Louisa’s smile was sad but knowing. “You know what saved me and Owen when I came back from school after four years apart?”
I shook my head, throat too tight to speak.
“We stopped talkin’aroundthe truth and started talkin’throughit. Got loud. Got ugly. But we didn’t stop.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand, her skin warm and work-rough. “Don’t be afraid of the mess, Ivy. That’s where the good stuff grows.”
Her words stuck to my ribs long after I’d finished breakfast.
When I finally left the house, the day had already begun to heat, the sky so blue it almost hurt to look at. My boots carried me toward the barn without me really deciding to go—like my heart knew before my head caught up.
Inside, it was dim and cool, the scent of hay and dust thick in the air. Light slanted through the high windows, catching on motes that drifted like slow-moving stars. I moved to the far stall, where one of the heifers was close to calving, and let the work quiet my thoughts.
Measure feed. Check water. Breathe.
I didn’t notice the sound of boots behind me right away—the low creak of the barn door, the soft thud of steps across packed dirt.
When I finally looked up, he was there.
Wyatt.
And just like that, every sound in the barn seemed to stop.
We just stood there and looked at each other. The barn held its breath around us—dust motes drifting slowly in the shafts of late light, the faint sweet-sour of hay, and the tinny echo of a distant gate clanking. No theatrics. No raised voices. The storm that’d been building between us had finally spent itself, leaving something raw and honest in its wake.
“Wyatt…” My voice broke on his name.
“We need to talk,” he said, the words coming out hesitant. “Really talk. No more secrets. No more running. No more trying to protect each other from the truth.”
For a heartbeat, neither of us spoke. The only sound was the telltale groans of the old barn and hay crunching under the restless shifting of the heifer beside me.
Heat pricked behind my eyes, and I nodded. A fresh tear rolled down my cheek as I whispered, “Okay.”
And then I gave him what he wanted.
“I’m sorry.” The words cracked out of me, ragged as the sigh of wind through the rafters. “For leaving. For not trusting you. For making a choice that should have been ours to make together.”
He blinked like the sound of my apology had landed in a place he’d been keeping closed off. When he answered, his voice was low and rough, like he’d been swallowing glass. “I’m sorry too. For yesterday. For what I did to your father. For proving—” He stopped, the next words choking out of him. “For proving you right about what I’m capable of.”
I watched his hands. Bandages wrapped his knuckles the way armor wraps a wound—useful but not whole. He ran a palm through his hair, and it stuck up in disobedient angles, and for a stupid, unfair second, he looked like the boy I’d once loved. The sight hit me like something tender and dangerous all at once.
“You were protecting me,” I said, the obviousness of it sounding more like a question than a fact.
He laughed once, hollow. “I was out of control. There’s a difference.” The admission came hard and bright, a thing he forced out of himself like a confession. He sucked in a breath, eyes closingfor a heartbeat. “When I saw him grab you—” His hands closed into fists; the gauze strained beneath the pressure. “I didn’t want to just stop him, Ivy, I wanted to end him. I wanted to make sure he never had the chance again.”
The brutality of it landed like a physical thing between us. My stomach folded inward, not from fear this time but from the nakedness of what he’d almost done—the line he’d almost crossed for me.
“But you didn’t,” I said. My fingers found his, half instinct, half plea. His hand was warm and rough and trembling. “You stopped.”
“Only because Liam was there.” He swallowed. The words were immediate and true and small. “Only because someone who knows me better than anyone pulled me back.”
The honesty of it, the raw admission, made something in my chest crack. We stood in the barn's filtered light, all the words we'd never said finally taking form.
"We were kids," I said finally, my voice barely above a whisper. "Kids trying to survive grown-up demons with tools we didn't have."
"We were." He moved closer, slow and careful like approaching a spooked horse. Each step deliberate, telegraphed, giving me time to run if I needed to. "But we're not kids anymore."
"No. We're not."
He was close enough now that I could see the flecks of gold in his green eyes, the way his pulse jumped in his throat. Close enough to smell him—hay and sweat and that indefinable scent that was just Wyatt, that had haunted my dreams for fourteen years.
