Instinct

15. Sink or Swim (The Final Goodbye)

He had grown.

With light stubble on his face, clean-shaven, that accented the ever-present angles of his face, Daniel had not grown any less tall and thin than when Stephanie had first met him.

Stephanie couldn’t remember a smile ever gracing his face in the time they’d spent together, not this boyish grin, not this simple happiness. In the time that she’d been gone he’d bulked up a little. No longer was he the pole of a boy who had the world on his shoulders.

No, he looked happy.

And the fact that Stephanie felt a deep disconnect with that was awful. She was wonderstruck by it, this transformation. Suddenly, all of the confidence she’d faked and the walls she’d fabricated fell away in the face of true happiness.

It took him a minute to recognize her. His eyes lost that sparkling quality as he regarded the stranger in front of him. She understood, she really did. With these damn flinty blue eyes and the weight still failing to hang onto her and the short, dark hair, she knew that she hardly recognized herself. And when the recognition finally dawned, his eyes were that stormy grey once again, confused and dark.

The disbelief in his eyes, the haunted melancholy of his gaze stole into her heart. Uncomfortably, she remembered the same look that she’d gotten nearly a year ago.

Here he was. After all those times she held on to memories of him, fabricated wholly and misremembered completely, and he was standing right there in front of her. Close enough to touch, far enough away that she could hardly bare to reach over.

What right did he have? Looking at her like that.

He had betrayed her, had put her in that awful place. She was so terribly, awfully naïve and messed up that she had fantasized about the boy who had cast her out and sent her to the wolves.

Stephanie didn’t really know what she’d expected him to say, but she didn’t expect this silence either.

“Hey, Daniel,” she said.

She struggled not to flinch at how timid, how quiet her voice sounded. Not for the first time, she wondered what she was doing standing there on this porch, waiting fruitlessly for time to reverse so that it would feel more natural, less like she was intruding on a life that was no longer hers.

“What are you doing here?”

He sounded just as spooked as she did, his voice lowered as if he was afraid that someone else would hear. That stung, right down to the core.

Stephanie didn’t really know why she was here. It had been a shot in the dark, and she wasn’t sure what she’d expected. No, that was a lie. She’d hoped for some closure, something. A sign that she had actually had a life before all of this that she could return to. But obviously that had been more wishful thinking on her part than a rational line of thought.

“I,” she said, heat prickling in her eyes. “I don’t know.”

His brow creased and he sighed, pinching the bridge of his noise. Stephanie felt ill. She ran a hand through her short waves.

“No, seriously, Stephanie,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I… was wondering if you still had my car.”

His face twisted, like he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Stephanie wasn’t entirely sure which she would pick either, but it was strange, seeing this level of shock from the unshakable Daniel Seymour. She looked down at the ground, unable to meet his eyes.

“Where were you?”

It was awful. The way his voice could still pierce her right down to her core, commanding her attention more than anything ever had. If there was any doubt that she was still Stephanie Armstrong, it was quelled the moment that she felt something within her snap. What right did he have to look at her like that? To ask her that as if all of this wasn’t his fault?