The question was soft, careful. I turned and found Rowen behind me, stepping into the halo of firelight. The glow cast warm shadows across his face, highlighting the sharp lines of his jaw and the worry anchored in his eyes.
He lowers himself beside me—not close enough to touch, but near enough that his warmth cuts through the night. It grounds me more than I want to admit.
“Not really,” I whisper. There’s no point pretending with him. He’s always seen straight through me.
Rowen doesn’t rush in with empty comfort or attempt to gloss over the truth. He simply waits, letting the silence stretch in that calm, patient way that has always made me feel safe. He knows I’ll speak when I’m ready.
I draw a slow breath and pull my knees to my chest. “Do you ever feel like everything’s shifting around you... and you’re the only one trying to keep it from falling apart? Like if you stop for even a second, the whole thing might crash down?”
I glance his way, bracing for confusion—or worse, pity—but what I find instead is something unguarded.
His expression tightens, as if I’ve reached straight into a place he doesn’t show anyone. “Every damn day,” he whispers. No hesitation. No softening.
And then his hand moves.
It’s subtle, careful. His fingers slide toward mine, barely grazing them—intentional, unmistakable. Not an accident. Not this time.
The light touch sends a shiver through me, small but sharp enough to steal my breath.
We don’t speak after that. We don’t need to. Under a sky scattered with stars, with the fire fading to embers beside us, everything unsaid feels suddenly understood.
The days that followed blurred together. I caught Ronan’s eyes dropping to my mouth when I talked. Noticed the way Emerson’s palm rested at the small of my back a beat longer than necessary. We were orbiting something big, a quiet pull none of us knew how to navigate.
And me—I was being torn open.
I loved them. Not just as friends. Not anymore. But how could I choose when each held a piece of me?
Rowen, with his steady strength. Ronan, with his gentle warmth. Emerson, with that brutal honesty that saw straight into my bones. Even Reign—her laughter, her loyalty—she was part of the gravity that kept us all tethered.
This wasn’t a story where I could claim them all... was it?
One evening, Emerson found me behind the community center, the old spot where we used to sneak snacks during town fairs. The air smelled of damp earth and aging wood, and faint traces of carnival sounds lingered in the night.
I didn’t hear his footsteps. I just felt him there.
“You hiding from me?” Emerson’s voice drifted out of the shadows, low and edged with teasing, though it couldn’t mask the heaviness beneath.
I didn’t turn. I pressed my back against the cool brick wall, folding my arms tight across my chest like I could keep myself from falling apart. “Hiding from everyone,” I murmur.
He exhaled softly, the sound of his sneakers brushing the pavement marking each slow step he took toward me. Emerson never rushed—not with touch, not with words—but he stopped close enough that his presence wrapped around me. His shoulders hovered near mine, hands buried in the pocket of his hoodie as if he didn’t trust them to stay still otherwise.
Silence settled between us. Heavy, but strangely gentle.
Finally, after a long stretch, he says quietly, “Things at home are worse.”
My breath hitched. This was how he always reached me—by peeling back his own armor first. He offered pieces of himself, unpolished and painfully real, like invitations to share the weight with him. But even as he spoke, I felt it—what he wasn’t saying.Shadows clinging to him just beyond my grasp, too tangled and dark for him to pull into the open.
And when I finally looked at him, his eyes carried a message he didn’t speak:Don’t make me say the rest. Not yet. Not to you.
Not because he doubted me—he never had—but because he wanted to shield me from the darkness he still battled in silence. The truth he feared might drag me under with him.
He kept his gaze fixed on the night, as if staring into the dark might create enough space between him and the words he was forcing out.
“Mom’s... barely there anymore. Pills. Booze. Some days I walk in, and she doesn’t even know who I am.” The confession landed like a punch, but his voice stayed steady, practiced. Like he’d repeated these lines in his mind so many times they’d gone numb. “I’m scared to leave my sister alone with her,” he adds, softer. “She’s just a kid, Berk. She didn’t ask for any of this.”
My heart cracked clean down the center. For him. For his sister. For everything they’d been forced to carry. After our mothers died in that crash, the only adult woman left in our small world—Becca Blackthorne—drowned under the grief she couldn’t outrun. Pills became her escape. Vodka, her refuge. Now she wasn’t just lost to herself... she was slipping away from her children too.
That reality stung the deepest. Because this wasn’t only Emerson’s pain—it was a wound that kept spreading.
