She left the door open behind her.
CHAPTER 24
CAMILA
Noah’s taillights had long since disappeared down the lane, and I was standing in my kitchen trying to decide how I felt about that.
Heartbroken was the word I’d expected. It wasn’t quite right.
There was something there — the specific sting of watching someone choose comfort over staying, the particular loneliness of a driveway at midnight — but underneath it, quieter and more honest, was something that felt disturbingly like relief. I had been almost ready to call Noah my boyfriend. Almost. And I had been telling myself for six months that thealmostwas about timing, about healing, about taking things at the right pace.
Standing here now, I understood it differently.
I had known, somewhere deep down, that Noah would run. Not because he was a bad person. Because he was the kind of person who needed things to be uncomplicated, and I was not, and had not been for a long time. He had shown me who he was tonight, early enough that it cost me something manageable rather than something catastrophic.
I had already paid catastrophic once.
I stood at the window looking at the wreckage of the garden. The demolished tent. The scattered equipment. Jason’s carefully installed motion lights, still blinking their steady green at the perimeter.
The tent had looked ridiculous when he put it up. It annoyed me every time I looked at it.
The broken tent in the floodlight, with two men’s footprints in the wet grass beside it, looked like something else entirely.
From the bathroom down the hall came the sound of Jason’s voice — he had closed the door, and I understood he was trying to give me privacy, but he was too upset to be quiet, and I could hear every word.
I need to speak to him. Can’t you understand? This is an emergency.
A pause.
Are you finally taking this seriously? I told you they’d come for Camila, and they did. I told you.His voice cracked slightly on the last word — not breaking, but close.I want her safe, Briggs. No — no, YOU listen to me. If anything, ANYTHING happens to her, I will not spare anyone. You hear me? Seven years ago I did the right thing. I testified. I trusted you. And your department—
A long silence.
Then, quieter:Okay. Let me talk to Camila.
The bathroom door opened.
I turned around.
Jason came out looking like a man who had been in a fight — which he had, technically — and also like a man who wascarrying something much heavier than the physical evidence of it. His shirt was torn at the shoulder. There was a cut on his forearm he didn’t seem to have noticed. His face was the face of someone who had been frightened, not for himself.
I looked at him.
And then, without deciding to, I started crying.
It came from somewhere below conscious decision, from the part of you that had been holding everything at a sustained tension for so long that the moment something gave, it all gave at once.
Jason crossed the kitchen in three steps and put his arms around me.
I cried into his shoulder in heaving, uncontrolled waves, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to explain or justify or offer perspective or any of the things that would have been wrong. He just held me, solidly, completely, the way he had always held me, and let me come apart without commentary.
I don’t know how long we stood there.
Eventually the worst of it passed, the way the worst of things always eventually did. I became gradually aware of several things simultaneously: that my robe had loosened at the waist and I was naked underneath, that my face was entirely wet, that I was clutching the torn fabric of Jason’s shoulder, and that being held by him felt, infuriatingly like being held by the only person who had ever known how to do it.
I stepped back and pulled the robe tight.
“I’m sorry,” Jason said.
