Page 143 of Never Alone
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 asleepagainst 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."
