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I know you’re out there.
Luisa stared at the screen in front of her, the blinking cursor taunting her with every flash. She didn’t even know if the email would even go anywhere. Maybe she was shouting into the void, but she had to do something . She could hear her brother’s voice in her head, telling her that she was being silly, that Rose was dead, that they were all finally free.
Except - Luisa wasn’t free.
She knew that Rose wasn’t dead. She just didn’t understand where she’d gone. Or why.
It had been the freckles. She’d had something tantamount to a university education in the details of Rose’s freckles and could trace many of her decisions (often the ones that seemed inexplicable to others) to them. They had some kind of siren-like power over her, calling to her from the rocky shores of bad choices, asking her to give up everything and fling herself beyond the barriers of safety. She couldn’t deny that she still wanted to, even after it all. She had fought with herself every step of the way, trying to tell herself that Rose didn’t care about her, that she couldn’t feel anything , especially love, that she was doing what was best for her family. She still wasn’t sure that was true.
Anyway. She knew Rose’s freckles and those were not them.
There was no little triangle just below her jaw, where the skin was so soft it made her ache. Or those three across the back of her hand, the ones that looked like Orion’s belt, that Luisa had teased her about, telling her that she could make wishes on her skin even in daylight.
They were all wrong. They were in the wrong places - they weren’t even the right shade. She’d realized immediately that it wasn’t Rose, but she hadn’t known what to do about it. And then Rose - or the cheap imitation that couldn’t even get her speech patterns down properly - had gone over the edge and there had been so much blood and she’d known that it wasn’t her but all she could see was Rose’s cold, lifeless face on the floor of a hospital and everything felt sickeningly familiar.
Hours later, she found herself in her bedroom and couldn’t quite remember how she’d gotten there. There had been police and lights and she thought maybe Raf had been there but she had a strange feeling that he’d checked in with her before ushering Jane into a car and taking her home. She wasn’t sure. The whole thing was hazy.
All she knew was that she was alone and Rose absolutely was not dead.
So she waited. She wasn’t even sure what she was waiting for exactly, but she knew that if Rose wasn’t dead then she would be back. Rose never gave up; that was the whole point.
But hours became days, became weeks, became months and...nothing. There were no strange, new neighbors who wanted to befriend her, no emails from addresses she didn’t recognize (at least not ones that weren’t trying to enhance certain parts of her anatomy or had what they claimed was very important information regarding a bank account she’d never heard of), no phone calls in the middle of the night with that voice that felt like pure honey telling her that she still loved her - nothing.
Life wasn’t exactly normal, but it was uneventful. That was what bothered her most.
Over time she did start to wonder if her mind was lying to her, if it was trying to find a way to protect her from the truth. It had done it before. Except this time she knew it in her bones: that hadn’t been Rose. Those weren't her freckles, and what was more, what really kept her up at night - that wasn't her kiss.
She had to be alive.
Which was what led her to to sitting in front of her computer warring with herself over whether or not to click send.
It was a long shot. The email address had been old even before Rose had gone to prison, but it was all she had. And she knew Rose. She didn't like loose ends.
She thought about adding to it, asking the questions she needed answers to, unfurling her anger and anxiety and longing in strings of rambling words and phrases but she stopped herself. If Rose was listening, this was all that she needed to say.
Send.
She couldn't quite tell how she felt when it didn't bounce back.
She didn't get a response.
It took awhile for her to pinpoint exactly why that upset her so much. At first she thought it was because she was angry that she had left her without answers - again. But that wasn't it. The anger faded and was replaced with bitterness that Rose was allowed to live out her life unencumbered by everything she had left behind while Luisa wouldn't be able to escape it for as long as she lived. But that wasn’t it either.
Then, one humid night in July, as she sat out on her balcony watching the fireworks down at the shore, she allowed herself to feel what was really at the root of it all. She allowed the hollow sorrow that she had kept at bay fill her chest, let her eyes well with those thick, heavy tears that will fall no matter what you do, and she finally acknowledged the truth.
If Rose really was alive and she'd made no contact, shown no interest however small, then she was choosing not to. Rose never did things halfway, and with grief that felt bone deep, she realized that, ultimately, Rose didn’t love her anymore. And with that the walls of denial and indignation came tumbling down. She'd fought so hard to keep her in prison, to put her away for good, but she never really believed that - even then - Rose could stop loving her.
It had seemed impossible. And as much as she had insisted to herself and Rafael and even Rose directly that she was over it, she wasn't. She couldn't be. She would never be. But apparently the same couldn’t be said for Rose.
And, once again, her world broke around her.
Things only got worse.
She was increasingly greeted by Rafael’s voicemail when she called, family dinners were cancelled again and again until they weren’t even scheduled anymore, and every holiday she would hear yet again about how Jane ‘just wasn’t comfortable’ having Luisa at the house.
There was no one left.
It didn’t escape her notice that Rose had been right about Rafael in the end. Really, she’d always been right about him, Luisa just hadn’t wanted to see it. Her only solace after leaving the voicemail calling him a selfish prick and suggested several ways he could go fuck himself was imagining the proud, fond look on Rose’s face if she’d known. It spurred a strange sort of fire within her. Rose might not want her any more, but she had spent years reminding Luisa that there was a strength within her that she didn’t give herself credit for, that she was worth more than her brother let her believe she was.
Finally, after all that time, Luisa realized - maybe there was something to that.
