“Jack—”
“Fucking hell, man. You dickmatized her into agreeing to the trust, didn’t you?”
I scowl. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Mmhmm,” Jack says, unconvinced. “Doesn’t take much to resurface a track record like yours.” He squints at me. “I still remember the fire department raffle incident. Two sisters, one bottle of tequila—”
I smack him upside the head to shut him up. It works.
He may be right about my past, but that doesn’t mean I like to relive it.
When I first moved to Blue Willow, I was a walking wound with something to prove, doing anything I could to feel better—or feel wanted. And when that stopped working, I chased the opposite. Wanted to feel nothing at all. Numb was safer than lonely.
But the longer I stayed, the less it felt like I had something to outrun. The town got quieter. So did I. I stopped treating my own body like a distraction. Stopped chasing the kind of company that came without conversation.
I sigh through my teeth. “That was five years ago, dipshit.”
“Okay, so it wasn’t like that.” He tilts his head. “Then what was it like?”
I glance back at the woodpile, the half-fixed railing, the whole damn house listening in. “It was ... something else. She’s ... I don’t know. Fuck, she’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. Half the time, I want to throttle her, and the other half, I—”
“Want to fuck her?”
“Want to understand her,” I say. “Want to fight with her. Want to figure out why she makes everything feel different. I like her, Jack. I like her when she’s mad. I like her when she’s guarded. And yeah, I’d like to take her to my bed again. But more than that ... I think I’d like the chance to love her, too.”
Jack looks at me for real then. No smirk or swagger from a man who’s known me long enough to recognize when I’m past posturing.
“She got under your skin,” he says quietly.
“She lives there now.”
He nods, slow. “That hit you like a bolt of lightning?”
“No,” I say. “It hit me outside Haven & Hearth. When I made her cry. I wanted to pull her in, apologize without condition, promise I’d never do it again. I haven’t stopped wanting that since. Now that we’ve slept together, it’s gonna be hard as hell to pretend it didn’t mean something to me.”
The admission rubs me raw. Jack waits, knowing I haven’t finished, but I keep the rest to myself. There aren’t many things I get to claim as mine alone.
I pull out my wallet and thumb through a stack of faded receipts until I find it—Elspeth’s letter, folded small and worn soft at the edges.
“Her grandmother wrote this for me,” I say. “Weeks before she died. Elsie found it in the attic.”
Jack reads it without a word, then folds it back, careful as a prayer, and hands it over.
“So, you want to be with her now because Elspeth told you to?”
I stare at him. “Were you listening to me at all?”
“I was.” He shrugs. “I’m wondering what part of this is about the house, about Elspeth, about grief, and what part’s actually about you.”
“It’s abouther.” I pace, jaw tight. “She makes this place feel alive again. She sees every crack and still thinks she’s the broken one. She makes me want to be the kind of man who deserves her trust. I want her to choose what she can live with. But I want her to know she doesn’t have to do it alone.”
Jack watches me for a beat, arms folded. “Then you better make damn sure she knows that, too. Because if you’re standing here saying you like her, that you want her to choose what’s best for her—then that has to mean giving her room to make the wrong choice. To walk away.”
“I’m not going to force her to stay.”
“No,” Jack says. “But you’ve got a habit of trying to control the fallout. Of telling yourself you’re doing the right thing when really, you’re just afraid of what happens if you stop managing everyone else’s damage.”
He pushes off the post and claps a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not saying don’t fight for this if it’s what you truly want.”
