Someone taught her to be afraid of touch. Someone taught her to expect pain.
And she missed her own parents' funeral because of him. That thought burns hotter than the rest.
My hands curl into fists against the bar top, and I have to close my eyes and breathe through the rage that wants to consume me.
Gemma is Cole's little sister. She's vulnerable and damaged and running from whatever tried to break her. She needs safety and time and people who won't ask anything of her.
She doesn't need me looking at her the way I caught myself looking at her tonight.
But as I lock up the bar and head out to my bike, I can't shake the image of her standing in that doorway. Can't stop thinking about the woman she's become and the girl she used to be and all the distance between them.
She stood beside me at Sarah's grave. She knew what Sarah and I had. She saw it, lived alongside it, even if just at the edges. But the man she found gave her the opposite of everything I tried to give my wife.
The irony tastes like ash.
She's not mine to protect. She's not mine to want. She's not mine at all.
But whatever happened to her, whoever did this, I'm going to make sure she's safe. It's not a decision. Just the truth, bone-deep.
I kick the bike to life and pull out of the lot. The house is dark when I pull into the driveway, same as always.
Safe.Out of everything she could have said, she chose that word.
I sit there longer than I should, engine cooling, thinking about a woman standing at my wife's grave five years ago. Thinking about the way she looked at me tonight, like I was something she'd forgotten existed.
I don't know what I'm going to do about Gemma Holloway. But sleep isn't coming anytime soon.
2
GEMMA
Coming home feels like admitting defeat. But defeat is better than another night in the house I shared with Craig, walking on eggshells over a floor that used to be my own.
After three days in Anchor Bay I still haven't slept through the night.
Cole's spare bedroom is nice. Clean sheets, soft pillows, a window that looks out over the neighbor's garden. There's nothing wrong with it. Nothing threatening. The door has a lock, and Cole made sure to show me that it worked before he said goodnight, his eyes careful and too knowing.
My body doesn't care about locks or clean sheets or gardens. My body remembers other nights, other rooms, and it refuses to let me rest.
The ceiling fan turns slow circles above me. I watch the blades cut through the darkness and try to empty my mind, but emptiness is just another word for space, and space fills up fast with things I don't want to think about.
The last night in that house. Craig's face when he realized I'd been planning to leave. The sound of his voice shifting from confusion to cold fury in the span of a single breath.
I pull the memory up the way you'd pick at a scab—knowing it'll bleed, doing it anyway.
We were in the kitchen. I'd made the mistake of leaving my laptop open, and he'd found the email confirmation for the storage unit I'd rented two towns over. The one where I'd been hiding clothes and documents and cash for three months, piece by piece, while he was at work.
"What the fuck is this?" He held my laptop like evidence. Like proof of a crime.
I didn't answer. Didn't make excuses. Something in me had gone quiet and cold, the way it always did when I knew what was coming.
"You think you can leave me?" He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it. "You think you can just walk out of here and start over like the last four years didn't happen?"
"I'm not doing this anymore, Craig." My voice came out steady. Steadier than I felt.
"You're not doing anything." He set the laptop down with exaggerated care, and that was worse than if he'd thrown it. That control. That deliberate patience. "You're going to sit down, and we're going to talk about this like adults, and you're going to realize how stupid you're being."
I didn't sit down. I didn't move.
