Just a little.
If they came for me, I’d be ready. I had a knife, a lock, and the stubbornness of an entire family tree backing me up. Plus, I looked incredible in plaid.
It would have to be enough.
I squeezed my eyes shut, breathed in Knox’s scent, and waited for whatever came next. But the thing nobody tells you about hiding out in a farmhouse at night is that darkness isn’t silent.
It’s the opposite.
As soon as the sun dropped, the world came alive in stereo—frogs in the ditches, something small and desperate chewing at the walls, the wild riot of cicadas all rising and falling in a sound that felt like it could shake the house apart.
In town, night was a vacuum. Here, it was a battlefield, every soldier accounted for, every platoon screaming its presence.
I listened from the bed as long as I could, but eventually my skin started crawling with the need to move, to not be a sitting duck in a locked room. So I did the stupidest thing I could have done and crept out of the bedroom, down the hall, down the stairs, and then out onto the porch.
The wood was cold under my feet. I went barefoot, because the socks felt too loud on the old floors and I wasn’t about to wake the entire McKenzie army just so they could watch me fidget.
The porch swing was still swaying from where Harlow had sat earlier, probably thinking about the weather, or crops, or something only Harlow would consider a pressing issue when his house was on the verge of siege.
I climbed on, knees up, and let the swing rock me, one slow push at a time. The creak of the chain was so familiar it barely registered as noise. I wrapped Knox’s flannel around myself twice, sleeves hanging past my fingers, and looked out over the yard.
The moon was full, or close enough. It lit up the old barn and made the shadows stretch all the way to the fence line. I tried to spot movement, but the only thing out there was the wind, tugging at the loose tarp on the hay bales. The rest of the world—the river, the trees, the mountains in the far distance—was painted in grayscale.
It didn’t look like a fortress, but I knew it was.
I took inventory of everything that made this place different from the Bridger house, where I’d grown up trying to be as invisible as possible.
There, night was for locking doors and triple-checking that nobody had followed you up the drive.
Here, you could see every approach, every possible vector of attack, and the only thing waiting for you was maybe a stubborn horse or a raccoon with a death wish.
I catalogued the things I liked about the McKenzie property. The porch swing. The sound of Knox’s boots on gravel at sunrise. The way sunlight, in the morning, turned the kitchen table into a spotlight where you could eat and be seen, even if you didn’t have anything interesting to say.
The fact that nobody in this house ever asked me to justify my existence, or tried to buy my silence with crisp bills and a one-way train ticket.
I wondered, for a moment, if I’d ever feel like I deserved to stay.
Something crashed in the field—a deer, probably, or a possum being too ambitious—and my whole body went rigid. I was already on high alert, but this sent me straight into threat-mode.
I waited, heart pounding, for the follow-up sound—a car engine, a human voice, anything that would mean trouble… Nothing. Just the regular night, loud and messy and indifferent to my fear.
I leaned back, head against the chain, and let the swing go until the momentum carried me forward and back with just the weight of my body. It felt almost normal, like any summer night before everything had gone to hell.
I thought about Knox, about the way he’d looked at me when he said,“You’re with me.”He’d said it like it was an order, like he was so used to giving commands that the universe would just obey out of habit.
I wanted to believe it.
More than anything, I wanted that to be true.
I tried to imagine what it would be like if my father showed up in the middle of the night. Would I run? Would I fight? The answer depended on whether Knox was beside me or if I was alone.
But I’d be damned if I let my father take this away from me, too.
The air was cold and smelled like cut grass and woodsmoke, the kind of night that would have been perfect for stargazing if my brain wasn’t so crowded with ghosts. I hugged my knees and buried my face in the sleeve of Knox’s shirt, inhaling the cedar-smoke-vanilla blend that was him, distilled.
My hands had finally stopped shaking.
The porch swing groaned as I stood, and I paused at the edge of the steps, squinting into the dark one last time before heading inside.
