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The car keeps smelling like Felix, like campfire, far after he is gone. Smoke and perfume and ash.
Rachel shudders, rubbing her temples with her fingertips.
She does not care
(She cares too much.)
She truly could not care less about the weirdest family reunion of the century, let alone want to be part of it.
(She almost begged Felix to let her in.)
It isn’t even her family. She doesn’t have a family.
(She lost her father twice. The second time she lost him, he died in her arms.)
She lets out a long sigh and sees Yusef trying to take a glance at her through the wing mirror.
"Family issues," she says out loud, somehow needing to explain herself.
"I wouldn’t know. Never had one," he replies casually, like he was talking about the endless traffic they were stuck in.
Rachel is too good at reading people’s feelings for her own good.
She perceives the hint of melancholy, the trace of sadness.
It sounds like the sadness that echoed in her own scream when she saw her father die, just diluted, tamed by the years.
She decides she cannot afford to care about her Uber driver now.
She allowed herself to care a little about all her pseudo-families at some point, and she lost them all.
She finds that the hurt still lives in her, and she loathes it.
(She loathes herself.)
Alone, broken.
Left behind.
On the run.
She has betrayed everyone she has ever cared about; everyone she has ever tried to love.
She lost it all for a family that isn’t hers, a family which won’t even let her inside the garden.
She is running away—Rachel never runs away—because she just made herself a good number of enemies and no friends at all.
When Yusef parks in front of the airport and unloads her luggage, Rachel finds herself struggling to get out of the car.
Smell of smoke, perfume, and ash.
Now that she must leave it behind, she finds she has almost grown fond of it.
She gets out of the car slowly, and there it is again—those echoes of sadness, that loneliness.
She even says goodbye to Yusef.
She never really cared about greeting her subordinates before.
(She has no subordinates now.)
She is nobody.
Just another clone on the run, one of many.
Knowing she will never be able to settle in.
She never wanted a normal life, but at least she wanted a life.
She is just another sad, broken experiment, thrown out with the garbage.
When the plane takes off, she lets herself shed one tear.
She wipes it away as she thinks of a new identity for herself.
She decides she’ll name herself Charlotte.