The siren was the only thing I could hear clearly.
Everything else came through underwater, the paramedic’s mouth moving, my own voice answering questions I didn’t remember being asked. The ambulance rocked hard with every turn, the driver taking them too fast on purpose, and every one of them went straight through me.
Across from me, someone was working over Nicole, hands moving too quickly to follow, calling numbers toward the front. Her hand was somewhere near mine and then not near mine at all. There was blood on my hands and I didn’t know if it was mine or hers. I kept saying her name like it would keep her in the ambulance with me, like if I said it enough she wouldn’t slip past the edge of it.
I felt us stop before I understood it. The brakes, the lurch, everything sliding forward. Then the doors flew open into white light and hands, more hands than I could count, a team already waiting at the curb.
They took Nicole first. A wall of scrubs closed around her gurney, and she disappeared into them before I could finish saying whatever I’d been trying to say. Someone said something about blood pressure dropping, saying OR, saying now, words that meant nothing and everything at the same time. I tried to lift up and follow her but an arm caught me across the chest and a voice told me I needed to let them work.
Then somebody was pulling my gurney the other way, and the fight went out of me somewhere in that hallway. I remember it tilting, and then it wasn’t the same hallway anymore, it was a different set of lights, a different set of hands, someone cutting my shirt away from the shoulder I hadn’t even realized was still bleeding. The voices went back underwater then and it all went black.
The noise came first. A steady, mechanical beeping of a monitor, somewhere close to my head. My mind reached for that sound before anything else. Next the oxygen tube in my nose.
Then the smell. Antiseptic and recycled air with something metallic underneath that no amount of cleaning ever fully reached.
My head throbbed, dull and heavy, the kind of headache that only comes from anesthesia and pain meds. My shoulder was wrapped tight with my arm strapped against my chest. The pain was a deep, burning ache, muffled from the Dilaudid flowing through the IV in my other arm. When I tried to shift, even a little, the pain shot up and I decided against it.
A nurse moved at the far edge of the room.
A doctor came and spoke in the measured way of someone who had delivered this kind of news enough times that the words had found their own groove. I listened. I answered what needed answering.
Then I asked the only question that mattered.
The pause before the answer had its own weight.
She’s in surgery. That’s all we have right now.
I laid my head back and caught a glimpse of a man sitting in a chair against the wall. A stranger in a wrinkled button down with a notepad closed on his knee.
The man in the chair waited until they’d gone. He introduced himself as a detective, younger than I expected, patient in the practiced way of someone who did this often enough to know pushing too hard closed people up faster than waiting did. He’d been there when I came out of surgery, he said, in case I woke up and remembered something. He asked me to walk him through the shooting, from the beginning, whenever I felt ready.
I opened my mouth and nothing came out in the right order. I got as far as her name, Lola, before something in my throat locked up entirely, and I was unable to make the rest of the sentence exist. He waited. Then he told me it was fine, we could do it in pieces, he’d come back.
Lying there with the detective’s card beside me and Nicole somewhere in the hospital I couldn’t get to, the truth finally caught up with me. Love doesn’t always turn into destruction all at once. Sometimes it happens so slowly that nobody notices until it’s too late.
Six hours earlier, I was sitting in Nicole’s driveway trying not to look too eager.
Nicole’s house sat at the end of a short block. It was small and well kept, the kind of place that looked like someone actually lived there and not just slept there between other things. There was a little garden along the walkway, nothing fancy, just terra cotta pots lined up under the front window. Parsley. Thyme. A rosemary bush that had gotten a little wild and clearly hadn’t been trimmed back in a while.
I was fifteen minutes early. I told myself I’d sit in the car and wait it out so I wouldn’t look like I’d been counting down the hours, and then I got out of the car anyway. My mom Marie always said early was on time and on time was already late.
She opened the door before I even knocked.
“I know,” she said, before I could apologize for being early. “I already knew you would be.”
She was smiling, the kind of smile that made it clear she’d been standing near the window for longer than she’d ever admit to. There was a streak of something pale on her cheek, flour maybe, or a speck of whatever she’d been working on in the kitchen, and without thinking about it I reached up and wiped it away with my thumb.
Neither of us moved for a second.
Her skin was warm under my hand and I felt the moment stretch out longer than it should have, long enough that I noticed the exact color her eyes went when she wasn’t performing anything for anyone, long enough that I became aware of my own heartbeat in a way that felt almost embarrassing. She didn’t pull back. Neither did I, not right away.
“You gonna stand out here all night,” she finally said, low, half laughing, “or you gonna come eat?”
That broke it, or it should have. It didn’t really. It just gave us both permission to pretend it had.
The inside of the house smelled like garlic and butter and something sweeter underneath, and the table was already set when we walked in, two plates, two candles, a pitcher of lemonade sweating against the wood.
Nicole went still for a second, just looking at me, whatever teasing had been in her face at the door gone out of it now.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” Then, quieter, “You look really good tonight.”
I felt my pulse pick up, quick and stubborn, and had to look down for a second to keep it from showing all over my face.
“Oh.” Nicole’s mouth curved. “So now you can’t look at me.”
