“I don’t want you to,” I muttered and slid the course catalog aside. I had stacked it on top of a brand-new pink legal pad to carry it to the dining table, but I hadn’t even written down a heading for the list I should have been making. My gaze circled the table. I hadn’t even brought a pen with me.
“And the shoulder? Are you back in PT? I know you’ve dislocated it before, but—”
“Sanny,” I cut him off, “I’m actually okay not talking to you for two months at a time until you figure out that I don’t need you to take care of me.” I ended the call andlet the phone clatter to the table face down. I didn’t even want to know if he called back.
I drummed my fingers against the empty notepad and glanced at the open catalog next to it. I wouldn’t even know what to put on the list. I’d somehow made it halfway through and didn’t remember a single course description.
Well …
I tore the first page off the legal pad, making sure to leave a messy edge behind.
If my parents asked, that page contained the list of courses I was genuinely interested in– and it wouldn’t even be a lie. They just wouldn’t expect that list to equal zero. I folded the piece of paper into a small square and pocketed it before I wandered back to my room. I slipped off the arm sling I’d been wearing for the last five days and flung it in the box with all my braces and bandages, just to crawl into bed and indulge in my new favorite kind of masochism:
I opened Noah’s social media profile.
Seeing his face was enough to reopen the stitches of my barely healing heartbreak. I was giving myself emotional open-heart-surgery– but I hadn’t actually gone to med school, hadn’t studied under a world-class cardiothoracic surgeon, so I was just poking and prodding my poor heart, hoping it would stop beating faster at the sight of him. Because how could both be true? How could he be the reason for the pressure on my chest that stole the air from my lungs, and yet I still loved him?
The only relief I got was that he hadn’t posted in over a week. Since before Sinan’s birthday party when everything had gone to shit. I’d checked Lucas’s and Heather’s profiles,and they’d both been uploading videos, so it wasn’t like Renee had put a halt to it after my accident. Noah was the only one who had gone silent online.
I wouldn’t be able to stomach the day I’d open his profile and spot a new video thumbnail.
I wasn’t ready for him to move on.
Chapter Twenty-Six
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NOAH
I set the last of my boxes down by the door and dropped on to the splintering porch steps. I’d have to fix these at some point. Right now, I needed a minute to breathe. Not physically. I’d managed to get all my things from the staff housing complex to the ranch in two drives. But I wasn’t coping well with the change. I was returning two years sooner than I’d anticipated. The house was supposed to be completely overhauled by the time I was going to live in it again. It was supposed to be new and wholly mine.
Now, it was neither.
The front door was still notched where my father had thrown an empty liquor bottle against it. Half the kitchen was still covered in construction materials. My bedsheets still smelled like a girl I’d only dream of from now on.
It wasn’t the place I’d wanted it to be when I moved back in.
I glanced down at the ailing wood beneath my boots,held down by shiny new nails for now. Maybe clean breaks and fresh starts were all lies. There’d always be jagged edges that you just had to build your life around.
If that was the case, this wasn’t the worst place to build a life. The sun was just beginning to set, lowering toward the tree line that separated this place from the rest of Wild Fields, and it bathed the entire estate in golden light. Sprawling grass as far as the eye could see, birds swooping through the air, and the kind of quiet you couldn’t get anywhere else.
I wanted a future here, but my throat constricted every time I remembered that she wouldn’t be in it.
My attention snapped to the driveway when the crunching of tires on gravel disrupted the silence. Sanny’s car rolled to a stop next to mine. He’d offered to carry boxes with me today, but I had to do it for myself. I’d made the decision to move here, and each box had helped turn it from a far-off concept into my new life.
When he’d insisted on helping anyway, I’d sent him to the hardware store.
“You look tired,” he said by way of greeting as he jumped out of the car.
“Thanks, always good to hear,” I called back.
Sinan just grinned and shrugged before he grabbed a paper bag from the passenger seat. He set it down on top of the box I hadn’t bothered carrying inside yet.
“Have you talked to Esra since she left?” he asked and sat down next to me.
