Someone asked me where the new chapter is—Bridgerton. It's at Bridgerton house (LOL).

To be honest, I was still trying to figure out the pacing. There is, as you probably know, a long time yet before that flashforward. But that's what we're all hanging on for, and because this story is going to be a LONG HAUL (are you really surprised), I decided to just go for it.

I don't see you anymore, but I see you in the mirror. – "History of a Feeling" by Madi Diaz

Claire

The water is warm and soapy on my skin. I don't take baths often. They're a hassle, really, because you just have to shower after anyway.

But I need a bath tonight. A long hot soak, long enough for the water to turn cold and the suds to disappear.

Why, you ask, do I feel like I got put through a human-sized meat tenderizer?

I went to work with Sierra today.

She works at a plant nursery exactly one point nine miles from her and Reed's bungalow. She walks there and back every single day.

In the month I've been here, I've done… actually, I can't really remember.

Some days I sit out in their back garden and stare up at the sky, thinking of my mother. Other times I will hear a song she liked and cry myself to sleep. Then there are the days where I contemplate calling Quil so long that by the time I decide, he's already asleep.

"You're coming to work with me tomorrow," Sierra said yesterday, in this no-nonsense tone she uses a lot with Reed.

So I did. I walked two miles to and from work, and somehow, it felt like those stories my grandparents used to tell: uphill both ways. My calves ached by the time we got there, and if I thought I was going to sit in a back room or behind a desk, I was sorely mistaken.

We didn't even take a break until lunch. If I wasn't following Sierra around, while she helped customers find vegetables and flowers and cacti (they sell those here), we were reloading the shelves, unloading boxes of fertilizer and rearranging produce.

My shoulders ache so bad I'm convinced the muscles have pulled away from the bone, and my lower back has been getting pounded by a sledgehammer since we started the walk home today.

I know what her angle was. She's trying to get me to re-enter normal society. Reed, too, has been trying, albeit a little subtler. Leaving a campus life packet for his university on the sideboard, or pointing out where he keeps his own surfboard if I waned to take one out.

I haven't done that yet—surf California waters. I haven't surfed since before my mother died.

My mother died, I think again. Constantly, I think it.

I miss her so much it aches, all the way down to my soul. I miss her when the sun shines because she loved it so much, and I miss her on the rare days where it's cloudy, because she would make her own light. I miss her when I listen to music and when it's quiet. I miss her when I wake and when I drift to restless sleep, and in my dreams, I miss her.

I miss her most when I look in the mirror. Seeing her features on my face. It should be a blessing to carry pieces of her with me like that. Should be but isn't. Not quite yet.

So I stopped looking in the mirror.

I miss everyone I left behind. My mother, my father, my sister, Quil.

Oh, I miss Quil.

I miss him in a different place in my heart, my body, than I miss my mother. The missing him is a different color.

Missing my mother is Black; missing Quil is blood red and raw.

We still talk, that's the thing. I talk to him every few days and I still miss him.

Just earlier today, I texted him — manual labor? Probably not for me.

He called me then, and I reflect on the sound of his voice, the tentative hope so transparent there.

"What'd you do today, Claire Bear?" he said, and that hurt, because he hasn't called me that in a long time. It made me ache for our normalcy, our regular repertoire of jabs and teasing and synonym wars and fighting. God, I even missed the fighting.

"California Katie took me to the nursery where she worked," I said. California Katie is what we call Sierra. "What about you? What's going on there?"

"Just back at work. The guys are digging the beard," he said, then coughed. "I think your dad's going back the first of the month."

"That's really good," I said. "What about Callie?"

He scoffed, and I could perfectly picture his eye roll. "She's still Callie," he said, and it explained so much and not enough.

But how could I tell him? That I ached for them. That I wanted to come home and be pulled back into the daily life of my family. That he could never tell me enough because short of getting on a plane and going home myself, nothing would ever be enough.

"How… how are you?" I said, dragging my lower lip between my teeth. It was both unsurprising and unfortunate that it didn't light me up the way it did when he did it.

"I'm actually okay," he said, then scoffed again. "I mean, I'm not. But I read my letter, and it helped me a lot. I… Yeah. It just helped."

"She always had the right words," I whispered, but he caught it anyway and made a noise of assent.

