He turned to face her.
In the moonlight, she looked exactly like—a woman running on no sleep and too much adrenaline and a grief she hadn't let herself feel yet, holding a weapon steady because that was the only thing she knew how to do when the world stopped making sense.
But Trent saw something entirely different. He saw the woman he wanted as a partner. The woman who had torn down every defense he’d ever constructed and shown him what it was like to really love someone.
And God, he loved her. He loved everything about her.
He cupped her face. Stared into her wide, blue eyes. “I’ll talk to him on the porch,” he said. "You can stand guard from inside. Your team will have eyes on us from the outside. It will be fine.” He pressed his mouth to hers. Soft. Tender. Loving. It was a promise more than a kiss. "I want to speak with him alone. I need to do that.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then past him, at the man waiting at the end of the dock. "If you try anything," she said, raising her weapon, "I will kill you. I don't care who you are or who you used to be.”
His father smiled. "I've been dead for twenty years. I’m used to it.”
Dove lowered her weapon. “Be careful.”
“I will,” Trent said. “Let’s go up to the porch.”
“I’ve missed this place.” His dad followed him along the walkway and over the bridge. A few gators made themselves known, while Dolly followed them, thrashing happily about.
“I could use a drink.” Trent opened the porch door, letting Dove in first, then his father. “Would you like one?”
“Tequila, if you got it.” His dad ran his fingers across his mom's favorite rocking chair, pausing for a moment.
“I’ll get the bottle and a couple of glasses.” Dove dragged a hand down his arm.
Inside, he could see the shapes of Lach and Easton through the kitchen window, Dove moving past them, snagging the liquor and rushing back through the door, setting everything down on the small table. “Buddy and Sterling aren’t too far away. Cullen’s out in the bay.”
“Thanks.” Trent kissed her cheek. He sat in the larger of the two chairs and poured the tequila.
“Your mother loved this chair.” His father eased into the rocker that he’d built with his own hands and sighed. “Your girlfriend, Dove, her uncle spoke so fondly of her. I talked with him the day he died, and he got a good chuckle out of the fact that the two of you found each other.” His dad stretched out his legs, crossing his ankles, just like Trent remembered he used to do. “I told him it didn’t surprise me by the way she looked at you at your mother’s funeral.”
Trent picked up his glass and stared at the liquid while he pondered that thought. “You were the man we chased.”
“I was.”
“Jesus,” Trent mumbled. “You’ve been here all this time, and you couldn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t stay. I couldn’t.”
“Right.” Trent lifted his drink, tossed back his head, and let the liquid burn. “Before we get into whatever the hell is going on.” He turned and looked his father straight in the eye. "I need to know if you visited Mom before she died.”
His father's hands wrapped around the glass. He looked down at it.
The silence stretched long enough that Trent heard Dolly slip back into the water at the far end of the moat. Heard the frogs start back up after going quiet when the voices had carried across the property.
"Yes," his father said.
One word. All the weight of twenty years inside it.
“Sneaking in to see her—the funeral…” His dad paused, let out a long breath and shook his head. "Probably the dumbest thing I've ever done. Given everything. Given how careful I had to be for so long." He lifted his eyes from the glass and Trent saw it there—the damage. The loss. The grief. Still fresh, somehow, despite the time. "But she was dying. And she was the love of my life. My everything. Maybe you can’t understand. Maybe you can. But I never stopped loving her. Loving you. And I couldn’t… couldn't let her go without saying goodbye."
Trent looked out at the moat. At the moon sitting flat on the surface of the dark water and the cypress trees black against the sky. He thought about the last days of his mother's life. The way she'd drifted in and out, present and then suddenly not, her eyes going somewhere he couldn't follow. The way the hospice nurse had said it was normal, the brain protecting itself, and he'd sat next to her bed and held her hand and talked about nothing because what else could he do.
And then one morning, she'd been calm. Not the medicated calm or the distant calm of someone slipping away. Something else. Something settled, like a question that had been asking itself for twenty years had finally gotten its answer.
He'd thought it was just the dying. The way bodies sometimes made peace with what was coming.
He turned back to his father. "It calmed her." His voice came out rough, and he didn't bother to try to smooth it. "I don't know if she knew it was real or if she thought she was dreaming, but it made the end easier for her."