I lifted my eyes back up and caught my bottom lip between my teeth, buying myself a second to find my footing.
“Give me a second,” I said. “You can’t just say something like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because, well, because uhhh.” I laughed, more at myself than at her. “I don’t know how to answer that without it sounding like too much for a first date.”
“Try me,” Nicole said. It wasn’t a question.
“Later,” I said, which wasn’t a no either, and she let me have it, like she already knew she’d get her answer eventually.
She turned back toward the kitchen then, and I trailed behind her, hovering near the doorway for a second, not sure whether I was supposed to help or sit or wait to be told. We’d never done this before and I didn’t have a script for it yet. When I reached for a dish on the counter, she caught my wrist, gentle, and said, “Tonight, you don’t have to.” Then, quieter, like she meant it more than the first part, “It’s already done, love.” She took my hand and led me the few steps to a chair she’d already pulled out.
“Sit down for me,” she said, easy, like she’d already thought this part through.
I sat, still holding onto her hand, not quite ready to let it go. She didn’t pull it away. Instead she lifted it, slow, deliberate, and pressed her lips to the back of it, her eyes on mine the whole time like she wanted to watch what it did to me.
It did plenty.
Then she leaned down, and I don’t remember deciding to meet her halfway, I just did. I remember thinking, right before her mouth met mine, that this was the first time in my life a kiss had ever felt like an answer instead of a question.
It was soft, unhurried, over before either of us was ready for it to be, and when she finally pulled back she rested her forehead against mine for a moment, neither of us in any hurry to change the moment.
“Let me take care of you tonight,” she said quietly, before she pulled back the rest of the way.
Letting her take care of me was not a thing I knew how to do gracefully. I was used to being the one who noticed what other people needed before they said it out loud. Nicole noticing what I needed before I said it out loud was a different kind of unfamiliar, one I didn’t have a name for yet.
Dinner went the way dinner with Nicole always went over the years, easy, unhurried, full of the kind of conversation that only exists between people who have actually known each other’s whole lives instead of just the parts they choose to show. We ended up back at GoMAD without either of us steering it there on purpose, Marie’s youth program at the Webb Community Center, Saturday mornings, the summer we got put on the same Habitat build crew for three weeks straight, Marie standing at the folding table during one of her etiquette classes telling both of us to slow down and taste our food instead of inhaling it like we were being timed.
“Your mama taught you to be so good to people,” Nicole said, turning her glass slowly on the table. “Grace like that isn’t normal. Most people don’t get raised like that.”
“She always said the extending it was the important part,” I said. “Even when people don’t deserve it.”
“I used to watch you do that with everybody at GoMAD and think, one day somebody’s going to actually deserve it.”
I laughed, but something in her voice had shifted again.
“Can I tell you something I never have?” Nicole asked with her eyes laser focused on mine. “I liked you back then, Kendall. For longer than I ever let myself say out loud.”
I put my fork down. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“Kendall.” She looked at me like the answer should have been obvious. “You were fourteen. I was eighteen. I wasn’t about to be the grown woman chasing a child, even a child I liked more than I had any business liking. And then you got older and I still didn’t say anything, because by then it felt like too much time had already gone by pretending it was just friendship, and I didn’t know how to undo that without losing you altogether.”
“So you just decided to like me quietly for a decade.”
“I decided to let you have your life,” she said. “I wasn’t going to be the reason you second guessed something that hadn’t even happened yet.”
I didn’t have anything smart to say back to that. I just sat there and let it land, the years of it, the whole shape of a thing that had been sitting patiently under every phone call and every holiday and every time she showed up for me without me having to ask.
We moved to the couch after that, plates cleared, candles burned halfway down, her legs tucked under her and my arm along the back of the cushions like it had always lived there. I want it on the record that I had never been that happy in my whole life. Whatever came after, for about twenty minutes on that couch, I had never been that happy.
Then her thumb stopped moving against my knee. I hadn’t noticed it moving until it stopped.
“Well,” Nicole said, more to the candle than to me. “Tonight makes this harder.”
My stomach dropped, some instinct already ahead of me. “Tell me.”
She turned to face me, confidently, the way she faced everything. “I got the offer. The residency in France. Six months, starting after the new year.”
The words hit me like a ton of bricks. Earlier I had been kissed like an answer for the first time in my life, and the floor was already shifting under it. I did not let any of that reach my face.
“Nicole. That’s everything you’ve worked for.” My voice came out calm and generous, the voice I had practiced my whole life. “You should take it. I’m not going to be the reason you hesitate.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s still the answer.”
Something in her face softened instead of hardening, like she had expected exactly this. “You’ve been doing that since you were a kid,” she said. “Handing people the easy way out before they even have to ask for one. I love that about you. I’m just not letting you do it to me tonight.” She took my hand and laced our fingers. “I already said yes. It was the right answer for my life. But I didn’t tell you so you could hand me a clean exit. I told you because I want this, and I want you, and I’m done pretending those two things can’t both be true.”
“It’s an ocean, Nicole.”
