Lav sat in the garden for a long time, the cold wrought-iron chair grounding him. He could no longer hear the wedding music; he could only hear Roo's whispered command: "Then you should set yourself free first."
He felt a bizarre mixture of shock and terror. Terror, because she had looked directly at his cage—the one built by his grief and solidified by Abby's betrayal—and named it. Shock, because the physical jolt from her hair had been the first feeling that wasn't numb despair in over a year. He wasn't supposed to feel. He was supposed to be empty.
He finally rose, the movement slow and heavy, and started the car. Ghost, sensing the shift in his owner's emotional state, whined softly from the back seat, leaning his massive head onto Lav's shoulder as he drove. Lav found immediate, quiet comfort in the pet's familiar weight. Ghost was the only thing that had kept him tethered to the world during the worst nights, when the suicidal thoughts would claw at him until dawn.
He drove past his old favorite haunts, places where he and Abby had once laughed, now seeing them as monuments to his foolish, betrayed past. Abby had been older, sophisticated, and his first great love, but she had abandoned him coldly for a man with a bigger bank account, cementing Lav's belief that all human connection was a transaction.
Now, Roo—a teenager with exhausted, empathetic eyes—had gifted him a tiny, caged firefly. The light was almost blinding. He felt a desperate, frightening need to see her again, not to talk about love, but to simply stand in the presence of someone who could see his true self without judgment. He needed her to confirm that the color he felt was real.
Lav knows he cannot let her slip away.