I sat in it with my knees pulled to my chest, Jason’s t-shirt pulled down as far as it would go, mud on my hands and arms and probably my face, and I thought about everything.
I thought about the chair he’d moved three times without complaint. Camomile tea at one in the morning. The clown outfit with the bells. The five million dollars sent quietly, forty minutes into a fundraiser, without telling me. The tent in my garden, soaked through by the tropical storm.
I thought about a Tuesday in October and a golden retriever puppy on a man’s face.
I thought about everything I had done to make him leave — the nightgown, the oil, Noah — and how he had stayed through all of it, not because he had no pride left but because he had made a decision about what mattered and was honoring it with everything he had.
He had made a mistake. A catastrophic, devastating mistake, compounded by months of cowardice and silence. I knew that. I had been living inside that knowledge for a year.
But I thought, sitting in the dark forest with mud on my hands and his cologne coming off the fabric of his shirt, that there was a difference between a man who betrayed and a man who had been afraid.
I wasn’t sure I had been making that distinction.
I lifted the collar of his shirt and pressed it to my face.
Then I heard the gunshots.
Three shots. Far enough that they were muffled by the trees, close enough that I felt them in my chest.
I was out of the trench before I had decided to move.
I ran toward the sound with no plan and no weapon and nothing except the absolute inability to sit still in a hole in the ground while Jason was somewhere in the dark doing this for me.
The forest thinned. A clearing opened.
And in the pale moonlight I saw them.
Scarlett, tied to a tree, her hands behind her back. Pablo beside her, also bound, his head dropped forward. Jason stood between them with Pablo’s gun, breathing hard, shirtless, his back to me.
He’d done it.
I moved a step, and a branch snapped under my foot. Jason spun toward the sound.
His eyes grew wider, and everything after that seemed to be happening in slow motion.
Jason’s mouth moved.
“MOVE AWAY, CAMILA—”
The voice came from my left. I turned and saw the last man, the one I hadn’t seen, emerging from behind a tree with his gun up.
And exactly at that moment, Jason came between us.
The shot was loud and close and wrong, and then Jason was still standing.
Still standing, which was the thing I fixed on — he was standing, upright, facing the man — but his left hand had gone to his right shoulder and when he pulled it away there was dark blood on his palm, black in the moonlight.
But he didn’t go down. He kept standing like a mountain in between me and the man with the gun.
He turned back to the last man, pointed Pablo’s gun at him, and said something in a voice so quiet and so absolutely certain that the man went still immediately.
“Drop it,” Jason said. That was all. Just those two words, in that voice, with blood running down his arm.
The man dropped the gun.
I was sobbing. I hadn’t noticed when I’d started.
Then the red and blue lights came through the trees — multiple vehicles, the sound of doors and voices. The clearing filled with light.
