“Stay,” I said, throat thick before I could file the word down to something less raw.
“I wasn’t going anywhere,” he said, immediate, no room for doubt.
I tucked my face against him and felt his smile in the way his chest moved, the way his arm tightened around me. “Are you—can you help me more?” I asked into his skin, the question so plain it scared me. “With the inn. I know you’re … you have a job. But if you’re here?—”
“I have an assignment in Charleston,” he said, honest and uncomplicated. He stroked his palm down my back once, slow. “No details yet. While I’m on standby, I’m yours as long as I can be.”
Mine. It fit.
“Good,” I said, quietly.
“Hazel.” He tipped my chin so I’d look at him. The lamp found the changeable gray in his eyes, and for a second I saw the boy he must have been—the one who learned early how to keep his face still while storms blew through. “We won’t hide from Maude. But more than that—we don’t hide from each other.” He paused, searching. “Whatever this is, however long I get, I’m showing up for it.”
I wanted to argue with time—bargain like a gambler—but instead I nodded, because I knew better than most that nothing in this life came with a guarantee. “Okay,” I whispered. My chest felt tight and open all at once. “We’ll do it loud and soft. Hand holding and hedge trimming. Kisses and caulk guns.”
He laughed into my hair, whole body involved. “You make that sound filthy.”
“It is filthy,” I said primly, then yelped when he nipped my shoulder, smiling.
We fell asleep folded together, ankles tangled, his breath a steady tide at the back of my neck. Happiness—real, unadorned—slid through me like warm light. I had the thought that maybe joy had muscles and this was how it held you: not with force, but with steadiness, with weight you could lean against and not topple.
The dream came like a switch flipped in the dark.
I was twelve again, the hall light too bright, the apartment too quiet in the wrong way. Mom’s voice traveled from the kitchen—raised, not at me. The sink ran and wouldn’t stop. The floor was wet under my socks. “Hazel!” she called, but when I ran, rooms elongated and doors refused to open. “Baby—” she said, and then it wasn’t words, it was sound, and it turned into the ocean and then into sirens and then into nothing at all. My feet wouldn’t find purchase. I couldn’t get to her. She was always just beyond the next corner, every corner multiplying like a cruel math problem. “Help,” she said, and I did everything a twelve-year-old could do, which was not enough. Which was never enough.
I woke with my mouth open on that word and no sound coming out, nails biting into Gideon’s forearm where I’d grabbed him in the dark.
He was already moving. “Hazel.” Calm. Not the bark of command; the anchor of it. A hand on my sternum, firm butgentle, pushing me back from a sit-up I hadn’t decided to make. The lamp clicked on low. The room returned in pieces—the cracked plaster, the knot in the wood floor, the steady breathing that wasn’t mine. He framed my face like he had earlier, thumbs sure at my jaw. “You’re here,” he said. “With me.”
I dragged air in like it hurt. My heart slammed against his palm, wild and wrong.
“Breathe with me,” he said, and we did. In for four. Out for six. Again. Again. He didn’t rush me past it. He stood in it with me until the edges stopped vibrating, until the room settled back into a room and not a trap.
“Sorry,” I said eventually, a word I hated landing between us like a dropped plate.
“Don’t apologize to me for having a nightmare,” he said, and the steadiness of his voice was a kindness so large it made my eyes burn.
“I don’t—” I closed my eyes. Opened them. He waited. “My mom died when I was twelve,” I said, the sentence so practiced and flat it had lost all its blood years ago. “I have dreams. They’re always the same. She’s yelling. She needs help. I can’t find her.” My throat closed. I swallowed hard. “I can’t save her.”
The muscle in his jaw ticked. I watched the information land in him—not just the fact of the dead mother, but the shape of the child who had learned early that being small didn’t excuse you from trying to hold back oceans.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but not the useless kind. The sharp, clean kind that acknowledged a slice you could still bleed from years later. He slid his hand to the back of my neck, warm and steady. “You don’t have to find her in here,” he said, tapping two fingers gently to my temple. “Not alone.”
“I’m not used to anyone … seeing it. Being in it.” My mouth twisted. “This part of me doesn’t have company.”
“It does now.” No drama. Just fact. “If you wake up like that again, you wake me. Or I’ll wake to you. Either way, I’m here.”
I stared at him because my reflex was to argue. To say I didn’t want to be a problem or a burden or a project. To sayyou don’t know what you’re signing up for. But he did know, in a way—maybe not the particulars, but the shape of damage and how it moved in a person. And he looked at me like the idea of showing up didn’t scare him, like it was a thing he’d already decided to do before I asked.
“Okay,” I said, and it felt like stepping onto a dock that looked rickety and discovering it held.
He pulled me in again, the circle of his arms familiar now, my cheek pressed to his chest. His heartbeat beat an argument against the side of my face: present, present, present. We lay like that until my breathing matched his again and the tremor checked out of my muscles.
“Tell me about her,” he said into my hair when the quiet went gentle. “Your mom.”
I thought about that carefully. “She sang along to the radio like every song belonged to her,” I said, surprised by the automatic smile that tugged at my mouth. “Off-key. She would change the lyrics when she didn’t like them. She had no respect for verses.”
He chuckled, low. “She sounds like trouble.”
