clothes and the things she’d left behind. Then she came back to me, sentimental toward the past, emotional because of the furniture. She stood there and looked at me. “I can’t believe we’re here.”
“I know.”
She came to me and hugged me again, the only person in the world that I had who knew exactly how it felt to be a prisoner in a labor camp. She was the only person who understood the trial that had tested us both. She pulled away, tears dripping from her eyes down her cheeks. “How did you get away?”
“Him.”
Her eyes softened. “I can’t believe what he did for you.”
“Neither can I.”
She pulled away and looked at the open doorway. “Where is he?”
I’d been so focused on her that I forgot about him. I turned around, expecting to see him standing there, but he was gone. “I’m not sure.” I left the apartment and headed back to the street.
He stood on the sidewalk outside my apartment, indifferent to the raindrops that splashed on the bridge of his nose and dampened his hair. There was no one on the sidewalk because it was late at night. With his hands in his pockets, he stood there, looking up when he knew I was on the steps.
I knew why he didn’t follow me inside, based on the look on his face.
I joined him in the rain, my clothes and hair slowly starting to dampen. I looked into his face, looking at a man I didn’t understand. He was good, but he was bad. He was a hero…but he was also the villain.
He looked at me, his brown eyes staring into my face as if he knew this was the last time we would see each other.
“Thank you…so much.” I shook my head because I didn’t know what else to say, how to express my gratitude. My life had been returned to me, exactly as it had been before those men took us outside that bar—all because of him. “I…I don’t even know how to thank you for what you’ve done for me.”
With his hands in his pockets, he continued to stare at me, but he didn’t have anything to say.
I moved closer to him and wrapped my arms around him, hugging him harder than I ever had, immune to the falling rain around us, soaking into our clothes.
He didn’t hug me back right away. That took time. Then his arms wrapped around me, and he held me against his chest, his arms locked around me like they were the final cage that would ever contain me.
We stood there for a long time. My clothes were soaked. My makeup was ruined. My hair was flat like I’d stood under the falling water of the shower. But the cold and the rain weren’t enough to make me turn around and walk back inside.
He was the one to pull away first, to release his hold on my body and step back slightly, his brown eyes softer than they’d ever been before. His heart was bright in the look, the goodness shining through his eyes.
There was no future for us. We were two people from two different worlds, our lives crossing unexpectedly and for a brief time. He would go back to his underworld, and I would walk to my coffee shop every morning on the way to class. The scars were permanent, so I would always have a piece of him, always remember the man who saved my life. His scars would carry my ghost as well.
We would just be ghosts to each other…to these memories.
But that was how it had to be, because we were too different.
He pulled his touch away and gave me a slight nod. “Live well. Be happy.”
Tears welled up in my eyes, and my bottom lip quivered because those words hit me with unexpected pain. My hands were still on his arms because I wasn’t ready to let go yet, to release the only person who had ever taken care of me.
He pulled his hands back and walked off.
I watched him go, standing in the rain, unable to leave until he left first.
He got into the car.
The door shut.
The engine roared.
If he looked at me, it was impossible to tell, because the windows were tinted.
Then he drove away, the tires splashing through the puddles.
When he was gone, I finally turned back to my apartment…as a free woman.
23
Survivor’s Guilt
We returned to our lives.
We finished the laundry, bought groceries, cleaned the apartment, all the things we used to