I pull away from them and they look to Theo—to Travis.
“Thank you,” my mom says through the wash of her tears, hardly getting the words out before she pulls Theo into a hug, sobbing against his shoulder. After all this time, he’s brought me back to them—he did the job they hired him to do.
The racket in my chest rises up into my throat, and I sink back down into the lobby chair, trying to keep the room from spinning. To keep the nausea at bay.
My parents sit on the small sofa opposite me, hands wringing, staring at me as if they’re trying to superimpose their memory of me from seven years ago over the woman who sits before them now.
“Are you alright?” my mother asks, leaning forward, as close to me as she can get—a strange show of affection from a woman who rarely showed any when I was little. A piece of my past I feel more than I remember.
I nod but my body feels as if it’s convulsing. Theo sits down beside me, and I can feel him wanting to touch me. But he holds his hands stiffly in his lap, afraid for my parents to see, to know what we are.
“The police said you were found near where your car was abandoned,” my dad says. “That you’d been up in those woods all these years.”
My gaze flinches to my mom, but her expression looks suddenly tight, creases pulled together at her temples.
“I—” I begin, then catch myself, twirling the ring on my finger—my wedding band. I don’t know where to start, what to say. How do I explain the last seven years of my life? Tell them that who I am now is not who I once was. I prefer the dampness of soil beneath my toes and the hush of an autumn twilight over cappuccinos and crowds and noisy movie theaters. That I don’t think I can ever be that woman again; that I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. That seeing them again is both relief and strain inside my rib cage, pressing on the hole where the bullet was pulled free. That I feel like I can’t breathe. Like I might vomit right here in this hotel lobby with its screeching TVs and the whoosh of the sliding glass doors as hotel guests come and go, dragging rolling suitcases and yelling children and cell phones that ding and buzz and chirp.
Finally, Theo reaches out and takes my hand, squeezing tightly, anchoring me to him. And I hear the word pulsing against my temples: husband, husband. The memory surfaces now: of Levi saying this word to me over and over until it became true. He convinced me of its meaning, made it impossible to think of Theo as anything other than my husband. But he didn’t make me love Theo, didn’t make my heart twine into knots whenever he touched me—those thoughts are my own. Theo is my husband because my skin cannot bear to be without him, not because Levi made us marry.
I smile at Theo, the familiar touch of his hand calming the roiling in my stomach.
But when I swing my gaze back to my parents, my mom’s expression has gone slack, the pink color washed from her cheeks. My dad’s posture has hardened in his chair.
I swallow again and this time find my voice. “This is my husband, Theo. You know him as Travis. We’ve been married for two years.” My voice catches, threatens to sink into my stomach, but then re-forms. “Although it feels like much longer—for both of us.”
The hiss of the TVs works its way into my ears. A phone rings from behind the lobby desk and a woman answers, speaking low enough that I can’t hear.
At last, my mother asks, “What happened to you out there?” Her bottom lip hangs open, hands clasped together so tightly that her knuckles turn as white as her slacks.
“I became someone else.”
* * *
My parents are staying in a room on the third floor of the hotel. An elevator ride above us. They ask us to join them for dinner at an Italian place up the road, Martoni’s Eatery, but I tell them we’d prefer to stay in, that the noise of a restaurant would be too much. But in truth, seeing them again, making conversation, pretending that we can resume life as it once was, is more than I can deal with right now.
My head hasn’t stopped swirling since we saw them in the lobby, my mother’s deft stare, concern and agitation puckering at the corners of her mouth. She was shaken by the sight of Theo’s hand in mine; the woman I’ve become, the secrets I carry. But she carries them too—I can feel the strain of them in her eyes.
Theo and I are back in our room, and I sit at the edge of the bed, my shirt drawn up, while Theo peels away the gauze and white cloth from my wound, revealing stitches and a surgically clean incision. It’s a small opening, the place where the bullet tore through the layer of flesh and wedged itself against my lower ribs. If Parker had been any closer to me, if his gun wasn’t so old, so rarely fired, perhaps the bullet might have traveled deeper into my torso. Hit organs that could have killed me. I got lucky, I guess.