Page 148 of Nash
The headband on my wrist catches the light through the kitchen window, the red faded to pink from years of wear.
The ride to the diner takes eight minutes.
Phoenix is in the back booth with an untouched coffee in front of him, dressed the way he's always dressed, dark and clean, the authority in his posture visible before he opens his mouth. He watches me cross the room and sit across from him.
"She's alive," he says.
The air between us changes. My hand goes to my wrist.
"Sera," I say. This is the first time I've spoken her name out loud in years, attached to every twenty-two minutes I've replayed since I was too late to the parking lot where she was supposed to be waiting.
"I found her three years ago," Phoenix says. "She was in a recovery house outside of Atlanta. One of my network contacts identified her through the intake records. She'd been in the pipeline for two years before she surfaced at a shelter in Mobile. From there, she moved through three programs before reaching ours."
My jaw clenches. Three years Phoenix has known.
"She wasn't ready," he says, reading my face. "She wasn't ready for contact, for Naya, for anyone from before. The recovery took priority. Her therapists agreed. I agreed. That's why I didn't tell you."
"Three years."
"Three years of therapy, identity reconstruction, physical recovery." Phoenix lifts his coffee, doesn't drink it, then sets it back down. "She's ready now."
"Where is she?"
"Here in Willowridge, at the hotel on Birch Street." He holds my gaze. "She wants to see you."
The coffee machine hisses behind the counter. A waitress drops a tray of silverware in the kitchen. The bell over the door rings as someone walks in. The sounds reach me from a distance, but the table and Phoenix's steady face are the only things close enough to matter.
"When?" I ask.
"Now. If you're ready."
I leave money on the table for a coffee I didn't order and walk out into morning light sharp enough to make me squint. Phoenix's black SUV sits beside my bike in the lot. I stare at the bike for ten seconds, then follow Phoenix to the SUV.
He drives. I sit in the passenger seat with my hands on my thighs, trying to remember how to breathe in a pattern that doesn't match the counting I've been doing for years. Twenty-two minutes. The time between the phone call, the empty parking lot, and the shoe on the ground. One shoe, her shoe, the left one, the laces still tied because she'd been pulled out of it.
The hotel is a small two-story on the east side of town, the kind of place that caters to people passing through. Phoenix leads me through the lobby, up the stairs, to a door at the end of the hall. Room 214.
He knocks twice. A voice inside says something I can't hear, and Phoenix opens the door.
She's standing by the window.
Shorter than I remember, thinner, her hair darker now, the bright color she used to wear replaced by something closer to her natural brown. She's wearing a sweater that's too big for her withthe sleeves pulled over her hands. The same gesture she used to do in high school: sleeves over fists, fists pressed to her stomach when she was nervous.
She turns and her eyes find mine.
"Nash."
Her voice is the same, lower and quieter, carrying something it didn't carry before, but the same.
"Sera."
Neither of us moves. Twelve feet of hotel room floor between us and the full weight of every year she's been gone pressing against the walls.
"You look the same," she says. Her eyes drop to my wrist, to the headband. "You still have it."
"Yeah."
"Naya told me. She told me you wear it every day, that you've never taken it off." Her voice thickens. "Nash. That was my scrunchie from ninth grade. I wore it because it matched my backpack."