“I know exactly how far it is. I’m the one getting on the plane. So tell me the truth, not the generous version. Do you want to try, or are you already halfway to giving up so you don’t have to hope?”
The question went all the way through me.
“It’s hard,” I said finally. “Tonight felt like something I’ve been waiting on for a long time, and now there’s a clock on it before it even gets to breathe. That’s hard to sit with.” I held her eyes. “I want to try.”
Something eased in her face. “I needed to hear you say it was hard first.”
“Then let’s find out,” I said.
Her smile arrived without permission and took over her whole face. She touched my jaw with her fingertips, light and certain. “I’m coming back.”
“I know.”
“I need you to actually know that.”
I covered her hand with mine. “I know,” I said again, and meant it.
“Now you have a reason to come to France,” she said.
“I had reasons before.”
“Name one.”
“You,” I said simply.
This time there was no wondering who moved first. The second kiss carried everything the first had opened and everything the conversation had made honest, slower and steadier, like something being settled instead of discovered. It didn’t last nearly long enough.
The car alarm went off outside hard and sudden, that particular shriek that yanks you fully out of your body, and we broke apart already moving toward the window out of instinct before either of us had said a word.
My car was sitting crooked in the driveway with the driver’s side window shattered in, glass catching the porch light, and Lola was standing right beside it like she had every reason in the world to be there.
I felt Nicole go still beside me.
“Kendall, don’t,” she said. “Don’t go out there and entertain that.”
I went anyway.
She had her arms crossed, watching me come toward her with that same unbothered little tilt to her chin she always had, like the world existed to accommodate whatever she’d decided to do that day. I wasn’t scared. That was the thing nobody ever seemed to understand about Lola once you’d been through enough rounds with her. I was tired, the particular tired that comes from being tired of somebody for longer than you’ve let yourself admit. This felt like one more version of the same game she’d been playing for months, showing up, breaking something, waiting to see how much of a reaction she could pull out of me.
“Really,” I said. “This is what we’re doing tonight.”
“You weren’t answering your phone.”
“I wasn’t answering my phone because I don’t answer your calls anymore, Lola. That’s not a mystery you need to solve with a brick.”
“I didn’t use a brick.”
“I don’t care what you used.” I crossed my arms to match hers, refusing to give her the satisfaction of looking rattled. “You need to leave. This isn’t your house, it isn’t your business, and I am done doing this with you.”
Something in her face tightened at that, and she said my name low, almost soft, the way she used to say it back when soft still worked on me.
“Go home to your husband, Lola.”
It used to work. Reminding her out loud that she had a whole life she kept choosing to go back to used to snap her out of whatever she’d worked herself into, and she’d leave, and we would both pretend it hadn’t happened.
Not tonight.
“You don’t move forward from people like they never mattered,” she said.
“I never said you didn’t matter.”
“Then why does it feel like you’re burying me alive?”
Every conversation with her became emotional quicksand. You walked in with logic, trying to explain yourself, and somehow ended up drowning in her feelings before you even realized what had happened. With Lola, emotions always arrived fully formed. Nothing was ever halfway.
I didn’t answer that. I’d heard that voice do too much damage to fall for it again.
The blast of the shot came before I even saw her raise her arm, and it took the window behind me out in one clean burst, glass raining down onto the porch steps. I flinched hard, more from the sound than anything, my ears ringing, and somewhere behind me I heard the front door fly open.
“I wanted her to stay inside,” I said, to myself.
“What the hell?” I yelled at Lola.
Lola’s arm dropped back down to her side like the shot itself had scared her as much as it scared me, and for a second she just stood there breathing hard, the gun loose in her hand instead of raised. “I just wanted to talk to you,” she said, and her voice cracked on it, something almost pleading underneath the wreckage. “That’s all I ever wanted.”
“You don’t get to talk to me anymore.” I kept my voice even, flat, refusing her the drama she was fishing for. “You don’t get to show up at my life anymore.”
She said something else after that, quieter, something about how none of this would have happened if I’d just answered her the first time, but I’d already stopped listening. I saw Nicole step out onto the porch behind me, barefoot, scanning the yard for me with a kind of panic I’d never seen on her face before, and every part of my attention left Lola and went straight to her.
Lola saw her too. Her eyes left me and moved over my shoulder to the porch, to Nicole standing in the porch light, and something in her expression changed. Not anger. Something worse.
“You moved on already?” she said, barely above a whisper.
“Nicole.” I turned toward the porch, already moving, already done with whatever Lola still had left to say. “I’m okay, stay back, I’m okay.”
I didn’t see what her face did next. I only heard it, the shift in her breathing gone ragged and fast again, the calm she’d just found dissolving as fast as it had come.
The second shot hit me in the back and it spun me half around before my legs understood what had happened to them. The third came almost on top of it, and that one wasn’t for me. I turned in time to see Nicole go down on the porch steps, her hand flying to her chest, blood already finding its way between her fingers.
I rushed to her without really knowing how I made it. I remember the ground under my knees and her weight against me. My own hands useless and red, pressing down on something I didn’t know how to fix, saying her name like it was the only word I still had.
That was the end.
This is where it began.
