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the phone.
Just stop it.
    Claire shut off the ringer, tucked the phone under her pillow, and tried very, very hard not to cry.
    She’d never felt so abandoned, or so lonely, in her life.

C HAPTER T HREE
     
     

S HANE
     
    It hadn’t taken me long to pack most of my crap up. Truthfully, I didn’t have that much; I wasn’t a fashion victim like Eve – hell, even Michael had more clothes than I did – or a collector of stuff. A few well-aged tees, some jeans that had seen the worst of acids and bloodstains and buckshot, and not in that fancy-ass designer way. More the ‘I survived that’ way.
    I decided to ditch the stereo – it was a third-hand ancient thing anyway, and cheap – and that was the biggest thing I owned, besides weapons.
    It was the weapons that were going to be tricky. A shotgun weighs a decent amount. Throw in multiple other deadly sharp things, some stakes, a couple of crossbows, and you’ve got a problem … particularly if you’re planning on having no fixed address for a while. In other words, I had to pick what I could easily carry in the battered camping backpack my dad had once used for the same purpose. Turned out that minus the clothes, my phone, some basic stuff for not smelling gross, the pack weighed about fifty pounds when I finally got it on to test it.
    Doable. Soldiers pack that much plus body armour, and I wasn’t exactly humping it through the mountains of Afghanistan.
    As I shucked the backpack and leant it against the wall, I sensed someone watching me … and I was right. Michael. ‘Can’t talk you out of this,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question.
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘You’re sure this is the right thing to do.’
    ‘Yep. You and the missus need some alone time. Last thing you need is me hanging around here like the new house ghost, haunting Claire’s room. Besides, man, I don’t do emo.’
    ‘I never said you had to go.’
    ‘Never had to,’ I said, and checked my phone again. No calls. Every time I checked and I didn’t see Claire’s name, I felt the dark, jagged ball of anxiety inside get a little bigger, choke me a little more. ‘You giving me a ride to the border or what?’
    ‘Shane—’
    I gave him a long look, and he shut up. ‘We’ve been through a lot, Michael, but I’m not going to collapse into your manly arms and cry about it, okay? I already said I don’t blame you. I don’t. It’s not your fault she left us … it’s mine. I should have trusted her more. I should have believed in
you
more. I got some things to make up for, not just to her but to you. And it’s probably better I do that away, so you and Eve can get to feel actually married without me lurking around in the background.’ That still hurt, the idea I was holding them back; I knew that was part of why Claire had decided to go, too. But he and Eve
did
need alone time. It was just truth, hard as it was.
    ‘I’ll give you a ride,’ Michael said. He walked over to my backpack and picked it up like I’d loaded it up with feathers. ‘You got weapons in here?’
    ‘A few.’
    ‘You know that it’ll get your ass arrested out there, right?’
    ‘Only if I’ve got really bad luck, or I decide to hold up a liquor store with ’em.’
    ‘You are a cocky bastard, did I ever tell you that, bro?’
    I flashed him a grin. ‘Did you really think you needed to?’
    He backslapped me as he passed me. ‘Come on, criminal. Eve will kill me if I don’t let her say goodbye.’
    ‘Oh man, that means she’s gonna cry. Again.’
    ‘Like a river,’ he assured me. ‘Good thing you wore a black shirt. That mascara never comes out.’
    I stopped him at the top of the stairs, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Then he set the backpack down, and hugged me hard. No need for words or speeches or anything like that; he just offered me a fist to bump, I bumped, we were good.
    And then we went downstairs to where Eve was pacing the floor, chewing on a neon-coloured thumbnail.