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“I know,” I say.

And for a moment neither of us does anything with that. The hoodie. Of every single thing in this house to grieve out loud, he picked the hoodie, because the hoodie is a sayable thing and the rest of it isn’t, and I understand the choice all the way down, because I would have made the same one. That’s what we are, the two of us. People who grieve the small sayable thing and leave the big one lying on the floor.

I pick up the bags. They aren’t heavy. That’s the thing nobody warns you about. Everything I own that matters fits into two bags and weighs almost nothing, and I built my life that way on purpose, years ago, so that I could always do exactly this, so that leaving would never cost more than I could carry.

He doesn’t get up off the couch.

“Sloane,” he says. Once.

Just my name. Not stay. Not don’t. Said in his voice, which is the only place it ever sounded like a good thing to be called.

I don’t turn around. If I turn around I’ll see his face, and there are a finite number of things a person can survive in one afternoon, and his face is not on today’s list.

“You’ll see I was right,” I say, to the door. “Give it a month. You’ll be relieved.”

I open it. The cold comes in off the porch, clean and hard and honest, the only honest thing in the room.

He doesn’t follow.

That’s how I know. That’s the thing I hold onto going down the steps with the bags that weigh nothing — he didn’t follow, he didn’t fight, he let me go. Which is what they do. Which is what everyone does, eventually, given long enough. At least this time I went first. At least this time the door was mine to open.

The street’s empty. The cold is the clean kind, the kind that gets down into your lungs and scrapes them out. I make it to the corner before I let myself stop, one second, just the one, and I don’t look back at the house with every light on, because I already know it’s there — lit up and full of people who would have kept me — and looking at it isn’t on today’s list either.

My eyes are burning. They’ve been burning the whole time. Nothing comes. Nothing’s come since I was eleven years old — the body forgets how, and then it just won’t, no matter how close to the edge you stand, and I am standing closer right now than I have in nine years and still the tears don’t fall. I walk out into the cold dry-eyed and hollow, carrying everything I own, having done the only safe thing I have ever known how to do.

It has never once felt like this.

Chapter 30

Beau

Four days.

It’s been four days and I keep reaching for my phone to tell her things. A dumb billboard on the highway. A thing O’Grady said in the meeting. My thumb’s already moving before the rest of me catches up and remembers there’s nobody on the other end of it now. Then I put it down. Then I do it again an hour later. The body’s slow to get the memo.

Here’s the part I keep skating back over.

She stood by the door with her coat already on and she laid it out for me, piece by piece, the way she argues, calm, no gaps. And I had the word. One word. It was right there behind my teeth, the whole short length of it, and all I had to do was open my mouth and set it down in the room.

Stay.

I know how to talk. I talk for a living, basically. I can stand in a room of forty guys down two in the second and find the one thing that turns it. I can talk a rookie back from the edge of a bad shift, talk my sisters down off whatever they’re spun up about that week, talk O’Grady into a line change he came in swearing he wouldn’t make. The words show up when they belong to somebody else. They line up clean and go where I send them.

That one would not go. I stood there reaching for it and it sat in me like a word on a page that won’t hold still, every letter in it and not one of them in the order that lets me say it out loud. And while I was reaching, my hand went up instead and found the side of her face, because that I knew how to do without thinking about it.

She didn’t lean into it.

Then she was gone, and the sound was still sitting in my chest where I never got it out, and I have spent four days not understanding how a man can hold a word that small and just—not.

The locker room at Corbin smells the way it always smells. Tape and cold and the spray Wyatt uses on his pads that he swears isn’t scented and is. I’m taping my stick. I’ve taped this stick a thousand times. My hands do it without me, which is good, because the rest of me isn’t really here.

“You eat?” Wyatt’s next to me, already in his gear, voice low.

“Yeah.”

“What’d you eat.”

I try to remember. I can’t. “Stuff,” I say.