“You don’t have to know.”
“He doesn’t push me,” I whisper. “Even when I think he will. Even when I… want him to.”
“That’s not nothing,” she says. “That’s him trying. If anyone understands surviving trauma, it’s him.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
She hesitates, then breathes deep. “Malachi’s older brother died when he was seventeen. Cornelius too, later on. Same night, his little brother and sister were taken.”
I blink. “I didn’t know. I mean, I knew about Cornelius, that they were close, but... siblings?”
Something shifts in her face, the slow creak of a door beginning to open.
“He doesn’t talk about it,” she says. “But it guts him. He’d walk through fire to find them.”
I feel something crack open in my chest. A pressure I didn’t know I was carrying. The image of him, seventeen and shattered, burns behind my eyelids.
“I didn’t know,” I say again. Small. Hollow.
“You weren’t supposed to,” she replies. “He keeps the deepest wounds quiet.”
“I’ve known him for years.” My voice breaks. “And I never even...”
“Candace.” She steps toward me. “You were surviving your own storm. He never expected you to carry his.”
I shake my head, throat tight. “Still.”
“You know now,” she says. “That’s what matters.”
I lean back against the dryer. The quiet hums through my bones. I want to cry. To sing. I want to scream into the folds of my lyric journal and never look up.
“He feels like a stranger,” I admit. “But somehow... also the only one who sees me.”
Maggie’s smile is warm and sad. “He probably feels the same about you.”
I nod. Eyes stinging. “Thank you. For the training. For everything.”
“We didn’t do it for thanks,” she says. “We did it because we love you.”
I close my eyes. Hold that truth close. Let it stitch something inside me that’s been unraveling too long.
When I step onto the porch, the swing rocks gently in the breeze. Malachi’s finishing his cigarette, gaze lost somewhere inthe trees. The night wraps around him, a kind of armor. But his shoulders, his posture, are softer than before.
He doesn’t rush me. Doesn’t say it’s time to go.
I sit. Let the swing move. Let the warmth of memory settle in a place I usually keep cold. The foil-wrapped cinnamon rolls rest in my lap. I tap them once, lightly. A beat. A tempo I don’t name.
When I finally rise, he’s already flicked the cigarette away. I offer him the rolls without speaking. He takes them, tucks them into the saddlebag, then holds my helmet out, wordless. I take it. Our fingers brush. I don’t pull back. He doesn’t either. The contact is brief, but it leaves heat in its wake.
On the ride back, I don’t hold him as tight. Not because I don’t want to. Because I do. That terrifies me more than anything else.
Chapter 30
Malachi
ThebelloverCoachTompkins’ gym chimes as we step inside, the smell of old sweat, leather, and chalk coating the air, steeped in memory. The scent clings to my tongue. Smells like dust stirred from a storm long gone but never forgotten. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, flickering with the erratic pulse of nerves under skin, and something about the way her shoulders stiffen tells me she feels it too.
We’re across town from the clubhouse, but the second she walks in, the space feels different. Charged. As if the room’s holding its breath, waiting to see which one of us will break first.
