After My Lover Forgot Me, I Let Him Go

Jenna called at 4:12 p.m.

I stepped into the bathroom and closed the door before I answered. The faucet dripped. I sat on the edge of the tub.

'Tell me you see what I see,' she said. No hello. No warmup.

'Jenna —'

'That's you in the photo, Wyn. I know your shoulders. I know the way you stand.' Her voice was tight, controlled, the way it gets when she's working very hard not to yell. 'How long has he been there?'

I looked at the grout between the floor tiles. 'A few days.'

Silence. Then: 'A few days.'

'He showed up in the rain. He didn't know where else to go.'

'He didn't know where else to go because his body remembered what his brain can't.' She exhaled hard. 'Wyn. Listen to me. Nash Perry has a team of people whose entire job is finding him. It's been four days. You think they're not close?'

I didn't answer.

'And when they find him — when Nash walks through that door — what exactly is your plan? What do you say? What does Holden say, when he doesn't even know your name?'

'He knows my name.'

'Does he know what you are to him?'

The faucet dripped. Outside the door, I could hear Holden moving in the kitchen. The soft sound of a cabinet opening.

'I told him we were together,' I said. 'He believed me.'

'Of course he believed you. He's standing in an apartment full of his own stuff and he doesn't know why.' Her voice dropped. 'That's not the same as him knowing, Wynter. You know that.'

I pressed my free hand flat against my knee.

'I know that,' I said.

'Then what are you doing?'

I didn't have an answer. Not one I could say out loud. I was doing the only thing I'd been able to do since he appeared at my door — I was keeping him close for as long as the world would let me. I was memorizing the way he hummed in the morning and reached for my hand without thinking and looked at the gardenias like they were a clue he almost understood.

I was being selfish. I knew that too.

'I'll figure it out,' I said.

'Wyn —'

'I'll call you later.'

I hung up. Sat there for another minute. Then I stood, ran cold water over my wrists, and went back out.

Holden had made tea. He set a mug on the counter without being asked, the way he always used to, and went back to the couch. I wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at the gardenias in their glass.

I didn't call Jenna back.

---

They came at 6:40.

Three hard knocks. Not a knock, really — a statement. The kind of knock that already knows you're home.

I felt it in my sternum.

Holden looked up from the couch. Our eyes met. Something moved across his face — not fear, exactly. Wariness. The animal instinct of a person who has been running and just heard a branch snap.

I went to the door.

Nash Perry was in a charcoal jacket, phone in hand, jaw set. He looked at me the way you look at a piece of furniture that's blocking a doorway — registering the obstacle, already calculating how to move it. His eyes went past me before I'd fully opened the door.

'Holden.' His voice was flat and certain. 'Let's go.'

Bellamy was just behind him.

She was wearing a cream-colored coat, her hair loose, her expression arranged into something soft and worried and perfectly lit. She looked like a woman who had been sick with fear for four days. She looked like a woman who had practiced looking like that.

She stepped around Nash and around me — around me, like I was part of the doorframe — and moved straight to Holden.

'Oh thank God.' Her hand found his arm. Her fingers curled around it. 'Holden. We've been so scared.'

Holden stood up slowly. He looked at her hand on his arm. He looked at her face. I watched him search it the same way he'd searched mine that first night — looking for something to hold onto, some thread of recognition.

'I'm sorry,' he said carefully. 'I don't —'

'It's okay.' She squeezed his arm. Her voice was gentle, practiced, warm. 'It's okay. You don't have to explain anything. I'm just glad you're safe.'

Nash had come inside. He hadn't asked. He stood in the middle of the apartment and looked around with the brisk, assessing gaze of a man doing inventory. His eyes moved over the two toothbrushes, the men's shoes by the door, the gardenias on the counter. His jaw tightened slightly.

Then he looked at me. Really looked at me, for the first time.

'You're the extra,' he said. 'From the Meridian set.'

Not a question. Just a classification.

'Wynter,' I said.

He didn't repeat it. 'You should have called the hospital the moment he showed up. You should have called me.' He said it without heat, the way you'd explain a policy to someone who'd violated it without understanding the rules. 'Do you have any idea what these four days have cost?'

'He needed somewhere safe.'

'He needed medical supervision.' Nash's eyes moved back to Holden. 'We're leaving. The car's downstairs. I've already called Dr. Reeves — he'll meet us at Cedars.'

Holden hadn't moved. He was still standing by the couch, Bellamy's hand still on his arm, and he was looking at me.

Not at Nash. Not at Bellamy.

At me.

That searching look. That reaching-for-something look. His eyes moved to the gardenias on the counter, then back to my face.

'I don't want to go,' he said.

Nash didn't miss a beat. 'That's the injury talking. You need —'

'I'm not talking to you.' Holden's voice was quiet. Steady. He was still looking at me. 'I don't want to go.'

The apartment was very small and very still. Bellamy's hand tightened on his arm, just slightly. I saw it.

I looked at him. At the cut above his eyebrow, almost healed now. At his hands, loose at his sides. At the way he was standing — not toward the door, not toward Bellamy, but angled, almost imperceptibly, toward me.

His body, doing what his mind couldn't.

'You should go,' I said. My voice came out even. I was proud of that. 'Nash is right. You need a doctor.'

Something shifted in his face. A tightening around the eyes. 'Wynter —'

'You need to go, Holden.'

He looked at me for a long moment. The refrigerator hummed. The gardenias sat white and still on the counter.

Then Nash's hand came down on his shoulder, steering, and Bellamy was already moving toward the door, and Holden let himself be moved — but he kept his eyes on me until the angle of the doorframe took him away.

The door closed.

I stood in the middle of the apartment and listened to their footsteps go down the hall, down the stairs, out into the street.

Then I walked to the counter. I picked up the gardenias. I held them for a moment — the cool stems, the smell of them, clean and sweet and unbearable.

I set them back down.

I didn't cry. Not yet. I just stood there in the quiet, in the apartment that still smelled like him, and I breathed.