I was blank. Empty. My lungs worked. And my heart beat, but my brain would only buzz and my arms would only clutch Pest and my eyes would only leak.

Did I sit there for minutes? Hours? I couldn’t even tell.

I turned and put Pest on the bed and then slowly picked my clothes up off the floor. My underwear and shorts. My T-shirt. Each time I bent over, I felt more keenly the way he’d used my body. I would be sore for days. My clit and my ass. My inner thighs.

I might have pulled something in my back coming so hard, and I wished with all my heart that he was here so I could tell him that. And we could laugh. And make a list of our sex injuries. Like normal lovers.

Normal people.

Pest barked at me, sitting on the edge of the bed like she knew I was falling to pieces.

“Shit,” I breathed. “You’re mine now.”

I had a dog. A goddamned dog. I had Tommy’s dog.

“You’re mine now,” I said again, petting her wiggling little body. “You and me, Pest. Rejected by Tommy, party of two.” She had surgical tape on her ear, and I put it together that she must have gotten bitten by one of the other dogs and Tommy must have gone inside with her to treat her and that’s how he saw the picture.

“We’re a little banged up, aren’t we?” I whispered, wishing I had something I could bandage. Wishing my pain could scab over and heal in a few days’ time, leaving me a scar I could talk about on first dates or radio interviews. A funny story— “Oh, this? Oh, well, once I fell in love and all we did was hurt each other. No big deal.”

But there would be nothing short-lived about this pain.

I’d hurt him. Really hurt him. And that hurt me more than his leaving did.

And I had no idea how I would get over it.

So how could I possibly expect him to get over it?

I stood still in the middle of the room that smelled like our bodies.

I couldn’t expect him to get over it. And how…childish and selfish I’d been to expect that of him. To ask that of him. To just let this go, like I’d borrowed his car and put a dent in it.

And I realized that I thought he should do it, because I believed I had done it.

I put my hands over my face, feeling the world I’d constructed since St. Joke’s crumble around me.

I believed I’d put aside the assault. That I’d let it go. That I’d cried the effects of it away. That because I was okay with sex, that I was okay with what had happened to me.

But I wasn’t.

If I thought he could just let this kind of pain go…well, that seemed wrong.

And it seemed like something I should deal with.

And somehow, as I thought about it, as the shame of my childishness and cowardice settled over me and through me—I felt, in a weird way, myself change. My heartbeat found a slightly different rhythm. My skin felt different on my body.

I had a lot of regrets in my life, but this… God… this.

It was like fire. It burned through me, leaving me completely different. Brittle and burned. Frail.

My shoes were beneath the bed and I went down on my knees to grab them and as I pulled them out, along came a bunch of dust bunnies and a phone.

My phone? I thought. An old one? I didn’t remember leaving one here last time I visited. I flipped it over, touching the screen, and Carissa’s messages popped up.

Bates needs proof.

Proof of Beth being all right.

Proof her mother means her harm.

Proof, Tommy, or he’s letting Sammy off his fucking leash.

How many times did I tell you not to screw this up, Tommy!

Shit.

My brain sizzled and popped, and the world returned in a wild, crazy rush. Tommy’s phone.

I didn’t give Tommy his fucking phone.

I shoved my feet into my shoes and opened the door, shutting it before Pest could come back out, and ran down the stairs. Peter was sitting on the back of his truck, his eyes on the driveway.

“How long ago did he leave?” I asked, sliding to a halt next to him, the dirt and gravel kicking up dust under my feet.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Gimme… I need your keys… I need to go get him.”

He looked at me. “What?”

“I have to get him. He left his phone. He needs… there are things he needs to know.”

And the crazy irony of not being able to call him.

“You’re going to drive after him and what?” Peter asked. “Drive him off the road?”

“If I have to.”

“Beth…” He took me by the shoulder, and it was so startling. Peter never touched me. We both stood there as if we were surrounded by bees. “That’s crazy. He’s twenty minutes ahead of you, and we don’t know where he went.”

I knew where he went. The only place he would go. Right back to the city to face down Bates.

“He’s in trouble!” I said. “And it’s my fault.” My voice cracked, but I was out of tears.

“How?” he asked, and again it was strange. He didn’t do these things, comfort or ask questions. He let me come and go as I pleased. “Tell me,” he said. “We can figure it out.”

He knew about the foster home, about how Tommy had saved me and killed the foster father. But he didn’t know the rest of it. Bates and the debt, how Tommy had been living in suspended animation waiting for his past to come calling. And how when it finally did, it was to pick me up and take me to my mother.

