I open my eyes and find Callie standing in the doorway. I can’t hide my smile; it’s good to see her. “At least you didn’t liken me to a lizard on a rock or something.”
She sits down in the chair across from me and passes over a shopping bag. But I’m not interested in what she’s brought me to wear; I’m more interested in my friend and how, despite the months in between the last time we hung out, it feels like time has barely moved at all.
At least this relationship has not deteriorated for the worse.
“Cal—”
“You know,” she says, as if I haven’t spoken at all, “Annar in the spring is really beautiful. Don’t you think?”
I know she doesn’t want to talk about spring, though. “I missed you,” I tell her.
She leans back in the chair and studies me, her green eyes narrowing. Nell trots over and licks her hand. “Good gods, girl. Why is it still this trashy blonde?”
“I guess I haven’t gotten around to finding a good hair stylist to do it.” I tug on the ends, now scraping my shoulders. “I didn’t want to risk doing a poor job at home. Any recommendations?”
She pulls out her phone. “Is today too early?”
I can’t help but laugh. So many things have changed, but not Callie Lotus—and for that I am so grateful. I sit back as she calls in a favor to get me into her hair stylist.
When she’s done, she shoves her phone back into her purse before leaning back in the chair. “What you did was really shitty, Chloe.”
I totally deserve that.
She drums her fingers across her stomach. “I mean—you bailed on me that day. Left me to the wolves when I couldn’t produce you afterward. So, I’m kind of torn here. Part of me wants to kick your ass for what you put us all through, and the other just wants to hug you because I’ve been worried as all hell.”
I think I already know, but I ask anyways. “Wolves?”
“What do you know so far of what went down once you left?”
I scrub my face. Gods. Facing up to one’s actions is no easy task. “I have bits and pieces. Mind filling me in?”
As she has done in the past, Callie doesn’t soft shoe around the bitter truth. She tells me how, once Jonah came home and found my purse and phone left behind, he immediately called her. And then, when she couldn’t produce me, he called Kellan and from there, they went to every single one of their houses to search for me. Days went by, no news came, and the Guard became involved. Jonah proceeded to tear apart my apartment, and when he found my ring, the shit truly hit the fan. People were scared that I’d been attacked by the Elders, but she says that Jonah and Kellan always knew differently. From the moment he found my ring, Callie says Jonah knew what I’d done.
My heart breaks when I hear her tell me, in a clinical voice, of how he desperately tried to hold it together for work. That Astrid constantly worried about him, how she tried to get him to move in with her but he balked, claimed he didn’t want to inconvenience anyone any further than he already had. Of how they finally convinced the twins to at least move in together, since Kellan was having a hard time, too—although, according to Callie, it wasn’t as intense as what Jonah was going through because Kellan already knew what it was like to live without his Connection.
She steps on the pieces of my heart so freshly cracked and grinds them into dust below me when she tells me how Jonah basically slid into some kind of robo-mode and threw himself into work. She tried to talk to him about it, Astrid, too—even Kellan, but two months into my absence, he simply stopped talking about me in any capacity other than directives toward the Guard’s search to find me.
As for Kellan—Kellan did what Kellan has always done when dealing with his pain.
When she’s done, I tell her, “I love him.”
Her eyebrows lift up.
“Jonah, I mean.” I’m well aware my smile is brittle, and that I’m declaring this to another person who lost their heart to him at a young age, one that even today may still feel that way. “I realized it in Alaska. Realized . . . no matter what I feel for Kellan—who I still and always will love desperately, make no mistake about that—it’s nothing compared to the need I have for Jonah. My life is crazy, and I know it sounds weird, but he’s been the only true consistency my entire life. He’s my rock when everything else is upside down . . . and . . . I love him, Cal. I came home, ready to tell him that, but now he wants nothing to do with me.” I lean my head back against the couch and stare up into the puffy white clouds in a pale blue sky. “Which, in a way, is exactly what I deserve after what I’ve done.”
I hear rather than see her sigh.
Tentatively, hopefully—“How is he now? Do you know?”
“The same. A work-a-holic. He’s on the Elders Subcommittee, you know.”