"Have you read yours?"

"Maybe tomorrow," I said too fast. "I might go to the beach."

"If you wanted, I could—" He cut himself off with a sharp inhale, but I knew him. I could finish his thought anyway.

If you wanted, I could hop on a plane. I could be there in eight hours, Claire, and you wouldn't have to read it alone. You wouldn't have to be alone again.

A selfish part of me wanted to take him up on his offer. Have him near me while I fall apart. But I still wasn't ready to accept him back into every piece of my life. Having him around for my hard stuff, my heart stuff, when I wasn't ready to do the same for him, was a line I knew even I couldn't cross, imprint or not.

"How's Bethany? And the baby?" I asked instead.

"It's a boy, did I tell you?"

And we talked about everyone and everything else, except my mother and her letters.

I wonder what he's doing right now. If he's at my house or his own. If he's in bed, watching television.

If, when the sun goes down wherever he is, if he remembers me like I remember him.

Now, in the bathtub, memories of his hot flesh against mine, inside me, rouse my heart more than anything else has in a month. My pulse makes a valiant attempt to race, and I wonder if I can relieve some of this restless tension, relax my body further.

My hand wanders, stroking my wet breasts, stomach, thighs before slipping between them.

The gasp that slips from my mouth is loud. I glance at the door, double checking the lock. Sierra and Reed usually spend their evenings on the back patio, so I feel safe enough. Still, my pulse trips over itself.

Pressing farther, I start making the little circles I like, letting my head fall back to the tub wall behind me. My neck aches, and I readjust deeper in the water. It rushes over my skin, hot like Quil.

So many things, he said to me that night. Good girl. You take me so well. And more than his words, the way he held me spoke volumes. He allowed me the space to grieve with my body.

The restless feeling in my limbs dissipates, just a fraction, and I imagine him, his erection hot in my hand, and the face he made when I gripped him tighter. The scrape of his teeth across my collarbone.

Tears in his eyes and mine.

A flash of Black behind my eyelids, and I move my hand faster, desperate to feel something other than utter darkness, even if it will be over in seconds. I need the reprieve.

But the faster I move, the more I chase it, the farther away it gets.

My body isn't working right. It seems that all I can feel is pain and sadness and death.

With a muted sob, I wrench my hand away. That's never not worked.

My chest goes tight, and I slip under the water, hoping it will turn my scream silent.

A few days later, I'm at the beach.

There is one more place in this city my mother could be. If she isn't here, she… isn't here. It's a long shot, I know, but I have to try. No place has ever felt more like my mother than the beach.

My board and backpack lay at my side, on standby in case I decide to surf.

In my hands, I clutch the letter.

She's been gone for five weeks today. Thirty-five days. Eight-hundred forty hours.

The sun warms my back, my skin exposed from my bikini top. The one I had to wear for a bra for that first week and a half, before Sierra dragged me to a clothing store and refused to let me spend my own cash on a decent bra. It made my heart hurt so much, because it was something my mother would have done.

I hope eventually I'll be able to think of those things, the things that remind me of her, and my heart will smile for having known her.

Right now my heart is just sore.

My thumb traces the lines of my name on the envelope in her handwriting.

I'm scared that whatever it is I'm looking for, I won't find in these words. That I won't find her anywhere, no matter how hard or far I look, because she's just nowhere to be found.

Out on the water, cheers go up, and a killer wave swells. I count at least ten riders, weaving in and out of each other like yarn. In La Push there are at most three at any time, and sometimes we'll even take turns to give the other space.

But this is wild and chaotic, the sky crisp and blue behind them, and I know my mother would have loved it.

I can practically hear her voice, in the whisper of the wind: those words aren't going anywhere, Claire, but waves like that don't come around every day. Go. Be.

And so I do. I put the letter back in my backpack, walk my bag back to Sierra's borrowed jeep for safekeeping, and return to the water.

Pacific water in Washington is not the same water in California. I ache—again. My body is mad at me, and I know I'll sleep like a baby tonight once I crawl into bed. I eye the tiny splotch of reef rash on my shin, a particularly hard tumble into the frothy water that had me catapulting toward the bottom, and decide I don't even care if we get those cilantro tacos for dinner, I'm sleeping through it.

