“Where are you?” he asked.
I steadied my breath. “Driving.”
“Alright, listen to me. Go back to the house,” he said softly. “I had Cami keep Harper for dinner,” he added. “She’ll bring her by later.”
A weight shifted. The unspoken way he handled things before I even thought to ask, making room for me without needing me to be okay first, made me feel looked after in a way that left me shaky, off-balance—but, for the first time all day, a little safe. My pulse tripped, a subtle flutter beneath my ribs. For a second, I wanted to close the distance between us; the phone line couldn’t bridge, the ache of that connection making my loneliness briefly sharper.
Something in me loosened.
“You don’t gotta walk back into everything right now,” he said. “Just… go sit by the water. Let yourself breathe for a minute.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
“I’ll stay on the phone,” he added.
I didn’t know what to do with that, or how to feel about it. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” he said simply.
So I drove, and he stayed.
Every now and then, I’d hear the sound of voices come over the radio or the subtle noise of his boots on the ground. But he didn’t fill the silence, didn’t force conversation. Like he knew in that moment, I couldn’t make words.
When I pulled into the driveway, the sky had softened into that gentle blue just before night fully settles in.
“I’m here,” I said softly.
I stepped out of the car, the sound of the ocean faint but steady in the distance, grounding in a way nothing else had been all day.
“Go sit,” he murmured.
As I sat, the sand cooled beneath me—air softer, waves crashing. The rest of the world was chaos, but here, things made sense.
I exhaled slowly, for the first time all day.
“You still there?” I asked quietly.
“Yeah,” he said.
And something in my chest finally settled, tension easing though the ache remained.
Not fixed.
Not gone.
But it no longer felt like I was drowning.
And right now—
That was enough.
Chapter 20
Logan
Dani was going to be the death of me.
Not just because I couldn’t keep my thoughts off the way that being close to her felt like something I shouldn’t want as much as I did, or the way she slipped into my life without forcing it, but because my body still hadn’t come down from earlier. The tension hadn’t eased. It sat there, wired tight under my skin, as if it was waiting for something else to go wrong, the anticipation keeping me on edge long after the danger had passed.
