EMBRACE winrina

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Karina POV

I hadn't expected letting her in to feel the way that it did. I expected the feeling that I had gotten during those first five or so minutes where all I could picture was the accident: the smoke, the shattered glass, my screams when I looked at the body of a woman that had once been so full of life.

But after those first five minutes, I felt free. It was almost as if I'd had a two-hundred pound weight tied to my foot ever since my mom passed, and Winter had reached down and made it disappear in a matter of minutes. It hadn't felt like that when I'd spoken to Lavender. It had felt like absolute hell, and I had never wanted to relive that.

With Winter, I didn't have to. Simply her presence had made those fives minutes just that: five minutes. The rest of my night, that of which I was awake for anyway, was pleasant. Somehow I'd managed to forget why I had opened up to her in the first place; Leo had completely escaped my mind. And when I woke up with my arms wrapped around her, I smiled.

It was only when I realized that my arms weren't wrapped around her that my smile faded. It was the faint smell of her that she'd left behind that fooled me. But then I realized that if she had been next to me, the scent would have been stronger. My vanilla scented body wash, her perfume.

It was so faint that I could hardly tell it was there.

I opened my eyes and tried not to worry just yet. She was in the kitchen, I told myself. She was with Addy. She hadn't left.

But I knew I was hopelessly mistaken when I looked over and saw that her duffle bag and shoes were gone.

I forced myself to stay calm as I slid out of bed. I didn't want to leave my bedroom because I knew that the moment I stepped into the other room and Winter wasn't there, it would become real. It would mean that she had really left and was at home with Leo. It would mean that all my efforts to keep her safe for the past two months would be for nothing. It would mean that I had failed to protect her because I knew if she was home, it was inevitable that Leo would drink and hurt her.

The first thing I saw when I exited my bedroom was Addy and I tried not to let my heart fall. Had Winter even thought about how leaving would affect her? How leaving would affect me? It was one thing to leave for her social worker, but I knew she wasn't coming back. I knew, and it tore my heart in half.

The kitchen was empty. The only thing that struck me as even slightly out of place was the small piece of paper in the middle of the counter. It hadn't been there last night, which meant Winter had put it there before she left. I wanted to look at it, but I almost didn't care what she had to say to me anymore.

I sat down on the stool anyway, reading the two words she'd scribbled across the middle of the paper.

Thank you

Reading those two words, I realized that I was not only worried and upset, but I was angry. It didn't matter to me why she left. She left. That was a fact. It was a fact that I had to come to terms with, but I wasn't sure I could. I needed her to be safe. I didn't know what I would do if she came into school on Monday with sunglasses or the limp she had had a while ago that she tried to cover up.

Addy's soft voice made me look up. "Aunt Rina?"

I tried to compose myself as she walked towards me, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "Are you okay?"

"Of course."

"You look really sad."

I shook my head but couldn't come up with a suitable response. She spoke again instead. "Where's Win? I want to tell her about the dream I had last night. It was so crazy."