"She did." Clara was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "So you just… keep moving. Never stay long enough to lose anything."
Something about hearing it in her voice — flat, simple, not a judgment but a fact — made it sound different than it did in his own head. Worse. Lonelier.
"Yeah," he said. "Something like that."
Clara was quiet for a long moment, watching the storm. The lightning was moving away now, the gaps between flash and thunder stretching longer. Four seconds. Five. Six.
"Storm's moving on," she said.
Sure enough, it was. And something in his chest had loosened with it — not all the way, not gone, but quieter. Like a joint that had been seized up for years and finally, just barely,gave.
He swallowed hard.
Clara inhaled deeply and rose from the bench. "Goodnight, Jack. See you in the morning."
"Yeah, see you in the morning," he murmured, watching as she descended the stairway and disappeared into her bedroom, the door closing softly behind her.
He sat there for a while after she left. Hands on his knees. Breathing. The glass was still streaked with rain, but the sky beyond it had gone quiet — just the low grumble of thunder retreating down the coast, losing interest.
His body felt wrung out. Hollowed. Like someone had reached into his chest and rearranged the furniture, and he hadn't given them permission but couldn't exactly say they'd done it wrong.
He'd told her about Joel. About the diner and the storm and the guilt he carried like a bag he never set down. He'd said those things out loud, in this room, to a woman he'd known for four days.
Jack pressed his palms flat against his thighs. Steady. Still.
He should leave. That was the smart move — the pattern that had kept him intact for seven years. Get out before the roots set. Before the woman with the red hair and the quiet patience became someone he couldn't walk away from.
His hands weren't shaking anymore. That was the problem.
Clara Hawkins had steadied them, and he hadn't asked her to, and that scared him more than any storm.
five
Clara woke to the sound of humming and the weight of what Jack had told her.
She lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, replaying last night's conversation in the tower. The storm. The counting. The way his voice had cracked when he talked about Joel.
"I was supposed to be with him that night."
Seven years. Jack had been carrying that guilt for seven years, convinced he could've changed the outcome if he'd just been there. As if his presence in a passenger seat would've stopped a hydroplaning car, stopped a truck from crossing the median, stopped the universe from taking his brother.
As if love could be a shield against loss.
Clara knew better. So did Jack, probably. But knowing and believing were different animals.
She understood why he traveled now. Why he never stayed. It wasn't restlessness or adventure or freedom—it was grief with a suitcase, constantly moving because standing still meant feeling everything he'd been running from.
The thing that kept circling in her mind was that he'd told her. Not just the facts—those were easy enough to share, a story you could tell without bleeding. But the weight of it. The guilt. The fear. The way his hands had clenched white-knuckled when the thunder cracked.
He'd let her see him broken.
And she'd just... sat there. Held his hand. Offered the only truth she knew: that sometimes terrible things happened and there was no one to blame.
She hadn't told him about Sam. Hadn't offered her own pain in exchange, even when the opening was there. She'd kept her mouth shut and now in the morning light she felt like a coward.
Or maybe just careful.
Because there was a difference between sharing grief and sharing shame. Joel's death was tragic, senseless, not Jack's fault no matter how much he believed otherwise.But Sam? Sam was Clara's failure. Her bad judgment. Her inability to recognize a predator until he'd already picked her bones clean.
