Page 96 of Exodus

“You left before I had a chance to tell you about the future I dreamt up for you. Maybe it had a little of my dreams mixed in with it too. Maybe it was a daydream for us, but it was a good one. It wasn’t a plan so much as it was a place. A place filled with music and laughter, books, and long kisses, and endless rainy days. It was a place where you didn’t have to hide your smile anymore.”

If only.

Cupping my mouth, I stare down at the stone as a soft sob escapes me.

“I pray now, Dom. Often and for you. Sometimes I pray selfishly, but just for the chance to see your face in my dreams. You never let me see you, not fully. A hint of your profile here and there, but it’s not enough”—I choke on the words—“but I keep trying. I keep chasing after you.” I’m convinced I haven’t seen him fully because I haven’t voiced the one thing I want so desperately to ask him for. And the hardest part is, I know the answer is up to me.

“Please, if you can, let me see you,” I choke up, a gut-wrenching cry bursting from me as I wipe the tears from my cheeks and kneel to press them into the freezing ground where he lies beneath the stone, permanently, a truth I’d give anything to change.

I’d imagined none of it. That, I already knew, it’s the mere sight of his stone that makes it more real. I’d fought my way back to some semblance of sanity without an ounce of proof of what happened that night, and finally I have it, but it doesn’t comfort me. Instead, it’s an excruciating ache. One that will never leave me. I never got a chance to mourn him properly. Not the way I deserved to, not as the woman he loved and who loved him in return because everything became distorted before he was killed. But I am thankful for the minutes we spent together, even if they were precious and few.

My eyes drift to the grave next to Dominic’s, and I address the woman who rests by his side, having joined him just months later.

I swallow as I think of the fear in her eyes that night we met and wonder if, when she died, she was afraid.

“Tell me, Delphine, did you find the back door? Did your nephew open it for you?” The wind kicks up, and I shiver in my jacket, thinking for the first time in a while about my own mortality. I’d come face-to-face with it just before I left Triple Falls. I don’t fear much of anything anymore, and I’m determined to see my thousand dreams through.

My eyes drift over the cluster of headstones.

The whole of Tobias’s family rests here, and if I have any fear at all, it’s the thought of his mortality. That one day, he’ll take his place beside his family.

I avert my gaze back to Dominic’s grave, and another rush of grief strikes me, and I tamp it down, refusing to let it consume me so soon. I can’t go into this grieving, or I won’t survive it.

Not yet.

“Repose en paix, mon amour, je reviendrai.” Rest, my love, I’ll be back again.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Following the route home, I adjust my rearview as flashes of the day I fled come back in torturous waves.

The gunfire, the smell of my fallen love’s blood, and the feel of it on my hands on the drive home.

The adrenaline disappeared after the first hour or so, leaving my limbs aching before giving way to utter devastation. They were the most agonizing hours of my life.

“You leave. And you never come back.”

I left a war zone not knowing if the men I loved were alive, if they were hurt, if they blamed me, or if they’d forever hate me if they survived. But those damning orders made me feel as if I were the poison, the cause of all that had gone wrong.

The details of that drive are still murky from one hour to the next. Once I got to Atlanta city limits, I stopped at a bustling gas station and turned down my visor to see Dominic’s blood smeared on the corner of my mouth. I found an old—inch full—water bottle left in my car, using my fingers to clean what I could from my face. I peered back at my reflection and saw bloodshot eyes and dark circles, my skin pale and clammy. When the bottle was empty, I raced inside the station, my hands tucked beneath my armpits as I kept my head down. I locked myself in the bathroom. Inside, I relieved my bladder before facing myself at the dirty sink, fully expecting to see what I felt. The only thing out of order was the stain on my hands, the blood of a man who pledged his love for me only minutes before he took his last breath. I turned my hands over and over, wanting to keep the stains, to keep the only part of him I had left, as sick and irrational as the thought was.

Unrelenting tears dripped from my chin as I scrubbed the caked blood from beneath my fingernails, watching the tinged pink water go down the drain.

When a gentle knock sounded a foot away, I quieted my cries and splashed cold water on my face. When I opened the door, I was greeted by a woman in a collared shirt and tennis skirt holding a little girl in a matching outfit. They’d smiled at me in greeting, and the shock of seeing them so neatly polished, so unassuming, their eyes alight with so much life, easy smiles on their faces let me know just how far down the rabbit hole I’d traveled. Instinctively I returned that smile, knowing it was a new mask. I remembered hating the feel of it, it didn’t fit, and from that day forward, I was stuck with it. That smile was the first lie I told after leaving Triple Falls.

Cecelia Horner died that night, the totality of her naïve innocence eradicated along with all her silly and foolish dreams in a reality where she was made painfully aware that evil exists, lurking in the shadows just waiting to prey on innocents just like that little girl in the Polo. The girl I used to be.

A reality where the wrong side often wins, where bullets are real, and the people you love can take their last breaths, and you could be the one to bear witness while their light goes out right in front of you.

And I asked for it, to be a part of it all because I was too greedy loving men who continually warned me away, and I refused.

Dominic died.

For all the questions I asked, for all the begging I did, I got few answers. I got secrets and a story, both I would never be able to share. The punishment behind the knowledge was unbearable. I knew I’d have to use the mask every single day for the rest of my life because I could never let anyone see what’s behind it.

I had to forget that girl existed.

For endless hours I sat in my car on top of a parking garage overlooking the Atlanta skyline, a world away from the small town that changed everything I thought I knew about life and love. My phone clutched in my hand, all I could do was pray to a God I cursed just hours earlier for taking my dark angel. Prayed that Tyler would keep his word, prayed that the people who had become a part of me made it through the day, hearts beating, still breathing.

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