Page 149 of Nash
A rough exhale pushes through my teeth. Half laugh, half something else.
"You've been wearing my ninth-grade scrunchie on your wrist for years." Tears run down her face, and she wipes them with her sleeve-covered fist. "I need you to take it off."
"Sera."
"Take it off. Please. You carried it long enough. I'm here and I'm alive. I'm standing in this room. You don't need to carry it anymore."
My thumb presses against it one last time.
I slide it off.
The skin underneath is pale, a groove pressed into the skin. My wrist bare for the first time since the night I found one shoe in a parking lot.
Sera crosses the room and takes it from my hand, holding it against her chest.
"Thank you," she says. "For looking for me and not stopping. For carrying this when there was nothing else you could do." She looks up at me. "But you didn't fail me, Nash. You were twenty-two minutes late. The men who took me had been planning it for weeks. If you'd been on time, they would have taken you too. Or killed you. Then nobody would have looked."
The air touches skin that hasn't felt air in years.
"Go be happy," she says. "Phoenix connected me and Naya by phone a couple of days ago. She hasn't seen me yet, but she told me about Ruby." The tears keep running but she's smiling. "She says Ruby is loud, funny, and she looks at you the way I used to look at the last slice of pizza. That was a compliment. I love pizza."
Phoenix appears in the doorway. "Naya's here."
Sera's hands shake. Her whole body tightens, her shoulders drawing up toward her ears, and she presses the scrunchie against her chest with both fists.
I step to the side of the room, against the wall.
Footsteps in the hallway. Slow at first, then faster, the rhythm of a woman who was told to walk and started running. The door is open. Naya fills the frame.
She's breathing hard. Her hand grips the doorframe and her knuckles go white. She's dressed in gym clothes, her hair pulled back, her face bare. Strong, sharp, the older sister who turned grief into fists and fought her way through every year Sera was gone. But her chin is trembling. Her jaw is clenched against the tremble, the muscles working, and her eyes are locked on Sera with the focus of a woman who is afraid to blink because blinking might make this disappear.
"Sera."
"Hi." Sera's voice is barely audible, her fists pressed to her stomach. "I'm sorry it took so long."
Naya doesn't speak. She crosses the room in three strides and wraps her arms around her sister. Sera folds into her, her face disappearing into Naya's shoulder, and the sound that comes out of Naya is something I've never heard from her. It's low. Broken. Torn from somewhere beneath the muscle and the fury and the years of holding herself together in a world where her sister was gone.
I press my back against the wall. My throat tightens. My hands hang at my sides, and I realize they're shaking.
They hold each other. Naya's arms wrapped around Sera so tight her knuckles go white against Sera's sweater. Sera gripping Naya's shirt with both fists, the scrunchie crushed between her fingers and the fabric. Both of them are crying. The sound of quiet sobs fills the room. The kind that come from behind clenched teeth, the kind people make when the grief is so old it calcified and the crying is the calcification cracking open.
I watch. My eyes sting. For years I wore the elastic on my wrist. And I replayed the twenty-two minutes. For years I saw Naya at the fights and read the accusation she never spoke out loud every time she looked at me.
And now Naya is holding that girl. Alive. Breathing. Thin, different, and wearing a sweater too big for her body, but here. Standing in a hotel room in Willowridge. Breathing against her sister's shoulder.
My vision blurs. I blink it clear. Blink again.
Phoenix stands in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame. He watches without moving. The man who found Sera three years ago, kept her safe, and brought her here. He doesn't need credit. Doesn't need acknowledgment. Phoenix stands in the doorway and lets the sisters have the room.
Naya pulls back. She holds Sera's face in both hands, tilting it, turning it, her thumbs wiping tears from Sera's cheeks. Looks at Sera's eyes, her mouth, the line of her jaw. Naya pushes the hair back from Sera's forehead, then touches the scar above Sera's left eyebrow that wasn't there before.
"You're thin," Naya says. Her voice is wrecked.
"I'm getting better."
Naya's thumbs move across Sera's cheekbones again. Her chin trembles. She pulls Sera back in, pressing her sister's head against her shoulder, her hand cradling the back of Sera's skull.
"You're here," Naya whispers.
