Almost.
“I’m not finished,” I say instead.
This time he looks at me. Those dark eyes search mine briefly before drifting away again toward the ravine. “With what?”
The investigation. The truth.You.
But I don’t say any of it. “Everything.”
Tension flickers across his face. “There’s nothing else here.”
We both hear the lie in it immediately.
I step farther onto the porch. Closer to him now. The wood creaks beneath my boots. “That’s not true.”
Rhys goes still.
“You just don’t want me to see it.”
His throat works once. God. I understand him now in a way I wish I didn’t. The guilt. The fear. The terrible possibility that if I stay long enough, I’ll see every broken thing he’s spent years trying to bury beneath silence and isolation and mountain storms. And worse—that part of him wants me to.
Wind moves gently through the trees. Below us, water trickles down the washout in thin silver streams beneath the morning light.
Rhys finally turns fully toward me. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“No.” I hold his gaze steadily. “I don’t think you do either.”
Something shifts in his expression then. Recognition. The kind that happens when someone sees straight through the defenses you barely survived building.
He steps closer slowly. Careful with the injured arm… and with me. The porch suddenly feels very small.
My pulse throbs as he stops only a foot away. Close enough now that the mountain air feels less cold, and I remember his hands gripping my waist in the rain. His blood on my skin. His voice breaking in the dark while he told me how my brother died.
“You should hate me,” he says quietly.
The words hurt more now than they did before. Because I know he means them. Some part of him still believes survival itself was betrayal.
I shake my head slowly. “I don’t.”
His eyes search mine carefully. Like he’s waiting for the rest.
Maybe I am too. “I don’t know what I feel,” I admit softly. “But it’s not that.”
The honesty of it settles between us. No easy absolution or dramatic forgiveness. Just truth, raw and unfinished.
Wind moves off the mountain, loosening strands of my hair and casting them across my face. Rhys watches the movement wordlessly before lifting his hand and stopping. The restraint wrecks me more than the possibility of his touch, as if he still isn’t sure he’s allowed.
I close the distance myself. Only half a step. But enough.
His composure slips for half a second.
“You keep trying to send me away,” I whisper.
“You can take the ATV.”
“But you don’t want me to.” The silence that follows feels louder than thunder.
Rhys’s gaze drops briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes. It’s a calculated mistake. One neither of us can come back from.
