Page 70 of Devoured

She had cried exactly once, and she'd done it in the shower at Elena's at five that morning, with the water running so it wouldn't carry, sitting on the floor of the tub with her knees up and her hand pressed over her own mouth the way his had been two nights before, until there was nothing left in her to come up. After that she'd gotten dressed. She'd done her face. She'd made herself coffee she couldn't drink. And she'd put the whole of it away somewhere behind her sternum where it sat like a stone she'd have to carry now, maybe for a long time, and she'd decided she would not set it down again where anybody could see.

She managed about four hours.

Elena drove her to the airport.

She didn't try to talk her out of it, which was the kindest thing anyone did for Lara that whole terrible day. She just put Lara's bags in the back of her sensible doctor's sedan and drove the two hours to Midland with the radio low and her hand, every so often, reaching over to find Lara's where it lay dead in her lap. Lara watched the country she'd come to know go by the window. The long gold sweep of it, the sky she could see all the way to the edge of, a hawk riding a thermal over somebody's section, and she catalogued it all the way she'd catalogue a room she was never going to stand in again. She didn’t say much. There wasn't a lot that would have come out steady, and steady was the only way she had left to do this.

It was only at the gate that Elena said anything that mattered.

"He's an ass," Elena said.

"He's not." Lara watched a man three seats down sleep with his mouth open, because it was easier than looking at her friend. "That's the worst part. He told me the truth from the first morning. Every word of it. He never once pretended to be something he wasn't." Her voice held, barely, on a wire pulled very thin. "I'm the one who couldn't live with the truth. That's not him being an ass. That's just… two people who wanted different things and were honest about it."

"I liked you better when you were willing to be unfair about him."

"Give me a week." Her mouth did something that wasn't a smile. "I'll hate him properly by Thursday." It came out wrong, too thin, and they both heard the lie in it — that she wouldn’t be hating him Thursday or any Thursday after, that she was going to love him a long miserable while yet, and that was the whole problem and always had been.

Elena pulled her into a hug, hard, the careful contained doctor holding on like she meant it. "Come back," she said into Lara's hair. "Not for him. For… I don't know. For me. I just got a friend in this town and I'm not ready to lose her to a man who can't get out of his own way."

"Elena, don't, I can't — " Lara's voice cracked clean in half on it, and she stopped, and pressed her lips hard together, and breathed through her nose until it passed, because she was not going to do this in an airport, she was not, she'd promised herself the tub at five a.m. was the last of it.

"I know." Elena let go. Stepped back. Wiped under one eye with the heel of her hand, brisk, embarrassed by it. "I know. Go on. Before I make it worse."

Lara went. She made it down the jet bridge and into her seat and got her belt on and her face arranged before the woman beside her so much as glanced over, and that, she would think later, was the single hardest thing she had ever done with her body, walking onto that plane like a person instead of like what she was, which was somebody leaving her whole life on the ground behind her on purpose.

Boston in November was exactly as she'd left it, gray and fast and loud, the harbor wind cutting down the streets, everybody walking like they were late for something, nobody saying good morning to anybody. Months ago she'd fled to the silence of West Texas to get away from precisely this. Now she stood on the curb outside Logan with her two suitcases and a box of books and felt the city close over her head like water.

It didn't fit anymore.

She'd changed. Soluno had changed her, the way a place gets into you when you're not watching, the saying hello to everyone, the knowing whose truck that was, the sky you could see all the way to the edge of. She moved through Boston now like a woman wearing a coat she'd outgrown, the seams pulling everywhere, nothing sitting right. People bumped her on the sidewalk and didn't apologize. A man in a suit said something into his phone about quarterly numbers, and out of nowhere she thought of the way Dean said the day starts at five and meant it as a kindness even when it sounded like a warning, and she had to stop walking for a second and stand against the cold wall of a parking structure with her eyes shut until she could go on.

She got a cab. She did not cry in it — held it the whole way across the city by main force, jaw aching, looking hard out the window at a skyline she used to call home — and the not-crying took everything she had, and when the cab finally pulled up outside her sister's building she sat there one more minute getting her face right before she could make herself go in.

Addi opened the door before Lara's key was out of her bag, which meant she'd been watching from the window, which meant she'd been worried, and Lara looked up at her sister's face, and the four hours of held composure, the stone behind her sternum, the white-knuckled airport and the cab and the parking-structure wall, all of it just went, all at once, the second somebody who loved her looked at her. She stood in the hall with the tears already running down her face, not even sobbing yet, just leaking, helpless, her whole careful arrangement coming apart on the doorstep.

"Oh… no." Addi had her inside in a single motion, suitcases abandoned in the hall, the door kicked shut, both arms around her. "No, no, come here. I've got you. Come here."

And Lara, who hadn’t let herself make a sound from the tub at five a.m. all the way across two thousand miles, finally did, against her sister's shoulder. The ugly kind, the kind that comes up from somewhere below the lungs, the kind she'd been swallowing for eighteen hours. Addi held her up. Walked her backward to the couch without ever letting go, got them both down onto it, and held on while Lara wept herself empty against her, one hand moving in slow circles on her back, saying nothing. Just here, I'm here, I've got you.

It went on a long time.

When the worst of it finally ebbed, when Lara was down to the shudders and the wet hiccuping breaths, Addi pulled back just far enough to look at her, and her own eyes were wet, and her face, Addi's bright loud open face, had gone somewhere Lara had only seen a handful of times in her life. Still. Cold. Frightening.

"Tell me what he did," Addi said, very quietly. "All of it."

So Lara told her. In pieces, in the wrong order, between breaths. The confession in the dark, the I can't, the do you love me, the second I can't, the truck packed in daylight, the kids at school so she wouldn't have to do the goodbye.

Addi listened to all of it without saying one word, which for Addi was a feat on the order of stopping her own heart, and by the time Lara finished, her sister was shaking. Not crying. Shaking. The rare full fury, the thing that lived way down under all the noise and theatrics and only ever came up for one reason in the whole world, which was somebody hurting the people she loved.

"I will kill him," Addi said, and she wasn’t being funny, not even a little. "He had you. He had you. You loved him and you loved those babies and you ran his whole life and you made his sick daddy laugh, and he held all of that in his two hands and he looked at it and he picked his fear. Over you." Her voice climbed, raw. "And he was so gentle about it, wasn't he. So honest and so sad and so sorry. Men like that, the ones who break your heart kindly and think being kind about it means it isn't their fault —"

"He's not like that." It came out of Lara before she'd decided to say it. "Addi. He's not."

"He let you cry on the floor of a bathtub —"

"He didn't know about the bathtub." Lara wiped her face with both hands, and her voice came wrecked but certain, defending him the way you defend a thing that's simply true. "He didn't do it to be cruel. He didn't do it to control me or win anything. He's not David, Addi. He's the opposite of David. David wanted me to disappear. Dean wanted me to have everything. He just couldn't be the one to give it to me, because something in him broke a long time ago and never set right, and he was honest about it from the first morning instead of letting me find out the hard way like a coward would." Her voice cracked. "He's not a coward. He's just a good man who's too scared to be happy. And I love him. And that's so much worse than if he were a bad one because there's nothing to hate. There's nobody to be angry at. There's just him, being broken and kind and honest, and me, loving him, and it not being enough. I don't even get the relief of him being a villain."

And she went under again, quieter this time, and Addi gathered her back in.