“Thank you,” I whisper.
I wish desperately that I could just stay here. It isn’t perfect in this town by any means. But I’ve grown comfortable here, I have friends, and there’s a comfort that comes with familiarity.
I won’t have any of that if I leave.
“What’s your name?” I ask, because for some reason, I don’t want to stop talking.
Or rather, I don’t want to be alone.
“Geoffrey,” he replies. “And yours?”
My real name slips out before I can stop myself. “Esme.”
“It’s lovely to meet you, Esme,” he says genuinely. “You know, no matter how bad life gets, there’s always a way out of it.”
“I wish I had your kind of faith,” I sigh. “But my life has changed so much in less than a year. It feels surreal, and not in a good way.”
He nods. “I know what you mean. I was living on the streets when I was fifteen. A year later, I was dealing drugs. Soon after, I was using. It took years before I was strong and brave enough to get sober. And even then, I can’t take all the credit.”
“You fell in love?” I guess.
“Yes, I did,” he replies with a distant smile. “She was the most beautiful girl in the world. She still is.”
“What’s her name?”
“Olive,” Geoffrey tells me. “She’s thirty-three years old now. Has two boys of her own, too.”
I frown. Geoffrey must be at least sixty, if not older.
He sees my confusion and smiles. “She’s my daughter,” he explains.
“Oh!”
“I was in my twenties when she was born, and I was too fucked up to be her dad,” he tells me. “When her mother stopped me from seeing her, I was angry, but I understood.”
He rubs the back of his neck like he’s going through the emotions all over again.
“I vowed to get clean. It wasn’t easy. I fell off the wagon a few times. But when Olive was about eleven, I finally managed to make it stick. It took a while longer to make her trust me again. To make her mother trust me again. But it was worth it.”
Someone shuffles into the bus station and heads towards the booth. Geoffrey stands with a muted groan and pats me on the shoulder in a fatherly way.
Then he goes back to the ticket office. He has a small limp and a hunched back, but his shadow stretches on for miles beneath the lone fluorescent light high overhead.
I look down at my map, at the new town that I’m to make my home.
I feel resigned to the decision. It’s not perfect, but this isn’t about things being perfect. It’s about survival.
I stand up, steadying myself on the armrest of the bench, and take one step towards the ticket booth. The shooting pain is there, but I ignore it.
Until, one step later, it doubles.
Triples.
Suddenly, it’s all I can feel, sharp and insistent and glaring. Then—moisture between my legs. A trickle of something that catches me off guard.
For one horrible second, I think it’s blood. Like all the stress my body has been through in the last few hours is finally taking its toll.
But when I look down at the concrete floor, it’s not blood I see.