Page 62 of Roadrunner

I zoomed in as far as the image would allow before it dissolved into meaningless squares of color. I traced the shape of his jaw with my thumb, absurdly, like I could feel it through the glass. I found myself cataloguing the differences the way I once catalogued the similarities. A decade adds things to a face, and takes things away, and I wanted an inventory of both before I let myself decide anything.

There was a woman in the photograph too, three men down the row. My stomach dropped before I registered that she was standing beside someone else entirely, her hand in a stranger’s, nothing to do with Riley at all. I sat with the aftershock of that small, unearned jealousy for longer than I wanted to admit. Ten years, and I still didn’t have the right to feel it. I felt it anyway.

I sat in the dark of my bedroom and looked at his face on my phone screen for a long time.

Then I got up and went to Arthur’s room and stood in the doorway and watched him sleep.

He was on his back. One arm thrown over his head. His hair curled slightly at the temples the way it did when he’d been warm.

I stood there for a while.

Then I went back to bed.

And I booked a flight to Tucson.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Alex

Now

Tucson smelled exactly the same.

I don’t know what I expected. Ten years is long enough that you assume things will have changed enough to be unrecognizable. The airport was bigger. The highway out of the city had a new interchange that didn’t exist before.

But the smell was the same.

Dry. Clean. Something underneath it that was specific to the desert and nothing else. Like heat and rock and a particular kind of quiet all compressed into something you breathe in without thinking about it.

I breathed it in.

I’d forgotten how much I missed it.

I rented a Jeep at the airport.

Not intentionally. It was what they had in my category and I didn’t argue it. I threw my bag in the back and adjusted the mirrors and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.

A Jeep in Arizona.

Some things don’t change.

I pulled out of the rental lot and headed toward Marana.

I hadn’t booked a hotel in Marana specifically. I’d booked something in Tucson, forty minutes south, which gave me a degree of separation that felt necessary. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got there. I had no plan beyond arrive. Beyond see.

Beyond know.

The drive took forty minutes. I took the long way without meaning to, which is what happens when your hands remember roads your brain has stopped consciously tracking. I went past the exit for the university. Past the stretch of highway where the mountains appeared on the left at a particular angle that I had never forgotten.

They were the same.

Blue at the edges. Exactly as blue as I remembered.

I gripped the wheel a little tighter and kept driving.

I found the clubhouse without looking for it.

That wasn’t entirely true. I knew the address. I’d had it memorized since the night I found it on my phone in the dark of my bedroom. But I told myself I was just driving. Getting familiar with the area again.