The brave thing is staying. The brave thing is letting people help you."
The departure board updated.
I didn't look at it.
The thing in my chest that I had been holding since the hospital—since the bakery before that—since the goodbye in the gray suit before that—let go.
I bent forward. My elbows on my knees. My face in my hands. I was crying the way I had not let myself cry in eight months. The way I had not let myself cry in ten years before that. The crying was not coming from one place. It was coming out of every year I had ever held it in.
Cole's good arm came around my shoulders.
He pulled me against his side. The sling was between us. He couldn't get both arms around me. He used the one he had.
I got my face into his shoulder, the side that wasn't broken, and I broke.
"I don't know how to do this."
It came out into the fabric of his shirt.
"I don't know how to stop running."
"You don't have to know."
His voice was in my ear.
"You just have to come home."
I cried into him.
He held me there with the one arm he had.
Some time went by.
I didn’t know how much.
After a while, I lifted my head. My face was wet. His shirt was wet. He had a thumb under my chin that I didn't remember him putting there. He moved it. He used the same thumb to wipe under my eyes, the way he had wiped a tear in the hospital with the same hand.
"Tessa."
"Yeah."
"Come home."
"Okay."
The word came out before I'd decided to say it.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He kept his arm around me for a beat longer. Then he let go. He stood up. It looked like it hurt him. I saw it. I didn't say anything about it.
I picked up the bag.
It was heavier than I'd remembered. Or I was lighter than I'd been at three-eighteen this morning. One of those.
He held out his good hand for the strap.
"I've got it."
"Tessa. I have one working arm."
"I've got it, Cole."
He let me have it.
We walked.
The terminal was the same as it had been an hour ago.
The man with the newspaper had folded it.
The girl with the suitcase had taken her foot off the bag and was standing.
The woman with the small child was up, swaying gently, the child still asleep against her shoulder.
The bus to Jacksonville was at platform six.
The other passengers were starting to drift in that direction.
I walked past them.
Cole walked beside me. The same careful walk he'd come in with.
The glass doors were ahead.
I had walked into this terminal four hours ago, and I had not let myself look at anyone, because looking at anyone meant being seen, and being seen meant being talked out of it. I had kept my eyes on the floor, the ticket, and the bag. I had been a woman who had managed to leave.
I was a woman now who was walking out the front of a Greyhound terminal on a Tuesday morning with a bag on her shoulder and a man in a sling beside her.
The doors slid open.
The Savannah morning was bright and gray-warm. It smelled like the harbor. Like exhaust. Like the coffee cart on the corner. Like a city that had been here all along.
Quinn was at the curb.
She was leaning against the hood of her car with her arms crossed. She'd been there long enough that her face had set. She watched us come out of the terminal. She didn't move.
"You drove him down?"
"He wasn't driving anywhere," Quinn said.
"Thank you."
She nodded. Once.
She crossed the sidewalk to us. She didn't say anything else to me. She put her hand on my arm. Just for a beat. Then she turned to Cole.
"Get in the car, Cole."
"Quinn—"
"Get in the car."
He got in the car.
Quinn took the bag off my shoulder before I'd registered her reaching for it. She put it in the back seat and then held the front passenger door open for me.
"You sit up here. I'll drive us home."
I looked at her.
Her face was the face she'd worn on the gravel. Steady, cousin-shaped, not asking anything of me.
"Okay."
I got in.
She closed the door behind me.
She came around to the driver's side. She got in. She started the engine.
She drove us home.