“No,” Senia replies quickly and Tristan actually looks a little annoyed. “This was not planned and we’re just taking it one day at a time. I can’t tell my parents yet or they’ll freak. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with school and everything.”

“You’re not quitting, are you?”

“Fuck no!”

The waitress arrives with our plates of food and I feel a pang of guilt as she places Chris’s omelet on the table next to my waffle. It kills me to think that Chris is in pain. And it terrifies me to consider the possibility, even for a second, that we may not make it through this. Seeing Tristan and Senia get the very thing that I stole from him, without sharing the love that we shared, must be killing him.

“That’s good. I don’t want you to fuck up like me.”

“You didn’t fuck up, Claire.”

Chris arrives and slides in next to me. He makes no attempt to eat his food, and I don’t blame him. I’ve completely lost my appetite.

I force Senia to eat her omelet then we leave the restaurant, all four of us in a haze of silence. Tristan reaches for Senia’s hand as she attempts to get in the car and I can’t help but feel that something has changed in him. She looks over her shoulder at him and he doesn’t say anything. He just smiles. She rolls her eyes as she lets go of his hand and climbs into the backseat of the Porsche.

I stare at him for a moment before I get into the car, utterly perplexed by this non-douche-like behavior. “If you hurt her, I’ll tell the world you got herpes from a gay cowboy.”

“I would never do something like that to her or my child,” he says as he turns around and walks toward his bike.

I don’t know if it’s the way he said it or my own guilt painting his words dark, but I swear that was a dig at me for what I did to Chris.

“Claire, you coming in?”

A chill passes through me as the weight of being judged returns like a vulture perched on my shoulders. I have yet to atone for my sins. Can I even accept Chris’s forgiveness if I haven’t paid for my transgressions?

Transgressions.

It seems I have something in common with my father after all.

I slide into the passenger seat and Chris can tell I’m upset. “I want to go get my stuff right now.” I turn around to look at Senia. “Is that okay with you?”

She looks a little disappointed at first, then she smiles. “I think it’s great. I’ll help you pack.”

I don’t have much stuff in the dorm. Moving from the dorm, to Senia’s, to Wrightsville, then back to the dorm taught me to pare down my belongings to the bare minimum. There are very few possessions that have any meaning to me. Most of those have been destroyed, lost, or given away. What’s left is just two suitcases and two boxes of books and mementos. Four containers like the four chambers of a heart, pushing my blood, my life, from one place to another.

I have to threaten to back out on Chris in order to get him to stay in the car. Not only is his leg too messed up to be carrying boxes, but I don’t want any of the girls in the dorm to recognize him and get any funny ideas.

I sigh as Senia and I roll my two suitcases out to the Porsche and Chris throws them in the backseat. When I turn to Senia, she’s already crying.

“Pregnancy hormones?” I say, though saying the words aloud makes my stomach turn.

She throws her arms around me and squeezes me so hard I can hardly breathe, but I don’t attempt to loosen her grip. Instead, I squeeze her just as tightly. I know it’s stupid. We’ll probably see each other on Monday when we meet for coffee between classes. Still, I can’t help but feel like this is a step away from my youth. This is a step toward my future with Chris, as adults.

Senia lets go and I pull her hands away from her face. “I’ll see you at the café on Monday. Heck, you’ll probably see me tomorrow when I realize I’ve forgotten my hairbrush or something. You’re a block away.”

“I know. Go ahead and move in with your sexy rock star. I’ll move in with mine next weekend.”

I laugh as I kiss her cheek. “We’re livin’ the dream.”

She smacks my ass as I climb into the car. “Don’t forget to study!”

Chris grins at this comment as I reach for the door handle. “I won’t forget,” I say, then I blow her a kiss and shut the door.

When we arrive at Chris’s apartment, there are three boxes stacked on top of each other in the entryway.

“Whose are those?” I ask as I set my purse and backpack down on a table near the front door.

“It’s some stuff from your room at the house. I had my mom pack it up a few days ago. I had it delivered while you were packing.”

Julian walks in pushing a rolling cart with my boxes and luggage from the dorm. “Where do you want this?”

“In the living room is fine,” Chris says.

Placing his hand on the small of my back, he leads me closer to the boxes. He looks them over for a minute until he finds a heart scrawled in marker on the second box from the top. Lifting the top box off the stack, he sets it down at his feet then pulls a blade out of his back pocket and slices through the tape to open the box.

My heart begins to race as I anticipate what is inside this box that made him mark it with a heart. He lifts the flaps and I see it instantly. And I instantly begin to cry.

He lifts the photograph of my mother and me out of the box; the photograph I thought I had lost when I moved into the dorm my freshman year; the only photograph I have left of the two of us together. He hands it to me, a soft but slightly worried expression on his face.

“My mom found it when she was packing your stuff. I had her frame it for you. Is that okay?”

I nod, unable to speak or tear my gaze away from my mother’s smile. “She’s….”

“Beautiful.”

I nod as I clutch the frame against my chest. “Thank you. Do you think… do you think this is what Abby will look like?”

