Karen doesn’t make her come home - not this time. They’re already in San Francisco, she murmurs ( too close to being within earshot of the boys she imagines ), after they saw the news they had gone. They had been trying to figure how to get into her apartment, how to begin arranging for her funeral. There’s a relief in knowing she’s okay. But she knows that edge in her sister’s voice. Claire knows without asking that there’s something still wrong - something that won’t be handled with only knowing that she is alive. That she made it. She survived again.
It takes her almost a day to get home, leaving Maisie with Owen at a barely finished cabin hadn’t been her choice but the boys - she had to go. The plan had been to go to her place first, hotel second but she takes a wrong turn and changes her mind. She doesn’t know if she was always, somewhere in the back of her mind, expecting to see him waiting for her. Because she’s not surprised to see him sitting, alone, in the lobby. Her chest constricts tightly and for a moment she can’t breath. Maybe some part of her still believed that they would have been gotten lost in the chaos again. That she wouldn’t be able to find them.
❝ Zach. ❞
@dinohearted. ( a starter you didn’t ask for but are absolutely getting ).