Page 13 of Born to Run Back
But standing among the evidence of her devotion, of the white roses placed with the reverence of a mourner at a grave, I understood something that should’ve absolutely terrified me:
I didn’t want to be sane anymore.
I wanted to be broken in exactly the same manner she was broken, wanted to match her madness with my own until we became something new together. Something that could only exist in the space between trauma and healing, in the dark hours when the world slept and left us alone with our ghosts and our demons.
I could have come Tuesday night. Could have finally faced her again, spoken her name if she’d been willing to give it. But every week I chose another day instead, chose the cowardly distance of seeing her work without risking the conversation that might shatter whatever this was we’d built over the last few months.
What if she was disappointed by the reality of me? What if thirty-seven minutes of shared trauma wasn’t enough foundation for whatever beautiful dreams I’d been constructing in my mind?
Coward. We both were.
We’d built this elaborate love letter out of stones and flowers and shared insomnia, too afraid to write our names at the bottom.
Tomorrow night I’d be back, probably. And next Tuesday, so would she.
The garden would grow larger, more elaborate, more beautiful and terrible and maddening with each passing week.
Until something gave. Until one of us finally broke completely.
Or found the courage to speak.
I didn’t know which was better, which was worse. I didn’t know anything anymore.
Chapter Six
Between Miles and Minutes
Wendy
Tuesday,2:30a.m.,February,four months post-accident
Four months of Tuesday nights had built this monument to madness, made of stones and flowers and little trinkets that could only ever mean something to the two of us. It should have been terrifying, and I guess it kind of was.
But tonight felt different. Electric. Like the air before lightning finally strikes.
I cut the engine and sat in the darkness, my pulse thrumming wildly against my exposed throat. Something was wrong—or maybe, finally, something was right.
The memorial looked different in my headlights. Disturbed. As if someone had knelt there recently, rearranging stones with the same obsessive care I’d been bringing to this ritual for months.
It was him. It could only be him.
Fresh tracks gleamed in the wet asphalt. Still warm, probably. Still—
Another engine. Behind me.
I froze. My heart stopped completely, then started again with such violence that it was a wonder I was still sitting upright in the driver’s seat. In my rearview mirror, headlights approached slowly, deliberately, like someone who knew exactly where they were going.
Like someone who’d been here before, countless times.
The car pulled up beside mine, a dark Subaru, maybe green or black in the darkness, and for a moment, we just sat there, two strangers who weren’t really strangers, separated only by metal and glass and four months of impossible longing.
My hands were shaking so goddamn hard I could barely open the door.
He was already out of his car, a tall figure silhouetted against the canyon’s darkness, and even though I couldn’t make out his face clearly, my body recognized him instantly. The way he moved in the world, the broad set of his shoulders, the careful way he approached our memorial like he was entering a church.
“I—” My voice came out broken, barely a whisper. I tried again. “I didn’t think you’d—”
“I know.” The same voice that had anchored me that night, deeper now, raw with months of sleepless nights and whatever else this had cost him. “I know.”
