Chapter 59
Amy
We spend the last night on campus in my room.
Not for any practical reason, since we have his house now, and most of my things are already there. But I asked if we could spend one last night in the dorm room, and Saint looked at me with the expression that said he understood something I had not said out loud, and he said yes.
The room is mostly empty. The desk is clear. What remains is the bed and the lamp and the gap in the curtain that lets in the streetlight, and the ceiling I memorized during the months when lying awake and watching it was the primary occupation of my nights.
We lie in the bed, and I look at the ceiling, and Saint is beside me, awake, the way he is always awake.
“I arrived here terrified,” I say. “I don’t think I knew how terrified until I wasn’t anymore.”
He is quiet. Listening.
“I thought I was running toward something safe,” I say. “A scholarship. A campus. Distance from my past. I thought the distance was the point, that if I could get far enough from the things that had happened, they would stop being part of me.”
I stare at the ceiling.
“That is not how it works. I already know that.”
“Yes,” he says.
“You carry it. But you also carry what you build. And what I built here—” I stop.
He is looking back with the full expression. The one that costs him something. The one I have been the cause of enough times that I have stopped being surprised by it and have started simply being grateful for it, which is its own kind of change.
“What I built here is worth more than what I was running from,” I say.
He reaches over and pushes the hair back from my face. His hand cups my jaw. “Yes,” he says.
I turn my face into his palm, craving more than just sleep.
“You should sleep,” he says. “I’ll be here.”
I close my eyes. The streetlight comes through the gap in the curtain. The building settles into its old stone quiet. Somewhere below, a door opens and closes as a student comes in late.
All of it is ordinary. All of it is exactly as it was the night I arrived, but I’m not the same person I was then.
I’m someone who knows what it feels like to be chosen. Who knows the difference between being claimed and being loved. Who has sat in the dark with a man who counted her breaths. I chose back.
I sleep without dreaming of anything that used to hurt me.