Chapter Thirty
SOPHIA
Vixen Falls looks exactly the same.
That is the first thing I notice, stepping out of the terminal into the cool air and feeling the particular smallness of it settle around me, the familiar streets and the quality of light that is nothing like Nevada.
It is softer here, greener, and entirely without the vast indifferent beauty of the desert that I had spent months waking up inside.
The kind of place that had always felt like home.
Only it doesn’t feel like home.
Standing there with my bag at my feet and the cool air on my face, waiting for the relief to arrive, the settling, the sense of the world righting itself the way it is supposed to when you go back to somewhere familiar doesn’t come.
Instead, what comes is the ache of someone who has left something behind and is only now beginning to understand what it was.
Annie’s car pulls up.
She doesn’t say anything when I get in. She just looks at me with one long, assessing look, the particular efficiency of a Marine who can read a situation faster than most people can form an opinion about it, and then pulls out of the terminal and drives while I look out the window.
The streets of Vixen Falls move past, the café on the corner where Ryan and I used to get coffee on Sunday mornings, the park where Annie and I had walked a thousand times, and the particular familiar geography of a life I’d lived for years.
It feels like somewhere I used to live, like driving through a photograph of a place rather than the place itself.
“Talk.”
So I do.
Everything there is to know about Vegas, the house, Tate, the slow burn of it, the way it had built over months without me meaning for it to.
The Grand Canyon, the bike, the night before he left for Mexico, and the particular rightness of waking up in his arms and knowing without question that what I felt was real.
The morning after, the careful way he’d kissed me before he left, candlelit dinner and his hand over mine on the table, and the five words that had changed everything, ‘I’m leaving in two days. ’
And then Raven.
Her words sitting in that clubhouse kitchen like something I couldn’t scrub off my skin, no matter how many times I told myself she was wrong.
‘Your man is barely cold in the ground. And you’re already in his brother’s bed.’
Annie is quiet for a long moment after I finish.
We are parked outside my apartment building by then. She’d pulled over at some point without me noticing, the engine is off, and the Vixen Falls evening is doing its quiet thing outside the windows, the streetlights coming on one by one in the early dark.
“How long have you had feelings for him?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “A while. I kept telling myself it was grief… proximity. That I was attaching to the nearest safe thing because everything else had been taken away.”
“And now?”
I look at my hands in my lap for a moment. “Now, I think it was real. I think it’s been real for a long time, and I just kept finding reasons not to look at it directly.”
Annie nods slowly, the way she does when she is thinking something through before she says it. “Then what are you doing here?” she asks, simply and directly, the way Annie always says the hard things, without softening them or wrapping them in something easier to swallow.
Again, I look out the window at the familiar street. “Raven said—”
“Sophia.” Her voice is gentle but completely certain.
“Why would you listen to a woman like Raven? She’s jealous.
She wants him, she can’t have him, and she said the cruelest thing available to her because that’s what people do when they’re hurting and have nothing left to lose…
but he chose you. Not her. You.” She lets that land for a moment.
“The heart wants what it wants. And as long as you’re doing this because you genuinely care for him and not because you’re lonely, not because he was simply there, there is nothing wrong with what you feel. ”
The tears arrive before I know they are coming. “What if Raven’s right?” I say. “What if I’m just—”
“You’re not,” Annie says with no hesitation or qualification. “I’ve known you your whole life, Sophia. I know the difference between you being lonely and you being in love.”
Looking at her, I ask, “Which one is this?”
She meets my gaze steadily across the darkness of the car. “You already know the answer to that.”
Holding her gaze for a long moment, I say nothing.
Because the answer is there, it has been there for weeks, sitting underneath everything Raven said, underneath all the doubt, fear, and particular grief of not trusting yourself, but not ready to say it out loud yet.
Not tonight. Not in a parked car outside a Vixen Falls apartment with the streetlights coming on and everything still raw.
Annie doesn’t push.
She just puts her hand over mine on the center console and leaves it there.
That is enough.
***
My apartment smells like absence.
That particular closed-up stillness of a space that has been empty for months, the air flat and stale, the surfaces lightly dusty, everything exactly where I’d left it and somehow more unfamiliar for it.
Annie had been checking the mail, a neat pile of it organized by date on the kitchen counter in the particular way that only Annie organizes anything.
I stand there looking at it and feel the distance between this kitchen and the one in Vegas sitting in my chest, like something physical.
No flowers on the island.
No painting on the wall.
No Memphis clicking across the floor toward his bowl in the morning, pausing to look up with those amber eyes like he has something important to say.
Putting my bag down, I go to the bedroom.
Ryan’s photograph is on the bedside table where it has always been.
