“I’m leaving now,” I said. “Call me if anything changes.”
“Joy—” Daddy started.
“I’ll be there in forty minutes,” I said, and hung up before they could talk me out of it.
I stood in the back room for one long second with my hand pressed flat to my stomach, breathing hard, trying to decide whether I should call Micah.
I thought about his eyes. The way they went cold when he felt threatened. The way he’d saidno one gets to say that to you.
If I told him, he would come.
Immediately.
He would come like a storm.
And the idea of Micah on my parents’ land, in the middle of my siblings, with a strange woman at the gate asking about him by name …
It felt like dropping a match into dry grass.
I wasn’t sure what would burn first.
So, I didn’t tell him.
Not yet.
I grabbed my keys, told Britney I had an emergency, and didn’t stop for questions. I just went.
By the time I hit the bridge, Charleston fell behind me in its pretty, curated way, and the world opened into marsh and sky.
Wadmalaw always did that to me—made me feel like the air was bigger, like life didn’t have to be so tight and complicated.
But today the marsh looked different.
Not peaceful.
Watchful.
The road to our farm was a familiar ribbon through live oaks and palmettos, the kind of drive I could do blindfolded. I’d done it in tears, in laughter, in anger.
But I had never driven it like this.
My hands gripped the wheel like I was steering myself through a new version of my life.
And as the trees thickened, I realized something I hadn’t admitted yet.
I was different going back.
Not because I’d slept with a man. Not because I wasn’t a virgin, anymore, like that was some magical badge of adulthood.
But because Micah had forced me to see myself without my own careful filters.
He had seen me want. He had seen me shake. He had seen me choose.
And once you saw yourself like that—raw and real—you couldn’t fully go back to being small.
Even on the land that had raised you.
When I turned onto our driveway, I saw the problem immediately.
