It takes you a second to react when the doorbell rings. These days, nobody comes unannounced anymore, and you aren’t expecting visitors.

You wipe your hands on your jeans, mentally preparing yourself for a delivery mistake, or one of your neighbors needing something, yet when you open the front door, it is neither of those things. It is, instead, Lottie Matthews.

She’s thinner than you remember, and paler too, but it’s her, without a doubt, standing on your fucking doorsteps, as if she wasn’t meant to be locked away in whatever psychiatric facility they sent her to after everything that happened.

The last time you saw her, she was being loaded into the back of an ambulance, her gaze uncharacteristically distant, and now she’s here, out of all places? It doesn’t make any sense! You don’t realize you’re gripping the doorknob too tightly until she exhales.

“…Hi,” Lottie says, after a pause, tilting her head to glance past you, down the hallway.

“Lottie?”

She nods, clasping her hands together in front of herself. “Yeah. Sorry. I-“ She swallows, shaking her head. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

The last time you really saw her (not as the goddamn cult leader that stood in the flashing ambulance lights) you were practically kids, lost in something bigger than yourselves, that neither of you ever really left behind.

It had been easier to fall into each other back then, to cling for warmth in a world that had turned cold on you. You remember Lottie’s hands, always steady on your face, her breath against your temple as she whispered promises she could never truly keep.

And now, after everything, after rescue and a short-lived reunion at her compound, she’s here.

Lottie shifts. “…Can I come in?”