Instead, she walked over and gently touched my cheek, the same way she had at eighteen before dawn stole her from me.
“Sleep,” she said.
“Savannah.”
She paused.
“I would have come for you.”
Her face crumpled.
“I know,” she whispered. “That’s what hurts.”
After she left, I sat in the dark with the glass of water untouched.
At 4:02 a.m., my phone buzzed.
A text from Savannah.
“I got home. No one intercepted this message.”
I stared at it until my eyes burned.
Then I wrote back.
“I remember everything now.”
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Finally, her reply came.
“Then don’t let me disappear this time.”
I didn’t sleep.
At sunrise, Rachel arrived with coffee, groceries, and the expression of a woman ready to interrogate a corpse.
She looked at my bandages, then at the second coffee cup on the table.
“Did she stay?”
“No.”
“But you wanted her to.”
“Yes.”
Rachel sighed and sat in the only chair.
“Caleb,” she said, “love that survives in your imagination for fifteen years can become dangerous. You have to learn who she is now, not just who she was then.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I showed her Savannah’s text.
Rachel read it twice. Her face softened despite herself.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“That poor woman.”
“Me too?”
“No. You’re an idiot. But yes, you too.”
Over the next week, Savannah and I texted like people building a bridge over a canyon.
Slowly.
Carefully.
No grand promises. No midnight declarations. She told me Dr. Price had opened a formal investigation into Grant’s conduct. I told her my motorcycle was totaled and my sister was celebrating like it had personally wronged her. She told me her mother called sixteen times in one day. I told her my mother cried when she heard Savannah’s name because she remembered how sad I had been that summer.
Then, on the eighth night, Savannah asked if she could come over.
She arrived carrying a shoebox.
And my past was inside it.
PART 6
The shoebox was pale blue, faded at the corners, with a water stain across the lid.
Savannah held it with both hands as if it contained something fragile and living. She stood in my doorway wearing jeans, a gray sweater, and no makeup. She looked younger without the hospital badge, and more exhausted.
“I almost turned around six times,” she said.
“I almost cleaned.”
She looked past me at the apartment. “Almost is generous.”
“I’m injured.”
“You were messy before the crash, weren’t you?”
“Allegedly.”
She smiled, but it didn’t last.
I stepped aside. “Come in.”
By then, I had purchased a second chair. Rachel called it a red flag. I called it furniture. Savannah noticed immediately and ran her fingers over the back of it.
“You bought another chair.”
“I needed somewhere for guests to sit.”
“Guests?”
“Very exclusive list.”
She lowered her eyes, and I saw the blush she tried to hide.
We sat on the balcony because the evening was warm. San Diego stretched around us in gold windows and distant traffic. Savannah placed the shoebox between us on the small table.
“For fifteen years,” she said, “I thought these were proof that I had been foolish.”
She opened the lid.
Inside were three envelopes, never mailed. My name written across each one in teenage handwriting.