I took her in, my heart expanding. I’d thought her selfish and vacuous at one point and been completely wrong. Or…if she’d begun traveling down that road because of the people surrounding her and the life she lived, this situation had exposed the deeper parts of her. The girl I remembered who cried when one of the barn cat’s kittens died, the one who’d tried to love me when I’d been unlovable. I took her face in my hands and risked a moment on this dangerous street to kiss her lips. It felt vital. It felt like it might be one of the only things powerful enough to give us the strength to continue on.

We exited the alley and kept walking, staying as far away from the people we saw on the streets as possible. We couldn’t say yes to anyone asking for food again. To do so would jeopardize Emily more than I was willing to.

I couldn’t help remembering the day we’d walked into Silver Creek two weeks and a million years ago. Then, we’d been worried, lost, but had been taken into a town just beginning to enact a plan of action. LA was already mostly hollowed out, the flood of people who’d called this city home streaming into the countryside. For a while anyway. I wondered how long it would take before most of those people were dead. Because the country had resources, but only so many. And we’d arrived at the point where few were willing to share.

We turned the corner onto my uncle’s street and my heart sunk when I saw all red x’s on the doors. “Fuck,” I breathed as we stopped in front of the chain-link fence. I grasped its handle, knowing the metallic scent it would leave on my palm. I’d entered this gate when I was seventeen years old, a scowl on my face and a broken heart. And he’d been standing on the porch, his shoulder leaned against the post holding up the small overhang, arms crossed and looking at me like he had my number. And he did. He’d watched me self-destruct and he might have been disappointed, but he’d never seemed surprised.

Because he’d been there.

But the x on his door told me he might not be anymore.

How will I ever find you now?

Still, I had to see. I had to know for sure.

“I need you to crouch down behind that fence, Emily,” I said, turning to the wooden fence across the way that led to a park that was as old and broken down as it’d been when I’d lived here. Despite that, kids had played there, but it was empty now.

“No, I want—”