He lowered his hand and turned to go.
“Anson?”
His heart stuttered. Maggie sat in the darkness at the far end of the porch, wrapped in what looked like every blanket in her cabin.
“You’re outside,” he said stupidly.
“Couldn’t sleep.” She tugged the blankets tighter around her shoulders. “Too quiet inside. Feels safer out here where I can see what’s coming.”
The admission gutted him—that she felt safer outside in the cold than inside where someone might be watching. He moved up the porch steps without thinking, stopping a few feet from her chair.
“Any word from Lila?” she asked.
“Princess is stable. Critical but fighting.” He shifted his weight, hands awkward at his sides. “She’s got a chance.”
“That’s good.” Her voice was small, almost lost in the rustling of the blankets as she huddled deeper.
He hesitated. He should walk away now. Go back to the forge and the kittens. But his feet wouldn’t move. “Do you… want company?”
“Please.” She gestured to the empty chair beside her.
He settled into it, the old wood creaking beneath his weight. The night wrapped around them, stars scattered like metal shavings across the anvil of the sky. For several minutes, they just breathed together, watching their exhales form ghost-clouds in the cold air.
“Who’s Landry?” he asked after a while. The question had been eating at him since she murmured the man’s name with a look of pure horror on her face.
Maggie went completely still beside him. Then, slowly, she turned to face him, her expression hidden in shadow.
“How did you know that name?”
“You said it. By the creek. When we found Princess.” He kept his voice neutral, careful. “Said ‘it was Landry, wasn’t it?’”
“Oh.” She looked away, staring into the darkness beyond the porch. “I didn’t realize.”
He waited, giving her space to decide whether to answer. The silence stretched between them, comfortable despite the weight of unspoken things.
“Landry was my co-host,” she finally said. “Before I got my own show. We dated for a while, too.” She pulled the blanket tighter. “It didn’t end well.”
Anson nodded, sensing there was more. His hands curled into fists on his thighs, already hating this man he’d never met.
“When the network gave me my own show, he didn’t take it well. Started showing up places he shouldn’t be. Calling at all hours. Leaving things at my house to let me know he’d been inside.” Her voice remained steady, but he could see the tension in her jaw, the way her knuckles whitened around the blanket’s edge. “I filed police reports. Multiple restraining orders. Nothing stuck.”
He remembered exactly when her letters changed—she’d talked about tools disappearing or things just not feeling right, and no matter how cheerful her words, he’d sensed the undercurrent of fear in them. “Jesus, Maggie. This has been going on for years, hasn’t it?”
She nodded slowly. “At first, I thought I was paranoid. Things would move in my house—nothing big, just... a mug on adifferent shelf. A chair at a different angle. I’d think I was losing my mind.”
“You’re not.” He fought to keep his voice steady. “Crazy.”
“I know that now.” She tucked her knees to her chest beneath the blankets. “But when you’ve spent your whole life being shuffled around, never having stability... you learn to question yourself first.”
“Shuffled around?”
“Foster care.” She gave a small, humorless laugh. “Eight homes in ten years. Some good, some... not so good. You get used to adapting, becoming whoever they need you to be to stay. But you never really belong anywhere.”
The admission pierced something deep in his chest. All those letters they’d exchanged, and she’d never shared this part of herself. Never mentioned the childhood that had taught her to question her own perceptions, to adapt or be abandoned.
“Where’d you find peace?” he asked, because he needed to know, needed to understand the woman who had driven two thousand miles to find him. “As a kid.”
“Abandoned places.” Her voice softened. “Construction sites after the workers went home. Half-built houses. Places where I could see the bones of things.” She shifted in her chair, leaning closer to him. “I’d imagine how they’d look finished. What I’d do differently. It was... control, I guess. Over something.”
