Page 140 of Never Alone
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.
