Headlights.
Cutting through the dark at the far end of the driveway.
Slow.
Unhurried.
One car.
Black.
I didn’t need to see his face. I already knew. My lungs forgot how to breathe. My fingers touched the glass like they could stop time.
The window was cold. He didn’t park at the front. He stopped halfway up. Got out. Didn’t pace. Didn’t knock. Just leaned against the hood. Waiting. Like he already knew the ending. LikeIdid too.
I walked barefoot through Camille’s house. Each step echoing like a countdown. The front door opened beneath my hand with no resistance. The porch light flickered above me.
I left it all behind. Not because I wanted to. But because my heart gave me no other choice. Wolfe didn’t look up. Didn’t move.
He was still.
Like stone.
Like inevitability.
I walked to the car. He opened the passenger door. Not with force. Not with ceremony. Just like it was already done.
I got in. The seat was warm. He closed the door. Walked around. Got in beside me. He didn’t speak. Didn’t look at me. Didn’t touch the key. He didn’t have to. The silence was enough.
It always had been.
The headlights lit up the gravel. And we left the house behind.
The letter still on the bed.
Unopened.
4
CLOE
The car ride was quiet.Not the kind that leaves space for thought or peace. The kind that builds behind glass in a sealed room, that hums beneath your skin until it replaces your heartbeat.
Not a single word passed between us. No sound except the low rumble of the engine, the occasional shift of gears, the distant sigh of tires against asphalt.
Wolfe didn’t look at me. He didn’t check the mirrors. He didn’t even touch the radio. Still he was everywhere. In the static tension of the air. In the subtle flex of his fingers around the wheel. In the way his presence filled the entire cabin—thick, heavy, impossible to ignore.
I didn’t ask where we were going. I already knew. And if I didn’t? I wouldn’t have dared to ask anyway. Instead I stared out the passenger window, watching the city blur into a smear of light and color—red neon bleeding into blue, high-rises reflected back at me through thick glass.
My reflection stared back like a stranger. Hollow eyes. Pale lips. A version of me that looked more ghost than girl.
The heat was off. The air in the car hovered just below comfort—cold enough to notice, but not enough to complain. Not enough to justify a word.
Wolfe wasn’t the kind of man to fidget. There was no bounce of his knee or tap the wheel. But tension lived in his body like a second spine.
I saw it in the clench of his jaw. In the pale stretch of his knuckles as they tightened around the leather grip. In the fact that he hadn’t blinked since the last turn.
We stopped at a red light. The world around us moved—crosswalks blinking, pedestrians darting—but we didn’t. Not even breath disturbed the space between us.
