When he straightens, he leans his body against the handle and hooks one foot behind his ankle.
His breath fogs out in front of him again, a long exhale that keeps me from swinging my shovel against a large piece of ice guarding Noelle’s tire and instead focusing on him.
“Jared’s a problem,” he says suddenly.
I pause mid-swing, the metal edge of my shovel biting into a crust of snow. “Well, yeah… We all gathered that much.”
He doesn’t take the bait. Doesn’t even crack a smirk.
Instead, he plants the shovel upright in the snowbank and leans on it, his expression grim.
His eyes flick up toward the gray sky like he’s sorting through something he’s trying to find the words to say.
Eventually, Callum goes on. “He’s a coward, but he’s persistent. We all saw it in his eyes when he came to our hotel room. He’s petty and vindictive. He’s not going to let us being around Noelle go.”
I feel my jaw clench before I can stop it.
The image of Jared’s red, rage-splotched face flashes in my mind. The way he spat those vile things at Noelle, the way she’d physically flinched just hearing his voice.
Then the sound of her sobs afterward, muffled against her hands, the way she’d folded in on herself like she was trying to disappear from the world.
It took everything in me not to go after him and drag him out into the parking lot and make him pay for every ounce of fear he’d put in her eyes.
But I held back for her and Eli because going to jail over a man like him didn’t seem worth it.
What Ididmake sure of, was that he’d actually climbed his sorry ass into that ratty little sedan he owned and booked it off the property.
Because while I couldn’t beat him into the ground like I wanted, at least I knew for certain he wouldn’t be coming back for another round.
“Richard already said he’s involving the police,” I remind him, wiping the sweat from my brow despite the freezing air.
Callum scoffs under his breath, shaking his head. “Yeah, and that’s been working great so far. He told Dean it’s been going on for almost a year. The cops haven’t done jackshit. What’s one more report gonna change? We don’t even have it on video.”
I drag in a slow breath, forcing the tension in my jaw to ease. “I get what you’re trying to get at, but we can’t go around serving vigilante justice, Callum.”
He raises a brow, his mouth twitching into something almost like a challenge. “Why not?”
That one catches me off guard.
Not because I don’t have an answer, but because part of mewantsto agree.
Wants to go track Jared down, drag him out of whatever hole he’s hiding in, and teach him what inflicting fear on someone actually feels like.
“Because,” I say finally, the word coming out as a sigh, “it’s going to make her life more complicated and give those people more ammo to use against her.
You think this mother won’t jump at the chance to call her unfit if she finds out we got involved?
Or worse, Jared drags her to court over custody? We start a fight, we give him exactly what he wants.”
Noelle didn’t want to talk about the woman who accosted her at the festival, but we knew who she was instantly.
She had the same nose, same set of the jaw, as Jared. Only his mother could protect his sorry ass like that, too.
Cal’s quiet for a moment, jaw ticking as he stares down at the snow. I know that look: he’s fighting the same instinct I am.
The need todosomething, to fix it, to protect Noelle in the only way we know how.
“I’ve seen men like him,” I say after a beat. “Small. Bitter. Lashing out because they can’t stand feeling smaller than everyone else in the room. It’s not about love or custody, it’s about control. He’s already got her looking over her shoulder, Cal. We can’t give him more ammunition to hurt her with.”
