Then I came back six months ago, desperate and running, and discovered that Cal Bennett lived twelve feet from my door.
Neither of us had ever acknowledged it. Six months of hallway encounters, six months of brief nods and averted eyes and silence so thick it felt like a physical wall between us. We didn't speak. Didn't even say hello. Just passed each other like strangers, pretending we hadn't once been family.
He looked the same. Taller than I remembered, or maybe I'd just forgotten. He had broad shoulders, the kind of build that came from carrying people out of burning buildings. His face was harder than I remembered, jaw tight, lines around his eyes that hadn't been there three years ago. He was in civilian clothes: worn jeans and a faded henley, but he carried himself like a firefighter even off-duty. Alert. Ready.
Our eyes met.
Something flickered in his expression. Recognition,yes, but something else too. Something I couldn't read.
He nodded once. A single dip of his chin, nothing more.
I nodded back.
He continued down the stairs, brushing past me close enough that I caught the scent of him: soap, something clean, and underneath it the ghost of smoke that never quite washed off firefighters.
I stood frozen on the landing. When I heard the main door close behind him, I climbed the last few steps to my apartment, unlocked my door with shaking hands, and stepped inside.
The apartment was dark, curtains still drawn from this morning, and I let the darkness swallow me. Sank down against the door I'd just closed, knees pulled to my chest, heart pounding like I'd run a marathon.
Cal.
I couldn't see him without seeing Mateo. Couldn't look at him without imagining that night. The warehouse, the fire, Cal going back in, finding Mateo under the rubble. The stories I'd pieced together from newspaper articles and condolence cards, the scene I'd rebuilt in my nightmares a thousand times.
Had Cal held him? Had Mateo said anything at the end? Had he asked for me?
I'd never had the courage to ask. And Cal had never tried to tell me.
Six months of living across the hall, and we'd exchanged maybe ten words total.Sorry.Excuse me.After you.The careful choreography of two people who couldn't bear to look at each other but couldn't escape each other either.
I wondered sometimes if he blamed me. If he looked at me and thought:she should have been there. She should have known. She should have kept him safe.God knows I blamed myself enough for both of us.
Or maybe seeing me was just too hard. A reminder of everything he'd lost too. Mateo hadn't just been my fiancé. He'd been Cal's best friend. His brother in every way that mattered. Maybe I was a ghost to Cal the same way he was a ghost to me.
Either way, we'd both chosen silence. Six months of shared walls and averted eyes, and it was easier this way. Safer. Because if we talked, we'd have to feel. And feeling was the one thing I couldn't afford.
I sat in the dark until my heart rate slowed. Until the evening light started to fade and shadows grew in the corners. Until my phone buzzed in my pocket and I flinched like I'd been shot.
Unknown number.
Thinking about you.
I stared at the screen, cold spreading through my chest. Three words. No signature. No context.
I deleted the message. Blocked the number. Toldmyself it meant nothing—wrong number, coincidence, some random creep who'd found my contact info somewhere. It didn't have to be Evan. There was no way it was Evan. Could it?
But my hands were shaking when I set the phone down.
I checked the lock on my door. Once. Twice. Then once more, just to be sure.
The phone sat dark in my hands. Just a wrong number. That's all it was. That's all it could be.
Because if Evan had found me here—in the one place I thought he'd never look—then I had nowhere left to run.
CHAPTER 2
Cal
TAKE CARE OF LUCY. PROMISE ME.
