Page 18 of Lost in You

“I know, but--”

He puts up a hand to stop me. “Look, I’m planning to go out and see if I can find help. I can walk a lot faster by myself. You’re staying here.”

My pulse pounds with worry. “You’re leaving me here alone?”

“How else can I go get help? It’s not like I’m not coming back.”

I fight back tears, hating the way I cry so easily. “I think we should stay together.”

I sound so helpless. But then again, I kind of am the definition of helpless right now.

“We are staying together.” He gives me the annoyed look an adult would give a misbehaving toddler. “But I’m the better choice to go for help.”

I look at the quilt on the bed, forcing myself to stay silent. Though I’d like to tell him to leave right this second, the truth is that I’m scared to be left here alone. He could die out there by himself, and then what?

“You know I’m right,” he says.

“I know you want to be the big hero who ventured out in the cold to save our lives. But whatever, it’s not like I’m in any position to make you stay. We can go our separate ways.”

I move back onto the bed and gingerly lift my foot onto the mattress.

“For fuck’s sake, Trinity. It would be a dumbass move for us to both go off walking in different directions.”

Even after sleeping for twelve hours, my eyelids still feel heavy. “Look, I’m not in the mood to argue with you. If you’re still here when I wake up, I’ll talk to you then.”

“You need to eat something.”

“And you need to stop being such a dick.”

I pull the covers up over myself, pain radiating from my ankle. It’s hard to keep track of days here with how dark it is most of the time, but I know whatever day it is, everyone is considering the possibility that we’re dead.

My mom and Dalton have to be frantic. Someone new will be tasked with leading the Allura launch at work. I know I should be grateful to be alive, and I am, but that launch meant so much to me.

How long will they search for us? When will they give up and hold funerals? The thought of my mom and Dalton at my funeral when I’m not even dead makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

And I have no one to voice these worries to. My anxiety means I have a constant running dialogue of worst-case scenarios, and now I don’t have my daily medication or my supplemental one for when I’m having an anxiety spike.

It’s such irony not having my medications when I’ve never needed them more.

Is someone feeding my cat Karma? Will the new Allura team leader figure out my system for organizing the materials for each individual product? Will anyone at work even be able to log onto my computer since no one but me knows my password? Is Dalton racked with guilt over putting us on that plane? Does my mom know how sorry I am that I worked instead of coming to see her for her last birthday?

I squeeze my eyes shut as questions fly through my mind at a rapid-fire pace. The only upside to the near-death exhaustion I felt when we got here was that it silenced my nonurgent worries. Now my anxiety has all the energy it needs to run at full capacity.

And I have to hide it from Lincoln. There’s no way he’ll understand how different my mind is from his. If he knew I was worried about my work computer password, I’m sure I’d get a scowl and a question like, “Are you fucking serious?”

Dealing with my anxiety is hard enough. I don’t need his caveman bullshit about it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Lincoln

Trinity’s been curled up on the bed since I last helped her to the outhouse an hour ago. She hasn’t said a word, and I can’t get her to tell me what’s up.

“I might be gone for twenty-four hours or more,” I tell her for the third time as I slide on one of my boots while sitting at the kitchen table. “If you’re sick, you need to let me know and I’ll wait until tomorrow.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says flatly.

Her usual fire is nowhere to be found and that concerns me. Both of us have slept a lot in the last couple of days. Even though there’s plenty of water in the storage room, I figured we should save it, so I’ve been filling cups, cooking pots and bowls from the kitchen cabinets with snow that we drink when it melts, and we’re finally rehydrated.

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