Page 87 of Devotion
I left both side by side. The letter and the papers. Everything I felt and everything he’d planned, sitting next to each other on the same desk.
I went back to the bedroom. He wasn’t home yet. The bed was made the way I’d left it that morning, and the room still smelled like his cologne and the ghost of the kiss he’d left on my lips seven hours ago when he said he’d be home early because he had something to talk about.
I looked at the bed for a long time. The pillows. The sheets. The indent on his side where his body had been. The empty space on my side where his arm had reached for me in the dark.
I picked up the framed photo of my parents from the nightstand. I picked up the handwritten quote. I couldn’t leave that behind. Even now. Even with the photos and the signed papers and my heart in ruins. I couldn’t leave the quote.
I was running. I knew I was running. The same way I ran from Aunt Eliza. From every person who had the power to hurt me. I was doing the thing I’d always done, the thing Anna would be furious about, the thing Vicky would call me out on. I was choosing flight over fight because the fight would require looking into Christopher’s blue eyes and asking whether I mattered and I was terrified of the answer.
I walked out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and through the front door.
Miami glared back at me—bright, hot and completely indifferent to the fact that my life was ending. I got into a cab and told the driver the airport and sat in the back seat watching the city slide past through wet eyes. I thought about the first time I drove through these streets, in Christopher’s car, with water on his collar and Coltrane on the stereo and his voice in the dark saying “You’re too kind and too beautiful to be a kidnapper.”
I booked a flight to Charlotte. Anna was there for her parents’ anniversary. Anna was the only person I trusted to hold me while I fell apart.
She opened the door that evening looking like a woman who had just put her feet up for the first time all day and was not pleased about being interrupted. Her hair was wrapped. She was wearing a floor-length robe over pajamas.
She saw my face and the bag.
She didn’t ask a single question. Instead, she pulled me inside, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and made tea.
I broke down on the first sip.
Anna listened. She didn’t interrupt. She held my hand and let me talk until the words ran out and the crying took over, and then she held me through that too.
When it was done, when I was hollowed out and hiccuping and wrapped in her blanket like a burrito of grief, she said: “Youdeserve someone who chooses you in every room, Miley. Not just the ones with cameras.”
I pressed my face into the blanket and nodded because I couldn’t speak.
The anniversary celebration was the next day. Anna’s family was warm and loud and chaotic, like only families who genuinely love each other can be.
They absorbed me into their midst the way they always had, without questions, without conditions.
Anna’s mother, Mrs. Wilson, pulled me into a hug the moment I walked through the kitchen. She held me at arm’s length, studied my face, and frowned.
“You’re too thin. When did you last eat a proper meal?”
“I had breakfast?—”
“That wasn’t a question. Sit.” She pointed at a chair.
Anna’s father, Mr. Wilson appeared before I could sit, holding a plate loaded with barbecue, corn, and potato salad. He put it in my hands.
“Mr. Wilson, I haven’t even said whether I’m hungry.”
“Wasn’t asking.” He patted my shoulder and disappeared back toward the grill.
Anna’s brother Caleb came through the back door carrying a cooler. He set it down, saw me, and his whole face changed, warmer and brighter.
“Miley! I didn’t know you were coming.” He crossed the kitchen and handed me a glass of lemonade. “How long are you staying? We should catch up. I learned this card game at school, you’d love it?—”
Anna appeared behind him. “Down, boy,” she said under her breath.
Caleb turned. “I’m being friendly.”
“You’re being too obvious. Take a chill pill.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
