Her look told me there wasn’t a chance in hell she was keeping this juicy detail from our older sister. Right. I’d cross that bridge when we got to it.
Madden glanced at me, something bright and unsettled still in her eyes.
I exhaled slowly, tightening my fingers on hers. “Let’s get out of here.”
Twenty-Eight
MADDEN
Hoyt came to get us himself.
I registered that fact the way I registered everything else after the clinic: distantly, as if it belonged to someone else’s night. Someone else’s emergency. He didn’t say much beyond that everything had been contained, which seemed like a strange word to apply to something that had erased an entire floating square of my life from existence.
Contained.
As if fire respected boundaries.
I opened my mouth to protest out of reflex. I didn’t need this. I didn’t want to be an imposition. I could manage. I always managed.
But the protest stalled halfway to my throat, because the truth crept in sideways.
Neither Rios nor I had our vehicles.
And somewhere between the clinic room and Hoyt’s truck, it finally sank in that the only things I actually still owned were whatever was in my car. Everything else—clothes, books, notes, mementos, the stupid coffee mug I’d had since law school, the last physical trace of Gwen’s life I’d still been able to reach—had been on the Second Wind.
Past tense.
There was no question the boat had been destroyed. No question whatever hadn’t burned had sunk. I didn’t need anyone to say it out loud for me to be certain. The absence echoed already, like a phantom limb I hadn’t yet learned not to reach for.
My throat hurt. My head hurt. My body felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry somewhere it didn’t quite belong.
So I didn’t fight.
I climbed into the truck and let the door shut behind me.
Rios stayed close. Not hovering, exactly—he wasn’t that kind of man—but near enough that I sensed him without looking. His presence registered on a level below thought, like pressure or gravity. I couldn’t tell if he was waiting for something else to happen—for someone to jump us, for me to finally crack—or if he needed me close for his own reasons. Like perhaps he needed the reassurance that I was still breathing.
The idea of that last one slid in unexpectedly, and something warm unfurled in my chest.
Which unfortunately made me think of the kiss.
Which immediately took that warmth and set it on fire.
I stared out the window and told myself not to analyze it. Analysis was dangerous territory tonight. Analysis led to spirals, and spirals led to questions I didn’t have the bandwidth to answer.
The truck slowed. Turned. Stopped.
Caroline and Hoyt’s house sat quiet and dark, the kind of late-night stillness that meant the children had been put to bed hours ago and the adults had made the fragile transition from managing to waiting. The porch light was on.
Caroline was already in the doorway.
One moment I was standing just outside the door, still orienting myself to the house, still vaguely aware of the night pressing in around me, and the next she’d wrapped her arms around me. No questions. No pause to assess whether I wanted it.
Just contact.
“Oh, honey,” she murmured, brief and low, pulling me in against her shoulder somehow, even though I was taller than her by about four inches. She smelled like clean cotton and something faintly herbal, and the absolute momness of it hit me sideways. Because I’d never had anything like this from my own mother.
She pulled back just enough to look at my face, hands still on my arms, thumbs pressing lightly as if checking I was solid. Her gaze flicked over me in quick, practiced passes before turning sharply toward Rios.