I told him all of it, the words barely making sense as they tripped out of my mouth.

“But he didn’t take you to your mother, right?” he asked. “That’s what started all this with her?”

“I begged him not to, and now he has this Bates guy after him.” I fumbled for the phone and showed it to him.

Peter blinked. “And you think he’s going back to San Francisco?”

“Of course he is,” I said. Because that’s what Tommy does; he stands up when other people run. “I have to go. I have to go help him. I have to tell Bates what my mother did.”

Peter nodded. “Okay. I’ll drive. Do you know where he lives?”

I shook my head.

“Wait,” I said and quickly pulled up the texts from Simon and called the number attached to it.

Simon’s voice answered before it even rang. “This is Simon Malik. I’m out of country for the next six weeks. I’m available on my European phone number. If this is an emergency, contact Denise Pebis at the New York Times.”

I hung up with shaking fingers and then scrolled through Tommy’s contacts for something that looked like Simon’s European phone number. But there was nothing that looked right.

There were in fact only four other numbers saved in his phone. One was for a Chinese restaurant.

Three people. I went back to the list of people he’d recently called and found the one he’d called the most. Paul. And I dialed that number.

“Tommy,” he answered before the first ring was over. “Jesus, buddy, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“This isn’t Tommy,” I said, trying to make my voice sound calm and reasonable. Friendly even. But in my own ears I sounded like a freaking-out lunatic. “My name is Beth Renshaw—”

“What the fuck are you doing with Tommy’s phone?”

“He left it… and I need to get it back to him. But I don’t know where he lives. I am a friend of his—”

“Oh, I fucking know who you are,” he said. “I won’t be telling you shit, sweetheart. You got him in some kind of trouble that Tommy would never go looking for on his own.”

He hung up on me. And I’d been expecting it, a little. But it still stung. It still stung that out there in the world I was being painted as the one who was trouble.

Aren’t you? I thought. Aren’t you the one who always gets him in trouble? Like since day fucking one…

I took a deep breath, my brain scrambling.

Peter looked so pained that he had no answers for me.

“Okay, how about this Bates guy?” he asked. “You know how to get in touch with him?”

I shook my head.

“The Carissa you—”

“Yes!” I cried. Not that I knew where Carissa lived, but I could just go right to Carissa and, through her, Bates, explain my situation to them. Hope like fireworks exploded in my head. I went to Carissa’s texts and pulled up her number and called it.

But immediately a robotic voice said, “This number is no longer in service.”

“Shit!” I said and then yelled it, startling birds from trees, bringing the dogs running up out of the bush to investigate.

“Hey, hey,” Peter said, again grabbing my shoulders, giving me a little shake. “We can find out where Tommy lives, right? You can find him like you found me. Using your computer?”

“It took me months to find you,” I whispered, dread turning cold and hard in my stomach. “And his name is Tommy MacNeill. Do you have any idea how many Tommy MacNeill’s live in San Francisco?”

“Well, let’s get in the car. We’ll think of something on the way.”

Inspiration was not a lightning bolt; it rarely was for me. It was like the slow clearing of a storm at night. The careful, stalling retreat of dark clouds until one star appeared. And then another. I had an idea…a sense… but it wasn’t until most of the clouds were gone and the sky was revealed that I could connect the dots and see what I needed to do.

It was what I should have done all along.

“We’re not going to San Francisco,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

I looked down at Tommy’s phone and tried to make a list of what I needed. But for this I didn’t need anything. I had it all. Right here.

I needed me and this phone and the courage to do what I’d never been able to do before.

“Nowhere,” I said.

And somehow that I was coming back around full circle to this moment seemed only right. I just hoped it was in time.

* * *

I filled up with gas and decided to get off the 5 and take the scenic route because…well, because it might be my last shot at the scenic route. The 152 went by the big reservoir, and it was a bright blue day, the kind that hurt my eyes. And I realized, with the highway stretched out ahead of me in a long ribbon, that I hadn’t talked to Simon lately. I dug in my back pocket where I usually had my phone, but it was empty.

Shit.

The duffel on the passenger seat beside me didn’t have it either.

Fuck. I’d left my phone with Beth.

Had she found it? I wondered. And I tried, really tried not to think about what she was doing right now. If she’d gotten off that bed. If she and Pest were curled up in a ball convinced that they were missing me.

That’s not fair, I told myself.

She was going to miss me. Just like I was going to miss her.

It just didn’t change anything.

