I trailed off, not sure how to explain it. How Oliver’s world had invaded my oldest nightmare, the two bleeding together until I couldn’t separate them. How Oliver’s face had replaced the anonymous darkness that used to wait outside the shattered windows of that car I’d been trapped in.
“Now I’m in it,” Coop said. Not a question.
“Not you exactly. Your world. The forest. The hunt. Oliver’s voice counting down.” I pulled back just enough to look at Coop, though I could barely make out his features. Only the shadow of his jaw, the glint of his eyes. “It’s like my nightmares have absorbed yours.”
His hand stilled on my back. I felt the weight of what I’d said settle between us—the way our damage had merged, tangledtogether until it was impossible to tell where mine ended and his began.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out heavy. “I brought him into your life. Into your head.”
“You did. I know that. But Oliver is the monster here, not you.” I pressed my palm flat against his chest, feeling his heart. Still steady. Still there. “You brought me into his world. But you also brought me out. I’m choosing to hold on to that.”
Silence stretched between us, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Just full. Full of everything we’d already said in stolen moments over the past couple weeks, full of confessions and explanations and the slow, painful work of understanding. Of growing together.
“I’m terrified,” I admitted. “Not just of Oliver. Not just of what happened. Not even of you going back undercover.”
“What else?”
I could have lied. Could have deflected, the way I’d learned to do in the years after he left. Build the walls higher. Don’t let anyone see the soft places.
But we were past that now.
“Of losing you again. Not physically, although yes, I’m terrified of something happening to you while you’re back under.” The words scraped at my soul on the way out. “But…of the fact that I let you back in.All the way in. You left me once because things got really hard and dark for you. I’m afraid of that happening again.”
“Mia—”
“There’s more than one way of you not coming back to me. When you were in the military, I always knew you might not come home. I didn’t like to think about it, but I knew it was a possibility. That I might get that call no loved one ever wants to get. But then I discovered you might make it out alive andstillnot make it back to me.”
His arms tightened around me. Not a flinch, not a retreat—just a pull, drawing me closer, as if he could absorb my fear through proximity.
“You’re right.”
“I know why you have to go tomorrow. I understand it. I’m not asking you to stay—I want Oliver permanently out of our lives too.” I lifted my head, trying to find his eyes. “But I’m terrified that one way or another, you might not make it all the way back to me.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I could feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath my hand. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough.
“I spent six years telling myself I did the right thing. Leaving you. Protecting you from what I’d become.” His hand came up to cup the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair. “I knew it was a lie, but I told it anyway because the truth was worse.”
“What truth?”
“That I was a coward. That I was so afraid of you seeing me broken that I chose to break us instead.”
We’d talked about what had happened to him before. In the car on the way to Oliver’s compound, in the cabin during stolen moments when the cameras weren’t watching. I knew the story—the mission, his friends dying, Danny’s suicide, the spiral that followed. I understood it now in a way I hadn’t been able to when it first happened, when all I knew was that the man I loved had vanished without a word.
But understanding didn’t erase the loss.
“I fell apart anyway,” I said quietly. “After you left. I fell apart, and I did it alone.”
The words hung between us, carrying the weight not just of four hours trapped in crushed metal, but of years building a life around the spaces where he should have been.
“I know.” His voice cracked on the words. “God, Mia, I know.”
“I’m not saying it to hurt you.” I shifted closer, pressing my forehead against his. “I’m saying it because…we could have fallen apart together. We could have been broken in the same room instead of in different parts of the country.”
“I should have stayed.” It wasn’t a defense. Wasn’t an explanation. Just acknowledgment, raw and unvarnished.
“Yes. You should have.”
We breathed together in the dark, the rhythm we’d found during my panic still holding.
