“Please come home.”I wanted to laugh, or cry, or hurl the phone into the sun. Instead, I just sat there, letting the words burrow under my skin.
I pressed my forehead to the handlebars, eyes shut tight. For a minute, I let myself feel it—the weight of wanting, the ache of missing him, the anger at both of us for fucking it up so bad. My body shook, just a little, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.
I loved him. I could say it here, in the silence, where no one would ever hear it. I loved him and I hated that he needed me as much as I needed him. I hated that I was so easy to break, and that he was the only person who ever bothered to try.
I sat up, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and looked at the phone again. The screen had gone dark, but the message was still there, waiting. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that home was more than just a place you left behind.
I put the helmet back on, squeezed the gloves tight until my hands stopped shaking, and swung a leg over the bike. I started the engine, let it settle into a low idle, and pointed the front tire back the way I came.
For the first time in three days, the road didn’t feel like escape.
It felt like hope.
Chapter Twelve
~ Floyd ~
Three weeks to the day. It doesn’t sound like much until you try to measure it out in sleepless nights, cups of gas station coffee, and the number of times you almost send a message and then have to break your own hand to stop.
After twenty-one days without Ransom, my body looked like I’d been exhumed: skin gone sallow, cheekbones out sharp enough to cut, eyes so rimmed with red that I started keeping the station lights on low to avoid scaring off the townsfolk.
This was my evening: sitting in my living room, not watching TV, not listening to music, just letting the stale air press against me. My uniform—clean, pressed, but no longer tailored to a body that actually ate—hung off me like I’d stolen it from a bigger, meaner man. Every time I moved, the fabric bunched up around my shoulders, like it was trying to fold me up and put me away for good.
The coffee table was a graveyard: three mugs with rings of sludge at the bottom, the same shade as pond water, each one with a lip print like a fingerprint, evidence that I was still haunting the place.
Takeout containers stacked on the floor next to the couch, orange grease bleeding through cardboard, each box a timestamp for another dinner eaten without taste buds or company.
The bed—when I made it that far—was a shrapnel field of unwashed sheets, pillowcases balled up at the headboard, blanket in a heap like I’d been wrestling ghosts.
My phone lived on the arm of the couch. Once an hour, I checked for missed calls, texts, emails, even the junk folder. Ransom’s number was pinned to the top of every app, as if the little blue star would conjure him back into existence. Nothing.Just the same county spam, same Amber Alerts, same biweekly reminder from my insurance to drink more water.
It wasn’t that I’d given up. I just didn’t know what else to do. I’d tried everything: guilt, anger, ritual. I let the house fall apart, then spent a weekend scrubbing every surface with bleach, like maybe I could disinfect the memories out of it.
For two days, I got so drunk that I had to lock my guns in the garage, afraid I’d start using them for target practice inside. I even tried going back to therapy, but the new guy spent more time complimenting my self-awareness than telling me how to make the ache stop.
Tonight, I just sat. It was almost peaceful, the kind of quiet that you don’t get in a house until everyone’s dead or gone.
The first noise was the radio, set to the lowest possible volume, the dispatcher’s voice a mosquito whine in the background:“…possible break at Inked Rebellion, Main Street. Caller reports a suspicious—”
My pulse woke up before I did. I straightened, the bones in my spine clicking like dice in a cup. I grabbed the mic from the end table, thumbed it alive.
“Dispatch, say again?” My voice barely cleared a whisper, the dryness catching on the end.
The dispatcher repeated, slower:“Sheriff Hardesty, we’ve got a report of a suspicious person at Inked Rebellion. Visual on the side entrance. No sign of owner, but possible forced entry. You copy?”
For a second, the entire world was just the phone in my hand. I wanted—needed—to hear his name. Even if it was just a false alarm. Even if he’d come back to torch his own shop and leave nothing for anyone.
“Was it Ransom?” I asked. The words broke on the way out.
A pause. I imagined the dispatcher glancing at her notes, picturing Ransom’s file in the digital Rolodex, his mugshotfrom the last time he “accidentally” set off a car alarm at the VFW.“Negative, Sheriff. Caller described a minor, possibly a teenager. Male, average build, dark clothing. No further details.”
The hope evaporated, replaced by something colder and meaner. This wasn’t Ransom, it was some punk—maybe a copycat, maybe someone who thought they could just take what wasn’t theirs because the owner wasn’t there to defend it.
The next words out of my mouth felt right for the first time in weeks: “On my way.”
The uniform jacket barely hit my shoulders before I was out the door. The air outside slapped me hard, and I inhaled so deep it felt like a threat. Every step to the cruiser was automatic; I wasn’t even sure I’d locked the house behind me.
The second I hit the driver’s seat, I flicked on the lights—no point in being subtle. Half the town could watch me floor it down the avenue; I wanted them to.
