The Last One Read Online Free PDF

the safety phrase and tears it in half. The action is symbolic—she has the phrase memorized—but no less sincere for the drama of the gesture. “So,” she says, looking at the camera with sly intensity, a smile hiding behind her straight face, “bring it on.”

3.
    I lie in my shelter well into the night, but can’t sleep for the tightness I feel everywhere—legs, shoulders, back, brow, eyes. The arches of my feet are screaming, as though only the pressure of movement kept them silent throughout the day. My rehydrated body thrums, changed and needing something more.
    Finally, I push my backpack out of the front of my shelter and crawl into the night. Leaves crunch beneath my palms and knees, and my loosened bootlaces drag like snakes. Cold air pinches my cheeks. Pausing, I hear crickets and chirping frogs. The brook, the wind. I think I can hear the unseen moon. I stand, leaving my glasses folded through a strap on my pack. Without them, my vision is a pixelated blur of alternating grays. Held at breast height, my palms are pale, their edges nearly crisp. I rub at the base of my left ring finger and relive the uneasy flutter of my heart when I removed the white gold band. I remember slipping it into its velvet-lined box and placing the box into my top dresser drawer. My husband was in the bathroom, trimming his beard into the even stubble I like best. He spoke more than I did on the drive to the airport, a role reversal. “You’re going to be amazing,” he said. “I can’t wait to watch.”
    Later, on the short flight to Pittsburgh, I sucked back sobs and pressed my forehead to the window, sharing my anxiety with the sky but not the snoring stranger to my left. It didn’t used to be so difficult to leave, but it was different before I met my husband. Before—leaving Stowe for college, that summer hiking hostel to hostel across western Europe, six months in Australia after graduating from Columbia—my fear was always tempered by excitement enough to tip the scales. Leaving was always scary, but it was never hard. But this time I not only left familiarity behind, I left happiness. There’s a difference, the magnitude of which I didn’t anticipate.

    I don’t regret New York, or Europe, or Australia. I’m not sure I regret coming here, but I do regret leaving my wedding ring behind, no matter the instructions I was given. Without my ring, the love I left feels too distant, and the plans we’ve made feel unreal.
    At the airport he promised me the retired greyhound we’d been talking about adopting ever since we bought our house. “We’ll find a good one when you get home,” he said. “Speckled, with some ridiculously long racing name.”
    “It has to be okay with kids,” I replied, because that was what I had to say, that was the reason I gave for leaving.
    “I know,” he said. “I’ll scout while you’re away.”
    I wonder if he’s scouting right now. Working late but really scrolling through Petfinder or checking the website of the greyhound rescue organization we saw at the farmers’ market a few weeks before I left. Or maybe he’s finally getting a drink with the new guy, who he keeps saying seems a little lonely.
    Maybe he’s sitting home in the dark, thinking about me.
    Standing alone in the gray night, watching leaves whisk in the wind, I need him. I need to feel his chest beat against my cheek as he laughs. I need to hear him complain of his hunger, a pain in his back, so I can put aside my own discomfort and be strong for us rather than for just myself.
    Out here I have nothing of him but memory, and each night he feels less real.
    I think of my last Clue. Home Sweet Home. Not a destination, because I can’t imagine they intend for me to walk the almost two hundred miles home, but a direction. A taunt.
    My stomach rumbles—louder than the crickets or the frogs—and suddenly I’m remembering what it is to feel hungry instead of just knowing I should eat. Glad for the distraction, I