But when I walk through the front door, greeted first and foremost by Marnie, her pink tongue licking delicately around that rash, that I don't think sleep is on the menu.

There are big backpacks by the hall closet, doors still open, like someone just dug them out. Hiking boots sit on the kitchen counter, scrubbed clean and drying.

Sierra and Reed are at the table, poring over a laptop together, the screen split between a map and an online guidebook.

When my backpack falls from my shoulders, it hits the floor with a thud. They look up at the sound.

"You're leaving," I realize suddenly, the words escaping as a wheeze.

Reed gives me a gentle wince. "On Friday. We put it off as long as we could."

Scooping up my backpack, I start for the guest bedroom before anyone sees me cry. I did enough of that on the beach today, and I'm dehydrated already. Sierra's graceful but prominent footsteps following behind me.

I throw open the dresser drawer and make a grab for my clean underwear. I think I have a load of clothes in the dryer. I'll have to grab them before I leave.

Sierra appears in the doorway. "Claire, he didn't mean that."

"I think he did." Hot tears scald my eyes, and I know I'm being a Capital-B Bitch right now, throwing a temper tantrum after these lovely people have welcomed me into their home for so long, but all I can think of is how much my mother loved this city, and even if she's not here, I still don't want to leave it.

I don't want to leave her behind again.

"Come with us," Sierra says, and it makes my hand pause on my bundle of socks.

"Where are you…" That's it. That's all I can manage.

She comes to sit on the edge of the bed. She told me about a week after I got here that she didn't care if I made the bed or not, but Mom would kill me if I treated a host with that much disrespect. All the little ways she's shown up for me, and I still couldn't find her enough to read that letter today.

"This time we were talking about hitting Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon before heading to Yosemite. We change it up every year."

I let out an unattractive snort. "You guys are just like Seth and Katie, I swear."

She smiles and reaches up to smooth back her crazy curls. "I'm taking that as a compliment."

"Take it however you want," I snap, then grit my teeth. "Sorry."

She doesn't say anything right away, just studies me with her intense gaze. I study the floor, the pins on my backpack. I think I lost one somewhere along the way, maybe in the airport or at the beach, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.

"Why are you here, Claire?"

I swallow the bile at the back of my throat and force myself to answer honestly. "I thought they told you. My mom…" Is this the first time I've had to say this out loud? Is that why the words catch on my tongue? I have to learn to shape them—they're shaped like glass.

Sierra doesn't make me finish my sentence. "San Diego, specifically. What are you looking for?"

"Her," I say, and even though it's a fast response it's not a lie. It's a reflex, like blinking when the sun is too bright or yawning when someone else does.

She nods, purses her lips in thought. I think if I ever had a big sister, I would want her to be like Sierra.

Callie's smiling face pops into my mind. I wonder how she's spending her summer. If she still talks to her friends or if she's withdrawn like me. She's better than me in so many ways. She won't withdraw.

"You surfed today," she notes, looking at the cut on my leg. "Did she surf?"

When I shake my head, she nods knowingly. "I've never… Well, my parents live an hour away." They're not dead, she means. "But I bet, if I had to guess, your mom would rather you do things that make you happy than things that make you sad."

I know she's right, but it almost feels like a disservice to Mom's memory, not to think of her all the time. I lost focus, forgot about her today for a split second, and the proof is etched into my skin in jagged red lines.

"Surfing makes you happy," Sierra notes.

"Surfing makes me happy," I echo. Because surfing is at the beach, and my mother loved the beach.

"There aren't any oceans in Yosemite," she says.

"No," I say, "there aren't."

The silence sits there between us, and we connect the dots between our words: I will not be coming with them.

She leaves, and I turn back to my backpack, trying to figure out how I'm going to stuff my things inside it. Pack my feelings down enough to make it to a new place where my mother does not exist.

Sierra reappears in the doorway a few minutes later, a suitcase at her side. "This is Reed's old one. Take it. All your things won't fit in that backpack."

I look at it, then at her. "Thank you," I say, for the bag and the bed and the quiet silence they have given me to sit in this space and grieve. For not asking questions. For not forcing words I don't have.

"Where will you go?" she asks, because she knows I'm not going home.

I give her a smile, an honest one this time. "I have absolutely no fucking idea."