“I don’t know.” He kisses my forehead and nods toward the hallway. “Go put that on your side of the bed. We can unpack this stuff later. You have some studying to do.” My jaw drops and he chuckles. “No, the real kind of studying. Why do you think there’s no TV in here? I wanted to make sure you don’t get distracted?”

He hands Julian some cash and thanks him as he leaves. Taking a deep breath, I look around the room and through the glass door leading onto the patio. Everything about this apartment is new to me, except for Chris. That’s when I think of the quote on the little sign hanging from Cora’s front door: Where we love is home.

I turn around to look him in the eye. “It feels like home.”

Chapter Seventeen

Lindsay

Listen

December in Laguna Beach, California is not as cold as Carolina Beach. It’s almost spring-like, with a light mist of rain and barely-gray clouds infused with the glow of the sunlight they’re obstructing. Every few minutes, a gentle gust of wind comes along and a skirt flutters or someone’s hair is ruined. And all I can do is hope that one of those breezes carried some of Nathan’s ashes eastward. Laguna Beach may have been his favorite beach in the country, but it wasn’t his home.

I hate thinking of Nathan in past tense.

I almost wore heels to trudge through the damp sand, until I saw that everyone was removing their shoes for the memorial service. We all stood barefoot in the cold, wet sand at the edge of the water as Nathan’s mother, Gianna, walked into the freezing ocean to release the ashes. She walked so tall and proud, showing such strength, while I stood twenty feet away, every muscle in my body clenched tightly so I wouldn’t collapse.

Now, as we plod through the sand on the way back to the rental car, I still find it hard to breathe. The beach smells of him.

“It’s okay to cry,” Adam says as he adjusts the blanket over Kaia’s eyes to block the sun.

I don’t even want to know what Leo, Nathan’s father, thinks of the fact that Adam came to the funeral with me. He called me two nights ago to ask me why I never contacted him or Gianna when Nathan didn’t come home three weeks ago.

“It took the county coroner over a week to identify him.”

His words have played in my head for two days straight. If I had worried about Nathan’s wellbeing rather than suspect him of cheating on me, there might have been more than just a few bones and teeth left. There would have been more ashes to scatter in the ocean. That was the implication in Leo’s words.

“I don’t want to cry in front of them,” I whisper as I reach for Kaia and she balls up her fists as I pull her against my chest.

Adam is dressed in a black suit that reminds me of the suit he wore to my cousin Luanne’s wedding last year. It may even be the same suit. That wedding came just a month before everything started falling apart between us. Before I lost all hope that I would ever see Adam in a suit like that at our wedding.

“If you don’t cry, they’re going to think you don’t care.”

“They already think that. They haven’t even attempted to see Kaia since she was born. They don’t give a shit about us, including Nathan.”

“Don’t say that.”

I draw in a deep stuttered breath as I attempt to hold back the tears, but the aching in my chest shoots straight up through my throat and lights my face on fire. The tears come so fast I can hardly catch my breath. This is only the thirtieth time I’ve broken down in the past seven days. Every time I think of the last time I saw Nathan, I want to bury myself under the covers, or right here in the sand would be great.

Nathan was not the love of my life, but he was there for me when Adam wasn’t. When Adam lost himself in the haze of his bong, Nathan would pick me up and take me to the beach. When Adam refused to talk about what was going to happen after graduation, Nathan promised me we would live in a grass hut in Fiji if we had to, as long as we had each other and the ocean, that was all we needed.

The day Nathan left for California five weeks ago, he stood next to his car in the driveway with a big smile on his face, his gold tooth flashing in the morning light, and said, “Fiji is just around the corner.” I always told Nathan I didn’t want to get married because I didn’t want him to feel tied to me by a stupid piece of paper. I wanted us to wake up next to each other every morning by choice, not by law. The truth is that, when I got pregnant with Kaia, I felt I owed it to her to stay with Nathan. When Nathan told me Fiji was just around the corner, his words filled me with sadness for the life we dreamed of that I no longer wanted. The life I never wanted.

Leo and Gianna reach the concrete staircase leading from the sand up to the street where we all parked our rental cars. Gianna looks over her shoulder at me and grabs Leo’s arm to stop him. The look she gives me has the power to frighten the ocean away from the shore. I wipe the tears from my face, at first trying not to smear my makeup, then I just say, “Fuck it,” and wipe the sleeve of my black dress across my nose.

Adam reaches for Kaia. I don’t know if he does it instinctively because he sees me struggling to hold her and keep up with the flow of tears at the same time, but this gesture does not go unnoticed by Gianna as she and Leo approach us. Thankfully, they don’t know anything about Adam. Right now, they probably think I’ve already moved on with some random guy just one week after the news of Nathan’s death. Little do they know that Adam and I both moved on months ago.

I give Adam a look to let him know that I’ll hold onto Kaia and he should probably take it easy on the dad-like behavior. He doesn’t look too pleased, especially since Kaia is beginning to stir.

“Lindsay,” Gianna says in her husky voice.

The wind is blowing her unnaturally red curls, but other than that she looks flawless as ever. Leo looks Adam up and down a couple of times before he turns to me just as Kaia lets out a frustrated yelp. I pull the blanket off her face and her face scrunches up. She’s going to start wailing.