Page 78 of Forever My Saint

Pavel follows.

Once they’re gone, I meet Larisa’s stare. Her astute eyes reveal she’s seen it all. She knows why Saint is defeated. She also knows it’s because of me.

“Shall we get started?” Sara is also privy to the tension, but like the angel she is, she saves me from having to explain myself to Larisa. Not that she cares, but needing to justify myself suddenly seems important.

Max makes himself scarce while Larisa sinks into the recliner and reaches for the newspaper Saint was reading.

Sara loops her arm through mine, leading me into the kitchen. I’m thankful we’re alone because I need a moment to catch my breath.

“So, you’re leaving?” Sara asks, turning around to face me.

“Yes, tomorrow.”

“To-tomorrow?” she stutters, eyes wide. “Wow, that’s fast. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.”

And I do. This has been a long time coming; the reason I fought so hard. But now that it’s here, it doesn’t feel real.

“I know. I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around it, to be honest. But it’s happening.” I reach into my pocket and hand over my passport.

Sara opens it, eyebrows shooting up into her hairline. “It looks so real.”

“Good,” I reply. Biting my thumbnail, I’m suddenly nervous.

She closes the passport and passes it back to me. “Is Zoey coming too?”

Sighing, I nod. “Yes, apparently.”

Her face turns sympathetic. “Well, this is wonderful news. I’m so happy for you. Will you go back home? To LA?”

With a shrug, I answer, “I don’t know what happens after we arrive in America. Saint and I haven’t discussed that far ahead. I don’t think we believed it would ever happen. But it has.”

Sara narrows her eyes, watching me closely. “Why do you sound like this is a bad thing?”

Sara and I have shared so much. In a short amount of time, she has become a close friend, and one who can read me quite well, it appears. Slumping onto a chair, I run my fingers through my hair, exhaling in defeat. “It’s not. It’s just—”

But I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.

“You’re scared?” she offers as a plausible explanation, which is, in part, true.

“Yes. So scared,” I confess. “This has all happened so fast, and I’m terrified that if I get my hopes up, something else will foil our escape. I’ve been held captive for…” I pause, needing to think, but I’ve lost count of how many months have passed.

“I don’t even know how long, and the prospect of freedom terrifies me.”

Sara doesn’t judge. She simply pulls up a seat and sits down beside me. “When I was younger, we had a pet bird,” she reveals. I nod, happy to discuss her bird if it means we don’t have to dissect my feelings. But I soon realize there is a moral to the story.

“He was a little yellow canary. Although caged, he used to sing the most beautiful songs. I often wondered how something imprisoned could sing all day long. Late one night, after my father came home stumbling drunk, he saw me talking to Pepsi. The bird,” she clarifies. I smile, remembering I once had a bird or, rather, a chicken of my own.

“He scolded me, calling me stupid for making friends with a bird. He said I was stupid like my mother.” A tear trickles down her cheek, but she quickly wipes it away. “He threatened that one day, when I wasn’t looking, he would feed Pepsi to the barn cats.”

It seems her father was always a bastard.

“I couldn’t let that happen,” she continues. “Early the next morning, I opened Pepsi’s cage to grant him freedom, and it broke my heart as he was the only friend I had. My mother had run off with our neighbor, and I was an only child. I had no one. Only Pepsi. I thought he would be happy. I thought he would spread his wings and fly.”

She has my undivided attention as I need to know where she is going with this.

“But he didn’t. Even with the door open, he stayed perched on his swing, singing his song. I didn’t understand it. Why wasn’t he flying to safety? I tried to coax him out by placing his cage outside. But it didn’t work. He simply was happy living his life in a cage.

“For three days, I tried everything, but Pepsi wasn’t interested. He ate his food, drank his water, and sang his happy song. It was a hot summer’s day; I remember it like it was yesterday as a new family moved across the road from us. They had a little girl, same age as me. She asked if I wanted to come over and play.

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