The sea answers with a roar that rattles the glass.I let that sound wash through me for a beat—not courage, not recovery, but a small, dangerous curiosity that tastes like something stubborn.I cross to the window, and the motion clears the fog in my head like someone throwing a pane open.
Decision packs itself into my throat like a stone.I will find out why he brought me here.Fuck—I will know.
ChapterTwo
Eddie
The door stays open.I want her to see the gap, to feel that leaving’s an option.She’s not trapped like in that apartment—unable to escape because that asshole made it impossible.I lean against the hallway wall and don’t move for a beat, afraid that if I step forward the image of her inside will dissolve: Cleo, wrapped in my sweater as if trying to disappear into the seams, eyes hollow, the pulse ticking in the hollow of her throat.
Haunted is too soft a word for what she looks like.
She looks brittle in ways that make me ache and panic.I’ve built an empire on solving problems, on cutting through crises with money and influence.None of those tools work on her.How do you fix someone who’s been opened in places you can’t see?
Two therapists are already waiting on standby—one in Seattle, one here on the island.I’ve spoken to both.They gave me instructions: let her set the pace, don’t push food, don’t hover—agency, boundaries.Good words.They work in offices, on paper.Not in a bedroom where she clutches a sweater like it’s the last rope left.
Honestly, I wanted to fold her into my arms and make it better.I wanted to hand her a map out of whatever marked that look on her face.It took everything in me to stop and let her be in her new space, to stand there and keep my hands to myself while hoping she’ll accept the mercy of it.
All I can do right now is give her a safe harbor and hope for the best while we help her heal.
I told myself this house would be better than a hospital.There are no needles, no sterile walls.No reporters planted outside the door trying to figure out what’s happening to Cleo Wilder.Here she would have privacy—space—the chance to breathe.But when I saw her eyes a few minutes ago, I wondered if I’d only built another cage—cedar and glass instead of marble and steel.
Downstairs, the kitchen smells of coffee and fresh bread.Breakfast has been waiting for over an hour.I ordered it before dawn—oatmeal, fruit, tea—small, digestible, nothing that could overwhelm.Timing matters.I wanted her to wake to something that said, “We see you.You’re not invisible—not to us.”
Barret stands at the counter, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair pulled back in a loose knot.Ink runs under the cuff of his shirt: a compass, a sparrow, a few musical notes braided into a thin river of black.He’s hunched over the bowls with a focus that reads like a prayer.Everything on the tray is arranged almost stupidly—oatmeal, berries, a linen napkin folded crisp and square, cutlery polished until it gleams.
He pours hot water, lines up tea bags on a plate, and nudges the mug handle to face the chair like it knows someone will need to grasp it.He used to fuss over lyrics this way—every line, every chord bent and smoothed until the phrase sounded just right.Apparently, now it’s bowls of oatmeal.
“Too much?”he mutters without looking up.
I study the tray.There is too much and not enough.You can’t bring someone back to life with blueberries and linen napkins, but no one can say we didn’t try.
“She might not touch it,” I say, remembering what one of the therapists told us.
They explained something that sounds clinical and then becomes human and heartbreaking when you say it out loud: survivors of prolonged abuse often don’t respond in ways outsiders expect.The body keeps scores the mind can’t name—nausea instead of appetite, a shut door where hunger used to be, a reflex that protects by turning inward.Food can feel like another thing to be taken away; being offered without choice can bring back a thousand small violences that weren’t called that at the time.
There’s dissociation—parts of a person drifting away to survive—and triggers in ordinary gestures: someone standing too near, a tone of voice, a movement that matches memory.Pushing, pleading, bargaining—any of it can snap the fragile line that lets someone stay present.What helps is smallness and consent: choices she controls, predictable routines that don’t surprise, patience that doesn’t demand explanation.Presence matters more than performance—showing up and not trying to fix everything at once.It’s maddening and slow and ...something that might send me to the brink of madness because it’ll force me to be patient in ways my instincts hate.
Fuck—it’s humbling.
Barret exhales, the sound fraying at the edges.He picks up a lollipop, the nearest thing he has to something to suck on.He can’t smoke.We’re trying to stay clean of everything that dulls our heads or makes us less present.Even sex.
I’ve been so close to coming within a breath of saying it out loud.Like, “suck my cock.”The thought slams into me—crude, desperate—as if the touch could stitch us together faster than patience ever could.It’s reckless, dangerous, and part of me still aches for it.The image is both ridiculous and dangerous.It would be a way to dodge the real work we’ve been doing toward an us.
I’m trying to fix what’s broken between us.It’s slow and mostly made of small, stupid moments: the times my hand reaches for him, I yank it back because I remember how easy it is to mess things up.Fixing us isn’t one big heroic thing.It’s a million tiny choices—getting up when he’s awake at three a.m., saying sorry before pride gets in the way, letting him hold a silence without trying to fill it with a fucking joke.
I promised I’d do it honestly.Show up.Pull back when he needs me to.Keep my hands to myself until he says otherwise.Fuck.It’s more complicated than I imagined.Every day, it asks something from me I didn’t know I had.
Barret finally looks at me.His gaze is cautious.“You sure this was a good idea?Bringing her here?”he asks.
The question strikes where I’m weakest.I’ve asked myself the same thing a hundred times in the past few hours.Forty-eight?Seventy-two?Time loses its edge when you’re running on adrenaline.In the planning room, it looked like control when Arthur Bradley and his son helped map everything.Now, watching Cleo in that sweater looks like a gamble.
“I don’t know,” I admit.The words taste foreign in my mouth.I don’t say I don’t know.Never.“A hospital would’ve been worse.Paparazzi would have swarmed.She’s supposed to be missing to the wold.There’s the part where we have no idea how we’re going to deal with her disappearance.Here, at least, no one will find her.Only a few people know about this place.”
Barret leans his hip against the counter.He runs a hand through his hair and then picks at the corner of a napkin until it tears.“I don’t think she trusts either of us.”
“She shouldn’t,” I say too fast.He flinches, but I keep talking.“We’ve learned that trust isn’t given after what she’s been through.We have to earn it.”
He tilts his head and studies me like I’m a chord he can’t quite place.“And you think we can?”
