“Everything that happened to you, your mom, your home—I feel like?—”
“Shut the fuck up before I punch you in the face,” he snaps—fierce, but not at me.“He’s the one I blame.Not you.Not even Jake.I just want this asshole to get what he fucking deserves.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, gripping the wheel until my knuckles go bone white.“He will.Even if it’s the last thing I do.”
Silence again but it shifts—just a little.
“Thanks, though,” I say after a minute.
“For what?”
“Helping me out.Not just this time.Every time.”
“I should be thanking you.”
“For what exactly?”
“For letting me help.For trusting me with this.”He gestures to everything—me, the road, the mess.“And in case it hasn’t been made clear already, I’ll always have your back.”
“Even if it one day involves shovels?”
“Especially then.”
We both laugh, it’s strained, but it’s real.
“So what now?”he asks.
I look ahead at the road stretching into nothing.
“I don’t know,” I admit, and the words taste like defeat.
But under it—under the exhaustion, the failure, the shaking in my hands—there’s something else starting to burn.
Something that feels a lot like war.
CHAPTER27
ALWAYS
NORA
The late afternoonwind breezes across the pages of my book, one I'm completely absorbed in, lost in someone else's story, when I feel eyes on me.That familiar warmth that means someone is watching, studying me with the kind of attention that makes my skin prickle with awareness.
But it's not Nate.It's Jake.
"What?"I ask without looking up, though I can feel the corners of my mouth threatening to betray me with a smile.
"I always liked watching you read."
Now I do look up, marking my place with my finger because this is the first time all summer Jake has started a conversation that wasn't loaded with tension or carefully constructed distance.
"That's a weird thing to say?"
He's leaning against the doorframe with that expression he gets—the one that makes me feel like I'm being studied, catalogued, understood in ways that should terrify me but somehow don't.
"You feel every emotion with every page you read.And it's always spread across your face."
I close the book completely now, dog-earring the page despite my usual reverence for books.Some moments demand sacrifice, and this feels like one of them.Jake doesn't start conversations lightly anymore, and when he does, it usually means something is breaking apart inside him.
