Page 174 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“She's not gone because she stopped loving you.” His voice is quiet and final, like the closing of a door. “She's gone because she loves herself enough now to know she deserves more than half of you.” He holds my gaze without blinking. “The question is whether you're capable of giving her the rest.”

He doesn't wait for an answer.

He picks up his bag, nods once at Cas, and walks toward the exit. At the door he pauses without turning around.

“She's safe.” It comes out rough, like the words cost him something. “That's all I'll give you. She's safe, and she's okay, and she's going to be alright.” A beat. “The rest is yours to figure out.”

The door swings shut behind him.

Cas and I stand in the empty gym, the envelope between us, and say nothing for a long time.

Then Cas looks down at his name written in her handwriting, and something in his expression breaks quietly and privately, the way grief does when it finally finds a place to land.

“She always thought about everyone else.” He says it mostly to himself.

“Yeah.” My voice comes out rough. “She did.”

I look at my hands wrapped and bloodied, aching from the fight and think about a beach, and tail lights, and a woman who built a peace offering out of her own departure.

She loves you.

She left anyway.

The question is whether you're capable of giving her the rest.

I close my hands into fists at my sides.

And for the first time since I watched her walk away, I know exactly what I have to do.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

XADEN

It takes me three weeks.

Three weeks of dead ends, cold trails and burning through every resource and contact I have across four states. Three weeks of Cas watching me from doorways with that look on his face that I refuse to acknowledge. Three weeks of walking into her empty library and standing there for reasons I won't examine, of leaving the divide in place at school because taking it down feels like something I'm not ready to do without her permission.

Three weeks of sleeping two hours a night and filling the rest with work, with strategy, with the methodical dismantling of anyone stupid enough to test the borders of my territory while I'm distracted.

I don't tell anyone I'm looking.

I don't have to.

Cas knows. He leaves a laptop open on the kitchen counter one morning with a single browser tab pulled up on a university enrollment page, a hockey program, a campus in Colorado and walks out of the room without a word. It’s the same place Alex got us both into. I stare at it for a long time. Then I close the laptop and go make coffee like I didn't just have every molecule of air vacated from my lungs.

That night I booked a flight.

I don't pack much. I don't tell Cas where I'm going, he already knows. I don't make a plan, don't rehearse what I'll say, and don't allow myself to construct some version of this moment that ends cleanly. I've never been the kind of man who deals in clean endings.

I deal in truth.

And the truth is ugly and complicated and I'm going to put it in front of her and let her decide what to do with it, because she deserves that much. She deserves more than that, actually she deserves things I don't know how to give, things I'm going to have to learn from scratch because no one ever taught me how.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First I have to find my fairy.

Colorado in November is brutal, gray sky pressing down on everything like a lid, cold with teeth in it. I pull my hood up and move through the campus like I belong there, which I don't, but belonging somewhere has never been a prerequisite for occupying it.