Page 9 of Coming Home

Ralph Brandt.

The man who had looked right through me in a lobby. The man who probably wouldn't even recognize my voice.

It was desperate and I knew it. Calling someone from a past life, late at night, in a downpour, with a dying phone, because my ex-boyfriend was watching me drown through his living room window. If there was a level below rock bottom, I was standing in it. Literally. In a puddle. In shoes that were ruined.

But my thumb hit the green button before my pride could overrule my survival instinct.

It rang once. Twice. I was already moving my finger toward the red button, already preparing the version of this story where I hung up and walked to the nearest gas station and asked a stranger if I could borrow a charger and it was fine, it was all fine, I was fine.

The ringing stopped.

"Emma." He said my name like he'd been waiting for the call. My knees almost gave out. "Are you okay? Where the hell are you?"

CHAPTER 4

Emma

Thunder split the sky the exact second his voice cut through the speaker, and my lungs seized.

I wasn't prepared for any of it. Not the weather turning violent, not the call connecting, and not the way my own name sounded coming out of his mouth after three years of silence.

"Emma? Talk to me. What's happening?"

I opened my mouth to answer, but the syllables got tangled behind my ribs. How could I tell him I was shivering on my ex-boyfriend's porch in a torrential downpour at ten o'clock at night?

"I'm fine." My voice was thin, competing with the wind. "I'm okay. I shouldn't have called you, Ralph. I'm so sorry, I⁠—"

A blinding sheet of lightning whited out the entire street.

A shriek ripped from my throat before I could clamp my jaw shut. Pure childhood terror.

I'd been pathologically terrified of storms since I was six years old, ever since a transformer blew outside my childhood bedroom and left me weeping in a pitch-black hallway closet with Theo's jacket pulled over my ears, convinced the sky was falling and nobody was coming.

"Give me the address, Emma."

I gave it to him. My jaw was chattering so violently the numbers came out in fractured pieces, forcing me to repeat the street name twice through the static.

"Stay exactly where you are. Don't move. I'm coming."

The line went dead before I could even attempt to argue. Not that I had the battery or any ounce of pride left to fight with.

I told myself ten minutes. Maybe less.

My phone died at minute three. I shoved the dead phone into my pocket and wrapped my arms tightly around my shins.

Another flash of lightning fractured the sky. I squeezed my eyes shut, burying my face into the denim of my jeans, and began counting the seconds between the light and the roar, the way Theo had taught me when my world was small. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Getting closer.

This was the exact posture I'd been in when James found me.

I didn't go looking for the memory, but once it settled in, I couldn't scrub it out. I'd been folded into myself just like this, trying to occupy as little space as humanly possible, at a dim hotel bar in Santa Monica three weeks after I walked away from the pool for the last time.

I was twenty-five. Nine years after standing on a podium with a gold medal around my neck, and my body had begun sabotaging me in ways no specialist could diagnose. The speed vanished first. I'd dive into the lane, my brain screaming commands, arms pulling, legs kicking, but the digital clock would return a number that felt like a cruel joke.

Slower. Every time, slower. I remember the exact moment I knew. A regional qualifier in San Diego, nothing major, a race I should have won half-asleep. I touched the wall and looked up at the board and my time was three full seconds off my personal best. Three seconds. In swimming, that's a different sport. That's a different person.

So I punished myself. I doubled my sessions. I starved my body. I cut my sleep down to fragments, pushing until my joints throbbed and my muscles seized, forcing my coach to physically drag me from the water because I refused to stop on my own. I told myself I was being disciplined. Looking back, I was just a girl beating herself bloody against a door that was already locked.

Something was breaking me from the inside, but the blood panels always came back pristine. I didn't know then that it was lupus, quietly destroying my tissue while I internalized the failure, fully convinced I was just becoming lazy. Cowardly. Weak. Every morning I'd stand on the block before a practice set, staring at the water, and feel nothing where the hunger used to be. The pool became a courtroom where I went to be convicted. Failure bred hatred, and hatred bred worse times. A violent, suffocating loop feeding itself. It got so bad I couldn't look at a qualifying heat without wanting to vomit.