That I’ve been to Austin fourteen times in the last three years. Twelve of those times were because you were coming home, and I couldn’t trust myself to be in the same zip code.
The honest answer would fucking end me.
“That’s what I thought,” she says.
Quiet. Not angry. Not hurt. Just confirmed.
Like she asked a question she already knew the answer to and got exactly what she expected, and getting it doesn’t make her happy, but it doesn’t surprise her either.
She pushes off the fence and walks back toward the fire.
I watch her the whole way. The sway of her hips. The set of her shoulders. The way the firelight catches the ends of her hair and turns them gold.
She sits down next to Presley and picks up a conversation like she didn’t just put a knife between my ribs and leave it there.
I take a drink.
My beer is warm at this point, but I drink it anyway.
* * *
Grace catches my eye across the fire about ten minutes later.
She’s got Waylon on her hip—still asleep now, his face pressed into her neck, one fat fist curled around the collar of her shirt.
She’s standing near the end of the table where Shadow’s talking to Banshee about something I can’t hear, and she’s not part of their conversation. I notice she’s not trying to be.
She’s looking at me with one raised eyebrow.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. One eyebrow, lifted a quarter inch, held for two seconds.
Half amusement. Half warning.
The amusement says: I saw that.
The warning says: be careful.
Grace doesn’t miss anything.
She’s a vet—she reads body language for a living, reads the shift of a horse’s ear and the tension in a dog’s jaw.
And apparently the specific way a man leans against a fence post when he’s trying to look casual and failing.
She watched me watch Dakota walk away and she clocked every damn second of it.
I look away first.
Because Grace is right.
Whatever she’s saying with that eyebrow, she’s right.
And I don’t need Dakota’s older sister to tell me what I already know—which is that I’m standing at the edge of a fire.
I finish the beer, set the bottle on the fence post, and don’t reach for a third.
* * *
Phantom finds me.