Money wasn’t an issue, and there was no longer anything tying her to Miami, so without notice or fanfare, she left. She took to the world and found places and experiences - things that she chose for herself, that weren’t influenced by her family or her trauma, or even Rose. She learned to surf in Australia (something she was surprisingly good at), tried to tame a horse in Arizona (somewhat less successful than surfing), and worked at an animal shelter Havana for as long as she could handle it. She spent six weeks in Poland learning to make pierogi, and lived in Marseille for two months helping plan their pride parade. She smiled and laughed and found herself astounded at how far away the old part of her life felt.
What she didn’t do was drink.
And she didn’t pine for Rose.
(It was a lie, but it was the culmination of a mountain of them, so who did it hurt?)
It happened in Valparaiso of all places.
She had been overcome with the urge to see Pablo Neruda’s house. A Chilean woman she’d met in Vancouver had regaled her with stories of Valparaiso - about the bright pink Captain’s bar that only Neruda had been allowed to man and how the funicular railway cars were named after butterflies and nuns.
She’d made her way there, in the slapdash freeform way she had created for herself, was moving through the crowd, looked to the right for no reason in particular, and there she was. It almost felt as though the moment had been coming all along, it had just been waiting for her to find it. When she imagined it, this random meeting in a crowd, she’d thought that it would be overwhelming, that her stomach would twist painfully and her eyes would fill with tears and she wouldn’t know what to do. But it wasn’t like that at all.
Rose hadn’t seen her yet, and Luisa took the chance to catalogue her after so long apart. She still stood with a confidence that made Luisa weak in the knees, her hands still gestured the way they did when she was annoyed, eyes flashing even with the ever so small lines that had begun to form at the edges. Her arms were still strong and toned and capable of bringing both despair and comfort, she was sure. And her hair was red; she decided that was her favorite part. But there was something about her that felt different, not wrong so much as new. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it felt suspiciously like coming home and finding that the furniture had been ever so slightly rearranged - and looked better where it was.
Then, before she really realized the moment was upon her, Rose ended the conversation she was having with the man in front of her and turned. Her eyes met Luisa’s and instantly she knew that she’d been wrong: Rose hadn’t stopped loving her at all. It was all in the eyes, how the ice blue of them always showed their warmth only to her, and the way she saw her lips part to let out a breathless ‘Luisa.’ It was in every bit of the way she looked to be frozen in place, seemingly unsure whether to bolt to or away from her.
Luisa carefully made her way toward Rose, keeping her gaze soft but sure.
She stopped several feet from her, knowing as well as anyone that a trapped Rose was a dangerous one, but the other woman immediately stepped toward her, almost as though against her will, and closed the gap.
“I knew it,” Luisa said plainly.
“What?” Rose said quietly.
“That you weren’t dead.”
The redhead tilted her head to the side with an appraising sort of inquisition. “Yeah?”
Luisa nodded. “The freckles.”
A hint of a smile found the edges of Rose’s lips. “Right.”
“It was obvious. I can’t believe you thought it would fool me,” she said, letting the irrational though mild indignation she felt at the fact color her voice.
"But you didn’t tell anyone.”
Luisa shook her head. “I thought you would contact me.”
Rose looked away, just a flick of her eyes past the side of Luisa’s face, letting some unknown spot behind her keep her gaze. “I didn’t…” she trailed off.
“What?” she pressed carefully.
Rose’s gaze was back, her eyes boring into her. “I thought it was time I gave you what you wanted.”
It was all she’d needed to hear and she hadn’t even known it. “You let me go because you thought it was what I wanted?”
“Wasn’t it?” Rose asked, with a mix of stubbornness and vulnerability that was so essentially her it made Luisa’s skin tingle.
She sighed. “As it turns out, it wasn’t.”
Rose was silent for a moment. Then - “You couldn’t have told me that before I faked my own death again?”
She shrugged casually. “I didn’t know then.”
They were quiet for a moment, their eyes searching.
“I like your hair,” Luisa said after a moment.
Rose gave a cocky smile, but it softened when she murmured, “Well, I kept it for you. So.”
With that, Luisa stopped fighting her smile.
Maybe it had been a mistake, an unsolvable problem - maybe they could have had all of that time back, but in the end, the Luisa that had stood across from that imposter on that rooftop didn’t exist anymore, and she was certain that this Rose (this real, tangible, imperfect one) wasn’t the one that had fled, loving her enough to let her go.
It felt like an ending and a beginning all at once.
“So,” Luisa started. Rose narrowed her eyes slightly. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Immediately Rose’s eyes flashed with worry. “What? No! Are you drinking? Please tell me you-”
“No!” Luisa insisted with a huff. “I was just - it was supposed to be a thing!”
“A thing?”
“It was the first thing you ever said to me! I was trying to be poignant.”
Rose scoffed. “I also said hi, you could have gone with that.”
Luisa crossed her arms. “Hi?”
“I don’t know,” Rose replied. “You had an entire world of firework-related comments to work with you and you left them all on the table.”
“Well we can’t all be as dramatic as you are.”
“It’s true, I’m really quite something,” Rose replied.
Luisa laughed, and felt a warmth fill her as she watched some part of Rose come alive in front of her at the sound.
“Dinner?” the redhead asked after a moment.
“Are you going to mock my attempt at poignancy?”
“I’d say it’s likely. But I’ll also buy you a palmera.”
“You still know the way to my heart.”
“It’s not hard. Find any local pastry covered in sugar and honey and you’re golden.”
They paused ever so slightly, acknowledging the weight of the moment behind the levity. Luisa held out her hand and felt Rose grasp it softly.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Are you?” Rose replied.
“I guess we’ll see.”
In the end, they were painfully flawed, their history tarnished with years of pain and betrayal, but also a love that no one but the two of them truly understood. Somehow, against all odds, years after stumbling upon one another in a bar in Florida, they had found each other again, wandering out in the world. And maybe that was enough.