“Thank you,” I say. It’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. But my voice is shaking, and it’s all I’ve got.
Rhett leans back. For a moment, I think he’s going to retreat. Close the door, rebuild the wall, go back to the safe distance he’s kept between us since the beginning.
He doesn’t.
He reaches out. His hand comes to my face. One finger, then two, hooking under a curl that’s fallen across my cheek. He brushes it back, tucking it behind my ear, and his knuckles graze my skin, and the touch is so careful that I feel it everywhere.
His hand stays there for a second. Against my jaw. Warm and rough and shaking, just barely.
I don’t look away.
I have spent my entire life looking away. Looking down. Dropping my eyes because eye contact is a kind of honesty I’ve never been brave enough to sustain. But his hand is on my face and his eyes are on mine, and they’re dark and scared and open, and I don’t look away.
I look right at him.
He drops his hand. Like it costs him something to pull back.
The fire pops. Chief shifts on his bed, letting out a long breath.
Neither of us says anything. We don’t need to.
I stay for another hour. We drink more coffee. He picks up the whittling. I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and my heart beating in a way it hasn’t in years.
When I leave, he walks me to my car. Chief follows, limping, and watches me from the porch as I back out of the driveway.
I make it halfway down the mountain before I have to pull over because I’m crying.
Not sad crying. The other kind. The kind that happens when something held too tight for too long finally lets go, and the relief is so big your body doesn’t know what to do with it except shake and let the tears come until they’re done.
You don’t have to be small to be safe.
I sit in my car on the side of a mountain road in the dark and I cry until I’m empty, and then I drive home and call Riley and tell her everything, and for the first time in my life, I use my whole voice while I do it.
Chapter 8
Rhett
The dream is always the same. Not the details. The details shift and rearrange the way dreams do, swapping faces, stretching hallways, turning daylight into dark. But the bones of it never change. I’m in a building that’s coming apart around me. Concrete dust and the copper smell of blood and a sound I can’t place that might be gunfire or might be the walls collapsing or might be someone screaming my name. I’m looking for my men and I can’t find them. I’m calling their names and the names come back wrong, echo-warped, and I know they’re dead before I find them, but I keep looking because that’s what you do. You keep looking.
I find them.
I always find them.
I wake up on the floor. Not the bed. The floor, tangled in the sheet I must have dragged down with me, my back against the cold boards and my heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth. Chief is standing over me, his nose pressed to my jaw,making the sound. The low, keening whine he only makes when I’m like this. When I’m on the floor and he can’t tell if I’m here or still there.
I put my hand on his neck.
“I’m here,” I tell him. My voice is wrecked. Scraped raw. “I’m here.”
He doesn’t move. He stays over me, breathing against my face, until my heart rate comes down and my hands stop shaking and the cabin reassembles itself around me. The woodstove. The ceiling beams. The window grows gray with predawn light.
Not there. Here.
I sit up. The sheet is soaked with sweat. My leg is seized, the femoral nerve locked in a spasm that turns the whole left side of my body into a single rigid line of pain. I breathe through it. I’ve been breathing through it for four years.
This is the part I don’t tell anyone.
Not the nightmares. People know about the nightmares. Colt knows. Nora probably knows, even though I’ve never said the words. What I don’t tell anyone is what comes after. The hour I spend sitting on the floor in the dark with my dog pressed against me, waiting for the world to stop smelling like dust and blood. How I check the perimeter of the cabin even though I know there’s nothing there. How my hands don’t stop shaking until the sun is up and the light is strong enough to burn the images out.
