Page 48 of These Tears

My lungs lock as it crawls past, engine rumbling low, windows black beneath rain and shadow.

I don’t see their faces. I don’t need to. Don’t want to.

The message sits in the growing gap between us.

And finally, the car accelerates. Its rear lights bleed red through the downpour before it takes the next bend and disappears.

I’m gripping the steering wheel so hard the ache in my joints startles me to the now.

I sit there with nature screaming at me from beyond the windscreen, the wipers swatting away the warnings I’ve been ignoring until now.

The road ahead is empty as if nothing has happened at all.

As if I imagined it.

As if my car isn’t skewed towards the edge of the road, mud coating the side, and my pulse scattered all over the wet lane.

My phone lies face down in the footwell where it had fallen when I hit the brakes.

For a wild moment, I think about reaching for it, calling Conall back and telling him they weren’t gone – that they’d followed me after all.

But that’s just it.

Am I forever going to be expecting other people to solve my problems?

Not just that – if I call Conall, this stays connected to Elias. Calling means surrendering it to questions, police, someone else.

But even saying it aloud in the confines of my car makes it too real. Painful, almost.

My breath breaks, but it doesn’t form a scream yet. It’s just a small sound that crawls out of me and turns into another, and another. Until I’m bent over the steering wheel with my forehead pressed to my knuckles, crying so hard my ribs ache.

And not just from those brutes scaring me.

But because Elias told me to stay away, and I heard rejection instead of warning.

Because Conall told me to leave, and I treated it like another person deciding how my life is going to go.

Because Ron turned his back on me.

Because I have a big house with nothing in it.

Because I am… empty.

And because when a door won’t open for me, I start believing the problem must be in me.

I had clung to Elias, made him into something I could save when I couldn’t do the same for myself. Something I could keep inside photographs. A man with winter in his eyes and grief on his lips. A man who read my quotations and wrote back in beautiful cursive as if beauty and danger could not only coexist in the same body but make each other more irresistible.

But his past was not beautiful.

It was not a wound waiting for my hands to stitch it up.

It was a dark room full of those who wanted to keep it dark. Men who knew my car. My face.

I cry until my throat burns and the steering wheel is wet beneath me. Until I fill that emptiness in my chest with pain I’ve been holding back, and cold certainty takes its place – certainty that this thing between Elias Crane and me has already ended, and I am the only one standing in the ruins, refusing to see the smoke.

Eventually, my sobs thin into jagged breaths.

I glance at the envelope on the passenger seat.