Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“Savannah,” I say, stopping her with her name alone.
She waits.
“Thank you,” I say, and I don’t mean for the patient or the sled or the ledge. “For what you said about your dad. I’m going to try to believe you.”
“You better,” she says, voice fierce. “Or I’ll make you.”
“That a threat, Brooks?”
“A promise, Ramirez.” She tips her head. “And for the record—if I’d had those letters while I was learning how to bandage strangers in places where the roads had no names, I think I would’ve survived the nights better.”
I close my eyes half a second because if I don’t I’m going to ask her to marry me in a box full of trauma shears and saline.
“Tonight,” I say again, because if I say anything else I might not make it to tonight.
She opens the doors and jumps down into the cold like she just swan-dived off a cliff she knows I’ll catch her beneath. For a second I see the girl I loved and the woman she is overlay perfectly, not a future, not a memory, just the exact present I have no business wanting this much.
I sit on the bench a long minute after she’s gone, elbows on my knees, hands locked, head down. Sirens wail somewhere else in town, far enough to sound like a song we already know the lyrics to.
I breathe until the tremor in my hands stops. I close the doors and climb down, and when Captain calls something about paperwork, I answer without looking away from the slope beyond the bay, from the line of pines marching down toward the river, from the slice of sky over the overlook.
Seventeen hundred. Letters and light.
I’ve run into a hundred fires without thinking. This one I’ll walk into, slow and sure, every step chosen.
I wanted absolution. That was arrogance.
What I have is a chance.
I’ll take it.
Chapter Ten
Savannah
The firepit at the overlook sits in a shallow bowl of snow, stones blackened from a hundred nights of bad jokes and stories that hurt to tell anywhere else. Pine boughs hunch under fresh powder, and the Phantom River whispers through the dark like it’s keeping score. Someone strung cheap café lights branch to branch; they sway in the light wind, tossing puddles of gold across the drifts.
He’s already here.
Axel stands with his back to the flames, jacket unzipped, the heat painting his throat and jaw in amber. In his hands, a shoebox—nothing special, just edges gone soft and tape that’s been peeled and stuck again too many times. He doesn’t look at me when I crunch down the shoveled path. He doesn’t look at anything, really. Just holds the weight like he’s always held it.
“Hey,” I say.
His eyes find mine. One syllable moves between us and sets everything humming.
“Hey,” he answers.
“What is that?” I ask, though I know.
“My insides,” he says, and it’s not a joke.
He crouches and sets the box on the log bench beside the firepit. The flames lick and settle. My breath fogs out and is gone; his hangs heavier and takes longer to disintegrate. He pulls off his gloves—callused knuckles, a shallow scar along his index finger I remember putting antibiotic on when we were thirteen—and he rubs his palms once on his thighs like he’s trying to wake them up.
“Sit,” he says.
The bench creaks. Heat wraps my shins; the rest of me stays winter-bright and alert. He slides the box closer to me and steps back as if it might bite.
“Axel.”
He lifts a shoulder without lifting his gaze. “They’re yours.”
The tape gives with that small, obscene sound that makes me think of unpacking at new addresses, of kitchens that don’t yet know your footsteps. The cardboard flaps open. Inside, the letters are arranged in messy arrangement of years—different envelopes, different pens, some thin, some fat, some stamped and never sent, some never even addressed because he knew he wouldn’t mail them and did it anyway.
I don’t touch at first. Just look. My throat tightens with the pressure of a decade.
“Savannah,” he says, and I hear the fear he’s trying to swallow. “If you want me to—”
“No.” My hand goes in. Paper whispers against paper. I pull the top envelope free. My name is printed in the neat block letters he learned to hide his lefty slant. Savannah Brooks.
The seal is unglued, old adhesive gone to dust. I slide the page out and unfold it.
October 12
I didn’t sleep. The framing crew hammered all morning and I kept thinking it sounded like a heartbeat outside the house. I went to the river and said your name out loud to see if it still felt like a prayer. It did. I’m sorry. I miss you. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
I don’t notice I’m crying until the paper blurs. The wind nudges a spark; it leaps, flares, falls.