My hands were shaking now, uncontrollably.
“I didn’t think,” I said. “I just … did it.”
Natasha smiled softly. “That’s who you are.”
The band started playing again, tentative at first, then gradually finding its rhythm. The cruise continued, the city glowing around us, unchanged by what had just happened.
But I wasn’t unchanged.
I leaned against the rail, breathing in the salt air, my heart still racing, my mind buzzing with the aftershock of it all. The water slipped past beneath us, dark and endless.
I hadn’t planned to save anyone’s life.
I hadn’t planned to be seen.
And yet—when it mattered, I’d moved.
I thought about all the years I’d spent preparing for a life as a counselor. The classes. The internships. The careful way I’d learned to listen, to sit with pain without flinching. I did like helping people. I always had. But standing there now, my hands still faintly trembling, I finally admitted something I’d been circling without naming.
I hadn’t studied counseling because I dreamed of spending my life in small rooms absorbing other people’s grief.
I’d studied it because I needed answers.
Because I wanted language for the things that had shaped me.
Because I wanted to understand my parents—their silences, their choices, the way love and damage could coexist so seamlessly.
Because I wanted to heal myself.
And somewhere along the way, that had quietly turned into a career plan without my ever stopping to ask if it fit.
Tonight hadn’t felt like therapy. It hadn’t felt like analysis or careful boundaries or measured responses. It had been instinct and urgency and stepping forward when everyone else stepped back. It had been physical and immediate and terrifying—and I hadn’t shut down. I hadn’t dissociated. I hadn’t felt drained or resentful or overwhelmed.
I’d felt alive.
Helpful in a way that didn’t require absorbing someone else’s suffering and carrying it home with me.
Maybe there were other ways to help people. Ways that didn’t look like an office or a license or a title I’d earned out of obligation instead of desire. Maybe purpose didn’t have to be something I forced myself into just because I was good at understanding pain.
As the boat cut through the dark water, Charleston shimmering in the distance, a quiet certainty settled into me.
It wasn’t an answer. Not yet.
But it was a shift.
A sense that I didn’t have to commit my entire future to one version of usefulness. That helping could be active. Immediate. Unexpected. That it could meet me where I was instead of trapping me in who I thought I was supposed to be.
It felt like purpose finding me—whether I was ready or not.
6
WYATT
Ididn't go back to Valentine.
Didn't stop at the hotel I'd booked three towns over. Didn't call any of my brothers to tell them I was leaving Texas.
I just drove straight to the airport.