I’d imagined leaving the mountain with no way of getting in touch with her. That would be easier in a way. No temptation. Because this, wondering if she had my phone, it was all kinds of temptation. I turned the radio up and rolled the windows down and tried to think about anything but her.

Which meant—weirdly—that I thought about my mom. That picture of her as a beautiful disgruntled teenager had rattled me.

Drudging up memories from the bottom of my brain that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. A really long time. The memories so long buried that I’d forgotten they actually existed, but they cropped up like unexploded WWII bombs in the French countryside. I had to handle each and every one of them with total care in fear of explosion.

Red blankets and ploughman’s lunches. The sound of her voice reading me the first Harry Potter book. We only got about halfway before the book got left behind in one of our ridiculous middle-of-the-night moves, but the memories were some of the sweetest I had of her.

She’d been a moth to flame for bad decisions. She’d brought men into our lives who’d had no business being there. Then, when they left, she’d stay in bed for days, not eating the sandwiches I brought her. Hugging me at night so hard, like she was trying to absorb me.

She was quick to anger and quick to laugh, and even as a kid I’d known…something wasn’t right.

I knew enough about bipolar disorder that it made sense of some of the things she’d do. The manic ferocity of her joy and the bottomless nature of her depression. And I wondered, if she’d been able to stay on meds, if she would have been able to love me better.

Love herself better.

And though I didn’t want to, I thought about what she must have been like as a kid. A teenager. In a house all the way up on a mountain.

I thought a lot about grief.

After Simon left for college and it was just me in that fucking apartment, just me until I took all my grief and all my loneliness and approached one of the women on the corner and bought my first twisted-up baggie.

You make shitty decisions when you’re blind and stupid with grief. And you really don’t care who you hurt.

And I didn’t care enough about Peter to forgive him. Or maybe that was a lie; how the fuck would I know? But I understood Peter.

Down to the ground I understood him.

I’d holed myself up in my shitty neighborhood, in my crappy apartment because I didn’t have a mountain to call my own. If I had, I’d be there.

It was almost—almost—funny.

The wind blew through the open window of the truck, and it was warm and smelled like highway and dust. It tasted like copper on my tongue, and the sun felt good on my arm.

The radio, which had been buzzing in and out with static, buzzed back in, and it took me a few seconds to realize, to hear it entirely, but the song playing was Beth’s.

And I turned it up as loud as it could go until her voice was beating against my eardrums.

Because that was the fucking key to grief, wasn’t it? You had to keep moving.

Too bad I figured that out too late.

The sun was setting when I got to the city. I wasn’t sure what I expected. But I pulled up in front of my apartment and there was no one there. No goons out front. No goons across the street. Just the regular men and women that worked the street on this edge of town.

Don’t get excited, I told myself. They were probably all waiting for me in my apartment.

Sammy for sure would be waiting to get his hands on me.

I parked the truck in front, grabbed my duffel bag, bit back the grief over missing Pest more than I thought possible, and pulled from the glove box the big long bowie knife in its serious leather case that I’d bought from one of the gas stations along the way.

Serious knife for a gas station, but whatever. If Sammy was waiting for me, I wasn’t going easy.

I took the stairs, my heart beating behind my eyes, sure at any minute I was about to get jumped, but it didn’t happen.

I got to my door without any drama. Unlocking my door, I took a deep breath, dropped my bag, unsheathed the knife. But inside my place was dark and still. Just like I left it. I closed the door behind me as silent as I could, but the click still felt like it boomed. My back to the wall, I edged through the kitchen, past Pest’s bowl, into the TV room, where the old take-out containers from the bar still sat.

Fuck, less than a week ago. How was that possible?

I checked every corner of my place. Every closet. Under the bed. Everywhere. No sign of Sammy or Carissa or anything.

My apartment was exactly the way I’d left it.

Empty.

So. Fucking. Empty. I had a couch. A TV. A bed and a drawerful of clothes. A closetful of work boots. Some books.

Mismatched plates. A couple of coffee mugs.

And this stuff… this stuff was nothing. Garbage. Things I could leave behind and never miss. No photographs. No memories. With Pest gone, this apartment could have belonged to anyone.

No one.

And it was weird. Alarming actually, that I’d lived like that for so long.

That I hadn’t cared.

That I was content being a shadow. Empty and quiet and…waiting.

Always waiting.

Fuck that, I thought. Fuck that right now.

I wasn’t waiting anymore. Not one more minute. I grabbed my bag from outside the door, clipped the knife to my belt, and put on a jacket to cover it.

And I left to go find Bates.