THE VISION IS A PLACE | ✓ {complete}

Chapter 57 : mess

     The storm has passed by the time we make it back to the farm. Blue lipped and shivering, Brandon gets out of the truck before the wheels even stop. With his arms wrapped tight around his body, and his chin to his chest, he goes into the house.

The rest of us continue in our silence and follow him in, no one quite in stride with anyone else, except for Heath and Addison. They're shoulder to shoulder, talking low.

I lag behind and take shelter against the wall next to the front door, under the roof's small overhang. I don't want to go in yet.

There are voices on the other side, but I tune them out and focus instead on the lilac flowers, heavy and drooping from the rain. A bee crawls out of the centre of one, and perches itself on a petal, trying to dry its wings. I tell myself this moment, with this bee, is the only real thing; more real than whatever is going to happen when I walk inside. If it gets to be too much in there, I can just come back here.

This sky doesn't care what happened today, and the insects won't holding anything against me, and these post-rain negative ions can sometimes feel like love.

It's not long before Addison is at the door.

"Family meeting," is all he says.

In the kitchen, it feels later than it is; the natural light from the window is making faces look pale, and the corners of the room look like black holes. Jai is bent over with the news of what happened. Anna is holding back tears and Brandon is trying to do the same.

She reaches to put on a pot of tea, but changes her mind. Tea won't help this.

"I don't get it," Jai says. "Who was looking for him? Who knew he'd be there?"

These questions are shared by the others. Accusations get passed around the room. Brandon is the first to suggest it was Aurora. That's the theory that spawns the longest debate, but the only ones debating it are Jai, Anna and Brandon. As they theorize about how she pulled it off and why, and when/if Noah will come back, and what this means for us, Addison locks eyes with me. He's sitting alone at the table. His hands rub down his face, pulling slightly at his bottom lids. He holds it there for a second, his eyes artificially wide.

He has reached some kind of end.

I'm crawling out of my skin.

"I told you we couldn't trust her," Jai says to Heath, accusingly. "It's always the quiet ones. I told you to get rid of her sooner. You never listen!"

Heath is at a loss for words.

"If it was her then he'll just come back, right?" Brandon asks. "It's not like they had burning love. They just had drunk sex that one night. She didn't even fight to stay here—he could be back by tomorrow."

"Could it have been anyone else?" Anna asks, withstanding Brandon's hollow hope.

A few shoulders shrug. It's too fresh to think clearly.

"Maybe he told someone he was coming here in the beginning," Anna suggests. "In case he wasn't one hundred percent sure of us at first."

"Why would an old friend come for him now? A year later?" Jai argues.

"Noah didn't have anyone like that," Heath says.

"How do we know that for sure though?" Anna asks.

"If he had anyone—anyone at all—he wouldn't have sent that first email to me. He wouldn't have come here. He felt like he was out of options."

Heath doesn't explicitly say it, but what he means is that him writing back saved Noah's life. At the time—the night he sent the message—it was either this, or jail, or death. He was that alone.