Once We Were

“Eva?” Josie said. I looked up. Both Josie and Vince had turned in their seats to stare at me. We’d parked.

“You okay?” Vince asked.

“I’m fine.” I moved to get out of the car, carefully shifting the oxygen tank so it lay flat on the floor. It was a little less than three feet long, maybe half a foot in diameter. Josie and Vince climbed out, too, our doors slamming shut in quick succession. It took me a moment to absorb our surroundings. Josie had practically driven me to my doorstep.

I didn’t want to go back into that apartment building, where no doubt Emalia was waiting for me. Maybe Dr. Lyanne and Henri and Peter, too.

And Ryan. What would Ryan think?

The anger powering me before had drained away, leaving me a husk of guilt.

But I had to face them all sometime. I’d run as long as I could.

“Hi, Eva,” Sophie said when I knocked. I wasn’t sure who felt more uncomfortable, her or me. Kitty and Nina were nowhere to be seen, so either they were hiding in our room, or they’d gone up to stay with Henri.

I’d expected Sophie to be angry, though I’d never seen her that way. She wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t seem mad, either. The coffee machine beeped.

“It’s decaf,” Sophie said, seeing the look on my face. “You want some?”

Always, she’d asked, and always, Addie and I had said no.

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t really know what to do with myself as Sophie poured the coffee. She asked if I took milk and sugar, and I nodded. She set the mugs down on the dining table.

She sat. I sat. The coffee steamed between us, heady and sweet. My heart thudded so hard I could feel it knocking against my ribs. Harder, it seemed, than it had back at Benoll, talking to the doctor.

Sophie brought her mug toward her lips, but set it down again without actually taking a sip. “I didn’t know you were friends with Josie.”

How much did she know? Only three people could have told her anything—Kitty, Hally, and Ryan.

Ryan knew where I was tonight, but no matter how angry he was at being left behind, he wouldn’t reveal anything.

Hally and Lissa? I doubted it. Not after they’d promised. Which left Kitty and Nina. They’d promised silence, too, but they were only eleven, and probably frightened.

“I ran into her,” I said. It wasn’t all lie.

If Addie had been here, she and I could have spoken to each other, at least. Between the two of us, we’d have figured out how to act and what to say.

“Eva?” Sophie asked. I looked up. “Is Addie here right now?”

Dr. Lyanne must have told her about my outburst. Slowly, I shook my head.

She nodded. “I just wanted to say that Emalia and I do understand what it’s like to fight with someone inside your own head. And we know what it’s like, not always being in control of your own body. How discomforting it can be to wake up and not know where you are or what has been happening the last few hours. We should have made it more clear that if you ever need anyone to talk with, or want to ask anything, we’re here for that. Okay?”

She kept trying to meet my eyes, but I could only manage it for a few seconds before looking away. I’d rather her be angry than hear her blame herself—or feel guilty, or whatever this was. This sounded like something a mother might say in a television show, only Sophie was far too young, too unfamiliar, too different to be my mother. Of course, my mother could never say what Sophie had just said, because my mother didn’t know any of those things. She never would.

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

Neither of us touched our drinks. She doesn’t know about the plan, I thought. Sophie thought this was just a one-time thing, that Addie and I had fought and I ran off, and that was the end of the story.

But why would she think differently? How could she even imagine what we were planning, let alone that I was a part of it?

“I need to talk with Ryan,” I said, “and it’s getting late.”

Immediately after saying it, I wished I hadn’t. Even to my own ears, it sounded rude. I could never say what I wanted to say just the way I wanted to say it. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? For so many years, I’d never had to wonder what I should and shouldn’t say aloud. I’d fed words to Addie sometimes, and felt superior about knowing what to say when she was too flustered to speak.

But it was different actually being in control. I’d spent so long watching Addie live. What if watching hadn’t been enough? What if I was doomed to be behind forever, stuck in some childhood I’d never actually gotten the chance to live? What else was I screwing up?

Maybe it was a deeper problem. Maybe I really had been meant to fade away. Maybe the universe simply hadn’t been meant to contain one Eva Tamsyn. Not for so many years.

If Sophie was angered or hurt by my words, she hid it. “Okay.”

I felt like I should say something more. Thank her, maybe, for what she’d said. For being kind, because she had been kind. Because she hadn’t had to take us into her home, but she’d done it. She’d hidden us when even my own parents hadn’t.

That wasn’t fair to think. Everything felt so awkward, my tongue lying useless in my mouth.

“Sorry,” I said instead.

I left it up to her what I was sorry for, and fled.

I’d spent my conversation with Sophie wishing for Addie’s company. But now, as I stood outside Henri’s door, I was infinitely glad she wasn’t here. Some conversations were better undertaken alone.

I took a deep breath and knocked. One, two, three, four, five, six seconds passed.

“Hi,” I said quietly when Ryan opened the door. He didn’t smile, like he usually did when he saw me. He didn’t invite me inside. He came out instead, and shut the door behind him.

“Did you get it?” His voice was quiet.

I nodded. I tried to read his expression. But he must have learned well after sharing a lifetime with Devon. He betrayed nothing.

He was studying my face, too. Was I a more open book? “Everyone’s okay?”

“Yeah, everyone’s fine.” My fingernails dug into my palm. “It happened really fast, Ryan. I came back and ran into Dr. Lyanne, and it—it got hectic.”

“What were you doing outside?” His voice was controlled, but I could tell it was a question he’d been waiting to ask.

It was also one I wasn’t entirely prepared to answer. It wasn’t something I could think about without feeling phantom hands on my body, and the foreign warmth of another boy’s skin. I’d felt his teeth graze my lip before I pulled away.

“I don’t know.” I took a deep breath. “I wasn’t the one who left. Addie was. And now she’s gone, and she won’t talk to me, so—”

Ryan frowned. We’d both kept our voices to a whisper—we had to—but his raised a little now. “She let you wake up somewhere by yourself and then abandoned you? Where did you wake up?”

I took his arm, reminded him with a look that we couldn’t be overheard. I thought, No, I woke up kissing Jackson, and then she abandoned me. But maybe I was the one who abandoned her first, because I was too selfish to think about what she wanted while I ran after my own goals.

No matter what I tried to tell myself, I was lonely without Addie. We’d taken our first breath in unison. The face in the mirror was hers as much as mine. The faint scars on our hands from the coffee we’d spilled at eight, the cuts from the windows we’d smashed at fifteen. They were ours.

“It’s just something between Addie and me, okay?” I said quietly. Ryan hesitated, his eyes sweeping over me, before moving back to my face. But he nodded. He accepted it, because he was hybrid, too, and he understood. “Vince arrived, and with Dr. Lyanne and Henri upstairs, I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t come get you. And