Chapter Four

She saw him off at the airport. She wasn't sure, afterward, why she went. Maybe to give him one last chance to look at her and see that something was wrong. Maybe just to watch the door close from the right side of it.

At the gate he was already half gone, thumbing through boarding groups, Brielle a polite three feet off pretending to study the departure boards.

"Adrian." She waited until he looked up from the phone. "Take care of yourself. I mean that."

Something in how she said it should have landed. For one second he almost caught it; his head tilted the way a man's does at a sound he can't quite place. Then the agent called his group, and Brielle said, "Dr. Wynn, that's us," and the second closed over like water over a dropped stone.

"Three weeks," he said, and kissed her forehead. "Four, tops. Try not to murder anyone at the office." He was grinning. He waved once, walking backward up the jet bridge, pleased with the world, and then the wall took him.

She stood at the glass and watched them push the plane back from the gate. She did not cry. She had said goodbye. He simply hadn't known he was being told.

She watched until the plane was a smudge and then nothing at all. It was, she thought, the kindest way she had in her to leave a man: out loud, to his face, with the door held open one extra second in case he wanted to walk through it the right way. He hadn't. That part was his to keep.

His apartment still had her in it, in pieces, so she went and took the pieces back. Her books off his shelves. Her coat from behind his door. The good knife she'd bought because he liked to cook on the two nights a year he was ever home to do it. It took one afternoon. Eight years came down to two boxes and a lightness that felt almost like getting away with something.

She left exactly one thing behind.

On his nightstand she set the compass: the cheap brass one he'd given her in college, before he was anyone, back when being wanted by him had still felt like being chosen. He'd had it engraved in those days, when he made promises for free and meant them. So you'll always find your way back to me.

She turned it to face the door, so it would be the first thing he saw. Let him read it. Let him be the one, for once, who couldn't find the way back.

She wasn't bitter about it. Bitter would have meant she still wanted the way back to lead to him. She only wanted the record left honest, sitting there in brass where he'd be sure to read it.

Then she sat on the bare floor of her old life and sent two words to the name that had waited eight years in her drafts.

He called before she'd put the phone down.

"I wondered," Caleb said, "if you'd ever send that." There was no rush in his voice. There never had been; that was the whole difference between him and the man on the plane. Caleb had spent years being precisely where he said he would be and asking for nothing, because she had been spoken for, and he wasn't the kind of man who knocked on a door that wasn't his to knock on.

"I'm not spoken for anymore," she said.

A breath on the line. "Then I'll say the thing I've wanted to say since we were seventeen, and I'll only say it once, so you never feel crowded by it." A beat. "There's a coast you've talked about your whole life. I've got leave saved up, a clean record with the airline, and nothing here I'd miss. Say the word and I'll be standing on that sand by the time you land."

"My father," she started.

"The fourteenth, still?" Caleb said. "I already checked it against my roster. I can be in that waiting room, if they'll let me. He taught me to drive a stick in that terrible Buick of his. I owe the man four hours at the very least."

She put a hand over her mouth. Not because she was sad. Because someone had just offered her, unasked, the exact thing she had spent an entire gala begging a man to give.

She looked around the emptied apartment, at the pale square of dust where eight years used to sit.

"Come north," she said. "There's a date I'm keeping after all. I just changed who's standing next to me."

That weekend her plane lifted off into a hard, bright blue, the coastline unrolling silver under the wing like something that had been waiting for her to finally look down and claim it. Somewhere behind her, a thousand miles the other way, Adrian sat in a conference hall and raised his hand to answer a question, certain that his life was exactly where he had left it.

He still thought she was home. Still thought she was sulking. Still believed, on the rare occasions he pictured her at all, that she was waiting.