“What are you going to do?” Elle asks, eyeing me like I might need another intervention.
“I don’t know. He wants to know about our past. About who I am to him. But—” I look at two of my best friends. “What if I tell him and he regrets it? Regrets protecting me? What happens when he realizes I’m the reason he lost everything?”
“Stop.” Madi’s voice cuts through the room, sharp and insistent. “You’re not responsible for what happened to him. Some asshole hurt a teenage boy for doing the right thing. That’s on them, not you.”
She grasps my shoulders with so much strength I wince. “You were both children, Clove. Children who needed help, and love, and care. He made the choice to save you. It was a beautifully brave, possibly stupid choice that cost him everything.” Her eyesare fierce. “But it was still his choice. And I guarantee you—memory or not—he’d make it again.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. I saw how he was looking at you.” Her smile is sad. “He stared at you like you’re the answer to a question he’s been asking his whole life. Memory loss didn’t erase your connection, Clover. You’re in his bones. You’re a piece of his soul.”
I want to believe her.
I want to believe that love can survive amnesia, a decade, and all the trauma in between.
But I’m terrified.
Terrified of hoping.
Terrified of losing him again.
Terrified that I’m not worth the chaos my presence seems to bring to his life.
A knock on the back door makes us all jump—it’s always nice when it’s not just me overreacting, but I hate seeing fear on the faces of my friends.
“Are you expecting someone?” Madi asks.
“No.”
We stare at the door as though it might explode.
Another knock. “Clover? It’s Chief. Got someone for ya.”
I exhale, and Elle curses.
“Freaking Chief,” Madi mutters while moving to the back door. “Why wouldn’t he come to the front like a normal human being?”
She opens the door to reveal Chief standing on my back porch, with Wrecks growling on one side of him and Valen standing on the other.
But it’s the package at their feet that makes my stomach drop dramatically to my toes. My legs carry me closer even as my mind screams at me to run.
White paper. Twine. My name written in an eerily elegant script across the front.
“We came this way ’cause it was time for a perimeter check and found this,” Chief says, his voice suspiciously careful. “Thought we should check it out before I called it in.”
The air slices my lungs like shards of ice as the panic seeps in. I’ve been in this kitchen since Valen left in the middle of the night. Someone was…they were right there, ten feet away from me, and I had no idea.
Wrecks whines before propelling himself forward and lying across my feet.
“Good boy,” Elle coos.
“Clover.” Valen’s voice shifts the panic to the back of my mind. There’s something in the blue depths of his eyes, a determination, a fearlessness I’ve never known that silently helps me regulate my breathing, my pulse, my mind.
Madi is beside me in an instant. “Is that?—”
“Another package.” The words taste bitter. She’d be pissed if she knew how regularly they were coming.
Chief steps aside as Valen circles the package with the eye of someone trained to disarm bombs—maybe he is. It hurts to realize there’s so much I don’t know about him now.
