All I see is Sedona at the gravesite, her hand in mine, her breath catching as she leans into me. I tell myself it was just a dream.
Just grief colliding with old memories. Just the shock of seeing her after five long years.
But the truth pushes in, stubborn and relentless.
Something is waking up inside me.
Something that should have stayed buried.
Something that can’t go anywhere.
I take another drink and breathe out slowly, the taste lingering on my tongue. Boone nudges my knee, and I drop a hand to scratch behind his remaining ear.
“You and me both, boy,” I murmur. “We’ve got to forget that.”
But the thought feels thin, like a string stretched too tight. It hums under my skin long after the words leave my mouth.
I finish the beer and set the bottle down. The house settles around me, familiar and worn, everything in its place.
Everything except the way Sedona Archer’s memory sits in my chest, warm and wrong and impossible to shake.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Billy
I wake longbefore the sun breaks. My phone screen glares at me when I tap it, numbers far too sharp in the dark. Three a.m. glares back.
I sit up fast, sheets twisted around my legs, heart thudding from whatever dream dragged me out of sleep. I drag a hand down my face and curse.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, trying to breathe through the chaos inside my skull. The image of her at the podium returns so sharply that the room seems to sway.
Sedona Archer, standing up there with her shoulders drawn back, her hair pushed behind one ear, her fingers gripping the paper that shook so softly it made my chest clamp.
She read her father’s eulogy with a voice that cracked and steadied, cracked again and held firm. She moved through each memory like she was touching a wound that had never healed.
And every time her breath caught or her lips trembled, something deep in me twisted too.
Seeing her again after five years hit like a horse kick to the ribs.
The last time I saw her, she was mine.
My fiancée.
The woman I thought I would marry.
We had planned out our future with a kind of excitement I had never known before. We had a venue booked. We had mailed invitations with our names printed in looping silver letters.
We had even tasted cakes together, her laughing through the frosting she smeared on my cheek.
For a long time, I thought nothing could break what we built.
Then she vanished.
Left in the night. No calls. No explanation. Just a letter addressed to me and the engagement ring I had given her.
Jasper found the envelope on the porch at dawn, brought it to me with a face carved from stone. When he handed me the ring, I remember staring at him like I had lost my grip on reality.
My brain refused to believe what my eyes saw. The ring looked wrong in my palm.
