Willa’s heart was beating too hard for someone sitting still.
She leaned forward a fraction of an inch.
So did he.
“Mom.” Grace’s voice cut through the cave, sharp with the particular fear of waking in an unfamiliar place in the dark. Willa was on her feet before the word had fully finished.
“I’m here,” Willa said, crossing the cave in four steps, her voice dropping immediately into the tone that had settled Grace since she was small. “I’m right here, sweetheart.”
Grace sat up in her sleeping bag, her eyes wide and disoriented. “I didn’t know where you were.”
“Right here,” Willa said again, and crouched beside her. “I was just over there. You can always see where I am from anywhere in this cave.”
“I know.” Grace let out a shaky breath. “I know, I just woke up, and for a second I forgot where we were, and I didn’t—” She stopped. “Don’t go far. Please.”
“I won’t,” Willa said.
She looked back once toward where Ace still sat on the flat rock near the entrance. He was watching her, his expression easy and unhurried, and he gave her the smallest nod.
She turned back to Grace.
“Lie back down,” Willa said gently.
“Will you stay with me?” Grace asked, and there was nothing seventeen about the question. There was only a girl who’d been frightened and had held herself together all day and now wanted the comfort of her mother.
“Of course,” Willa said.
She eased herself into the sleeping bag beside her daughter, which required a degree of contortion, given that it was designed for one person. Thankfully, both Willa and Grace were small women. Her daughter pressed against her side and wrapped both arms around her, something Grace hadn’t done since she was a child. Willa held her close, pressed her lips against the top of her head, and breathed her in.
“You smell like the ocean,” Grace murmured.
“We all do,” Willa said.
Grace’s grip tightened briefly, then relaxed.
“Go to sleep,” Willa said softly. “I’ve got you.”
The fire held its steady amber pulse. The storm murmured at the edges of the limestone. Andy breathed deeply to her left. Somewhere across the cave, Rad’s voice said something low and quiet to Margo. She answered, and then there was silence again.
Willa looked up at the ceiling of the cave.
She thought about the conversation she’d just had with Ace,
Willa thought about how close they’d both been as they’d been drawn together. Suddenly thoughts of Shaun flooded her mind. The way they always thought about Shaun in the quiet moments, not with the acute, chest-splitting grief of the early years but with something softer and more permanent. It was how you carried someone you had truly loved, as a presence rather than an absence.
She let it sit with her in the firelight, in the warmth of her daughter’s arms, in the sound of the storm easing by degrees against the stone.
Her eyes closed.
The cave held them all, warm and dim and solid, and the fire breathed steadily on, and outside, somewhere above the clouds, the stars were still there, waiting for the storm to pass. Willa drifted to sleep with a warm, smiling face and a strong hand leading her into dreamland—Ace!
6
ACE
The fire needed another piece of wood.
He knew it before he looked at it, the way you learned to read a fire after enough nights spent near one. The slight shift in the quality of the light, the way the warmth it threw had gone from active to passive, giving back what it had already generated rather than producing more. He reached for the stack that had been built against the back wall, selected a piece the right size, and laid it across the bed of coals with the care of someone who understood that too much too fast would smother it and too little would let it die.
