The door closes softly behind me.
Inside the warehouse, Leyla’s sobs echo against concrete that doesn’t care, and Cameron holds her as best he can, whispering reassurances he doesn’t fully believe but refuses to let go of anyway.
Hope is dangerous.
But despair?
Despair is predictable.
And that is why silence always wins.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
IF YOU ONLY KNEW
ZACK
Imiss it the first time. I see her looking back at me and I know that my head isn’t where it’s supposed to be. I don’t know how to allow myself to feel this when everything around us is crumbling. My world isn’t whole unless she’s in it, and I have this innate sense of knowing when she’s not okay. To know it’s my fault is probably the part that hurts me the most.
That’sthe part that bothers me most.
The warehouse hums the way a place like this always does—old wiring, distant power, the faint vibration of something running longer than it should—but my attention keeps snagging on the wrong things. The echo of our argument. The memory of Hazel’s voice in the dark last night, soft and unguarded, saying something I wasn’t prepared to hold.
I love you.
The words loop without permission, cutting through my focus like interference on a clean signal. I tell myself it’sirrelevant. I tell myself this is not the time. Cameron and Leyla matter. Lives matter. Feelings can wait.
They always can.
Hazel moves a few steps ahead of me; light, careful, posture alert. She doesn’t say anything, but I can feel the space between us the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm. She notices when I lag half a step behind. When I pause too long at nothing.
“You good?” she asks quietly.
“Yeah,” I say too fast. “Just thinking.”
She doesn’t respond. That’s worse than if she did.
I force my mind back to the building—angles, seams, load-bearing walls—but it keeps sliding sideways, back to the way she looked at me this morning in the car. Not angry. Not dramatic. Just…hurt. Like she’d offered me something fragile and I’d locked it in a box without meaning to.
I didn’t pull away because I don’t feel it. I pulled away because that’s what I do.
Love isn’t soft to me. It’s weight. Responsibility. A list of names I carry with me every day. My parents. Sam. People I didn’t save. People I was supposed to.
Hazel saying it makes it real in a way I don’t know how to protect.
“Zack,” Hazel says again, sharper this time. “You’re not listening.”
I stop walking.
She turns to face me, frustration flickering across her expression. “You keep saying you’re fine, but you’re somewhere else.”
I open my mouth with the right answer ready—mission, focus, timing—and then close it again because she deserves better than another deflection.
“I can’t afford to split my attention,” I say finally. “Not here.”
Her jaw tightens. “I’m not asking you to.”
“You are,” I reply, more sharply than I intend. “Not on purpose, but?—”