It’s the one of us at the Blood Brothers’ yard, him laughing at something off camera, his face completely unguarded and entirely himself.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at it for a long moment, feeling its familiar weight and something else underneath, something quieter and more complicated.
I’m sorry, I think. I love you. I will always love you. But something has changed, and I think if anyone would understand that, it would be you. I think you’d want this.
Lying back on the bed, I look at the ceiling of my Vixen Falls apartment, still white, and nothing at all like the one in Vegas with the pool light moving slowly across it in the dark.
Missing it.
Missing him.
The way you miss someone who became essential before you understood what was happening, so gradually and completely that by the time you noticed it, they were already woven into everything.
Reaching for my phone, I see them immediately.
Two missed calls. Both from the same night and from the same name sitting at the top of my screen.
Tate.
Lying there looking at them for a long moment, I put the phone face down on the bedside table, and I lie in the dark with the full weight of what I’d run from pressing down on my chest. He’d come home, found the note, and called.
Of course, he had. And I can’t listen. Not yet, when his voice would undo everything I am still trying to hold together.
Not yet.
The days settle into something that looks like routine from the outside.
I call Trevor and apologize for disappearing without warning, assuring him The Ember project won’t suffer, and meaning every word of it.
He is gracious in the easy way Trevor always is.
Victoria Chen is considerably less gracious, but professionally so.
That particular cool precision of a woman who expects commitments to be honored and has every right to expect it.
Apologizing, I promise to deliver and agree to continue working remotely, liaising by video call until figuring out what comes next.
My days consist of working, taking walks, and having coffee with Annie every single morning. The familiarity of Vixen Falls doesn’t fit the way it used to. The particular comfort of a place that I used to feel is no longer there.
Standing in the café on the corner one morning, the one where Ryan and I had coffee on Sunday mornings, the one with the table by the window that we’d claimed as ours, I order the usual and look out at the familiar street, feeling something inside that isn’t here at all.
The desert is sitting in me like something I’d carried home without knowing.
The wide open sky of Nevada. The dry clean heat of it.
The particular quality of a morning coming gold through floor-to-ceiling windows with the mountains in the distance, Memphis at my feet, and Tate somewhere in the house, his voice carrying from the kitchen.
My house, something says quietly inside me.
I don’t push it away.
Just let it be there.
Every morning, I pick up the phone, see his name, and put it back down.
Every night, I lie in the dark and feel those two calls sitting there, unanswered, waiting, like something with weight pressing against the screen.
I tell myself I’m not ready, I need more time, and a lot of things get less convincing with every day that passes.
On the fourth day, I pick up the phone and press play.
One voicemail.
Sophia. I don’t know why you left. I don’t know what happened.
A pause that feels like something being weighed very carefully.
But I need to talk to you, in person. There are things I need to tell you, and they can’t be done over the phone.
A longer pause.
Please come back.
A beat.
I miss you.
The voicemail ends.
Lying there with the phone held against my chest and feeling those three words sitting in me—’I miss you’—said quietly and without performance by a man who does not say things he doesn’t mean and never has.
I play it again.
And again.
By the fourth time, I’m crying properly, quietly, the particular tears of someone who has been holding something at arm’s length for days and has finally run out of arm and reasons.
‘He chose you,’ Annie had said. ‘Not her. You.’
I lie there for a long time after. Then, I reach for my laptop, open it, and book the first available flight to Vegas.
I think about calling him, sitting on the edge of the bed with my thumb over his name, the flight confirmation glowing on my screen.
I feel the pull of it, the need to hear his voice, to tell him I am coming so he’d know, so he’d be there, so I wouldn’t have to walk into that house not knowing what waited for me.
Then, I put the phone down.
Because if I call him, I’ll say everything that needs to be said in person, the things that deserve to be said, looking at his face, standing in the house that has become mine without me deciding it would, with Memphis between us, the desert outside the windows, and all of it around us.
He deserves that.
He deserves me showing up.
Not a phone call.
Me.
I pack a bag, the same one I’d brought to Vegas the first time, the one that had sat in his guest room, then in his room, and now sits in mine here with the particular strangeness of a thing that doesn’t quite belong in either place anymore.
I leave Ryan’s photograph where it is on the bedside table.
I’ll always love you, I think, standing in the doorway, looking back at it. That will never change. But I think it’s time.
I pick up my keys and walk out of my Vixen Falls apartment, calling Annie from the cab.
“Finally,” she says.
I laugh, small, genuine, and slightly wet around the edges. “Don’t say I told you so.”
“I would never,” she says in a tone that suggests she absolutely would.
“Annie.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For everything.”
A beat of quiet, warm, certain. and entirely Annie. “Go get him.”
Smiling, I head for the airport.