The silence in the cottage was a physical presence. It wasn’t peaceful; it was anticipatory, coiled, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Every creak of the floorboards was a footfall. Every car door slammed in the distance was an arrival. She found herself cataloging exits, assessing windows, listening for the pattern of a threat that no longer existed.
She stopped sleeping. When she did, she dreamt of concrete tunnels and the deafeningclick-click-clickof an empty chamber echoing in a dark, damp space. She’d wake gasping, her hand flying to her side where his wound had been.
The news was a special kind of torture. She’d watch the polished recaps, see the aerial shots of the airfield, and her body would react before her mind could armor up. A cold sweat. A jolt in her stomach. A flash of the storm drain’s mouth, a dark maw swallowing him whole.
One afternoon, digging for a sweater in her go-bag—the one she’d packed months ago and never fully unpacked—her fingers brushed against worn, soft cotton. She pulled it out. It was a plain gray T-shirt of Tonio’s, stolen by her on some forgotten morning and shoved in with her things, a secret piece of him she’d carried without knowing.
She brought it to her face before she could think.
His scent—soap, gun oil, the unique, warm spice of his skin—hit her like a blow to the chest. It wasn’t a memory; it was an assault. The careful scaffolding of her resolve, built over two weeks of numb determination, buckled and collapsed.
She sank to the floor, the shirt pressed against her mouth to stifle the sound, and broke apart. The sobs were ugly, wrenching things, torn from a place deeper than grief. It was the raw, screaming truth she’d been outrunning—she missed him. She missed the solid weight of him beside her in bed. She missed the low rumble of his voice in the dark. She missed the way he looked at her, as if she’d hung the damn moon in a sky he’d only known as night.
She cried until she was empty, curled on the hardwood floor of a safe, pretty house that felt like a tomb. The shirt, now damp and crumpled in her fist, was the only real thing in it.
Day Twenty-Three
The call cameat 3:17 a.m.
Her phone, set to Do Not Disturb, lit up the nightstand with a number she’d deleted but hadn’t forgotten. Luc.
Her heart a frantic drum against her ribs, she stared at it until it went silent. A voicemail icon appeared. Thirty seconds later, a text buzzed.
Luc: Sophia. It’s an infection. Fever’s 104. He’s asking for you.
Ice flooded her veins. She saw it instantly: the wound turning angry and red, poison seeping into his bloodstream, the strongbody that had survived the bullet succumbing to something invisible and slow.
Her thumbs moved over the screen, cool and clinical.
Sophia: I’m sorry. I can’t.
She sent it. She placed the phone facedown on the nightstand. She lay back in the perfect silence of her perfect, safe room and tried to breathe.
The logic was still there, a cold, sharp knife.This is what you chose. This is the phone call you feared. This is the distance you insisted on. You are not his nurse. You are not his keeper. You saved yourself.
She repeated it as the minutes ticked by. She recited her mantra.
But a new thought, small and terrible, began to worm its way through the cracks.
If he dies tonight…
The sentence wouldn’t finish. It didn’t need to.
A clear picture hit her: Luc calling again, his voice stripped of its usual calm.He’s gone, Sophia.Everything shifting. A future—empty, endless, gray—stretching before her. And the knowledge, a stone in her gut, that she would be hiding in this cottage, pretending it counted as protection.
Her “self-preservation” suddenly looked like the deepest kind of cowardice.
The other side of the coin was just as dark.If he lives…he would wake up in that sterile room, weaker, in pain, and she would not be there. Again. She had left him at his most broken. What kind of love walks away from that? What kind of person did that make her?
The truth descended, heavy and absolute, extinguishing the last flicker of her defensive certainty.
She was already living the nightmare.
The fear that had driven her out the door—the fear of waiting for the call, the fear of losing him—wasn’t a future possibility anymore. It was her present reality. She wasalreadywaiting. She hadalreadylost him. The agony she’d been trying to preempt was here, now, a constant, gnawing presence in this quiet house by the sea. She had traded the terrifying, vibrant, life-and-death reality of loving him for this half-life she’d built.
And it was infinitely worse.
She wasn’t saving herself. She was cutting herself off from the part of her that felt anything.
