“Don’t scuff my door,” the sheriff drawls. “Taxpayers’ll fuss.”
I step back. Not because Travis deserves my restraint, but because Greta deserves me later. Whole. Unarrested.
“Get him out of my eyes,” I say, not to anyone and everyone, and then it’s just us again—her and me and the humming neon and the busted lock and the smell of smoke and the end of a story that tried to make her a thing.
She isn’t a thing.
She’s a person.
She’smyperson.
I hook an arm under her knees and lift. She comes easy, arms around my neck, face tucking into the place that fits it. I walkher out under the buzzing sign, down the cracked concrete, past the ice machine where a deputy is zip-tying a boy with a bad mustache who looks like he regrets all his life choices.
Snow has started again. Soft. Forgiving.
We clear the breezeway and the ambulance door opens. Greta tenses, and I stop, lowering her to her feet in the shadow of the rig.
“You don’t have to ride,” I say. “Let the medic check your wrists. Then we go to Tom’s and we’re done.”
She looks up at me, lashes wet, mouth stubborn. “And then?”
“And then home.”
Her throat works. “Your home or mine?”
“Yes.”
The laugh she makes is small and wrecked and perfect. She nods and lets the medic dab at her wrists, lets Tom take a few basics in his notebook, lets Micah wander over long enough to squeeze her shoulder with a friend’s care and say, “You did good,” and wander off again because that’s what he does. Hale leans against the truck, texting Wrenbe there soonwith a half smile he doesn’t know he’s wearing.
I stand there and breathe and keep my arm around Greta like a fact.
It isn’t until Travis is shoved into the back of a cruiser—head ducked, cuff chain clinking, mouth running to no one who matters—that the last of the ice breaks in my chest. I watch the taillights vanish down the access road and feel the shift, the waytension drains without leaving a vacuum. In its place: something warm. Something terrifying if you haven’t earned it.
Greta slides her fingers through mine. They’re bandaged now, white and neat. “You okay?” she asks, flipping my question back at me from a lifetime ago.
“Yeah,” I say, honest. “Now I am.”
Tom clears his throat, always the man to save two idiots from drowning in feelings in public. “You lovebirds come by the station once you’ve washed the motel off you. I’ll start the fun without you.” He tips his hat and saunters away, fat flakes dusting his brim.
We end up back at my truck and I open the passenger door.
She climbs in and I shut the door on the cold before I circle to the driver’s side. I sit, hands on the wheel, engine humming, and look at her. Really look. There’s a bruise high on her cheek and a scrape at her jaw, and none of it touches the thing in her eyes that refused to break.
“I thought you were dead,” she says into the space between us. “When he dragged me across the snow, you— you didn’t move.”
“I moved,” I say. “Just not fast enough. That’s on me.”
She shakes her head, fierce. “No. That’s on him.”
We drive with the heater on blast, hands tangled on the console like we forgot how to be separate. Ten minutes from town, she turns my palm over and kisses the inside of my wrist. It’s a small thing. I have to breathe around it.
Back at the cabin, the broken lock gapes like a mouth. I fix the door because I promised. I set a new brace and sensorbecause I’m me. Greta stands in the doorway and watches the way my hands move like she’s reading a language and finally understands it. Inside, the mess waits. We step around it for now.
I make tea because it’s what I can do with my hands that isn’t touch her. She takes the mug and sets it down untouched because what she wants isn’t heat. It’s me. I see it in the way she steps close, the way her fingers hook in my shirt, the way she rests her forehead on my chest and says, quiet and certain, “Take me to bed.”
We don’t rush it. We don’t apologize. We undress each other with the care of people who know what was almost lost and don’t intend to waste any time pretending. When I push her hair back and kiss the bruise like I can change time, she sighs and cups my jaw and says, “I’m here.” It’s enough. It’s everything.
Later, when sleep drifts in and the cabin settles around us, I slide my hand to her hip and say what I meant to say before the world tried to teach me that quiet is the only thing that won’t leave.
