I don't want to be another thing that hurts you.
As if she'd asked me to protect her. As if that's what she'd been sitting there waiting for.
Idiot.
Chapter 33
Olivia
The living room was dark except for what little light spilled in from the kitchen, and I was glad for it.
I stood in the middle of the room with my arms crossed and my jaw tight and my heart going too fast, and I stared at the fireplace and tried to remember how to breathe like a normal person. The anger was already cooling at the edges—it always did, too fast, leaving me with nothing but the embarrassing evidence of having lost it.
I'd asked for a minute.
A minute. As if it would do anything about Ben Walsh sitting in this house doing that thing he did—that careful, considered, maddening thing where he could see exactly what was in front of him and still find a reason not to reach for it.
I pressed my fingers against my eyes.
The thing was, it wasn't only about Ben. Ben was just the place the pressure had finally found an exit. What it was actually about was this room. This house. The fact that I was standing in the dark of it six months after my husband died on the road outside, and I still didn't know why he was on that road.
That was the question I couldn't put down. The one I kept turning over in the dark hours, wearing it smooth without everfinding an answer. Maybe that was all I was ever going to get. Not an answer, just the question, worn smooth from handling.
I leaned against the stone of the hearth, suddenly exhausted. My fingers moved along its surface without thinking, tracing the irregular grain, the mortar lines between courses. His choices. Every one of them.
My hand dipped into a deep, recessed shadow where the base of the timber post met the stone foundation. A gap between wood and masonry that was never meant to be filled, just where two materials met and left a dark seam between them. My fingertips snagged on something.
It wasn't the grit of mortar or the cold, porous grain of river rock. It was a surface too smooth, too deliberate.
I crouched, bringing my face so close I could smell the dust of the stone. I reached into that narrow, dark crevice, my fingers trembling as they found the object again. It was tucked away, almost behind the edge of a massive timber post, where only someone cleaning the deepest, most forgotten corner of the hearth would ever find it. It wasn't part of the structural design; it was a secret kept by the masonry.
My heart skipped. I didn't need a light to know the color. I knew the exact weight of it, the way the sea had worried that one edge into a perfect curve for a thumb. The black lava from Maui. Ryan's stone.
He'd brought it here.
He hadn't just built a house; he'd built a vault. He'd pressed a piece of our marriage—a piece of us—into the very spine of his secret life. He'd hidden me in the dark of this room, a talisman he couldn't quite give up, or maybe a silent witness he needed to keep close.
I sat down on the floor, back against the fireplace, and looked at the dark room. And I waited for the wave—the grief or the rage or the bottomless sadness that usually came when I let myselfthink about him directly. I waited for the question to rise up again—why were you on the road?
It didn't come.
There was just the stone under my fingers and the quiet house around me and a feeling in my chest that took me a moment to name.
I was…done.
The question was still there—it would probably always be there—but it had stopped being something I needed answered in order to keep breathing. Ryan had been complicated and brilliant and selfish and tender, and he had loved me in the way he was capable of loving anyone, which was imperfectly, partially, with one hand always reaching for something just out of frame.
And he'd brought a piece of our honeymoon into his secret place and built a wall around it.
I pressed my palm flat against the stone, a final acknowledgement of the man I'd lost and the one I'd never fully known.
Then I stood up.
The kitchen light was a warm rectangle across the floor. Ben's shadow, still exactly where I'd left him. Waiting. Of course he was waiting—that's what he did, that's what he'd been doing for months. Waiting for the right moment, the right words, the right version of events in which reaching for me made sense. Building the case in his head the same way he'd built this house—carefully, methodically, making sure every joint was sound before he'd put any weight on it.
Except I was done waiting for him to decide I was structurally sound.
Ryan had carried the stone here because he loved me — messily, contradictorily, in the way he did everything. And maybe that was what undid me most. He had been thinking ofme. He just never told me. He'd made me a secret he kept from myself.
