“Don’t apologize, just answer your phone—or at least text a bitch back so I know you’re alive.”
“I will,” Cassie promised, before adding.“Text a bitch, that is.”
“Asshole,” Jordan said with a small snort.“Whom I love.”
“Lieb dich!”Marta shouted.“More than Jo!”
“Je tolère ton existence,” Étienne added breezily.
Cassie let out a breathy, half-laugh.“Love you all,” she murmured, ending the call.
The silence swelled—painfully so.Almost instantly she wished the chaos back—Marta’s shouting even—anything but this loud, aching stillness.
Straightening, she turned away from the truck—and went still.
Nash was leaning against the clapboard just outside the side exit door, arms crossed, watching her.She had no idea how long he’d been there, what he’d heard, or what the hell he could possibly want.As usual, his expression gave little away.
They stared at each other until, after several tense moments, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from inside his cut and lit one.The flare flickered over his face—a quick frame of sharp lines and edges—before swallowing him back into the shadows.
He drew on it once, exhaled, and then—without a word—held the pack out to her.
She stepped forward without thinking, plucked one from his pack, and let him light it.Their hands brushed, the contact blurring into the warm haze of booze already curling through her.
“Heard you on the phone,” he muttered around the filter, gaze fixed somewhere past her.“Sounds like you got yourself a hell of a life out there…no wonder you never came back.”
The cigarette stopped halfway to her mouth; she let out a soft, disbelieving snort.
“It is a good life,” she snapped.“But one thing has nothing to do with the other.”
His eyes cut to her, every line of him going taut; when she didn’t say anything else, he gave a short scoff.“You gonna fill in the blanks?Or do I gotta guess why you never came back?”
Cassie’s nostrils flared.“You really wanna have this conversation…right now?”
“Been waitin’ twelve years for it.”
“Eleven,” she shot back automatically.
His jaw flexed.“No.Twelve.”Something in his voice went hard.“I might be mountain, Cassie, but I can fuckin’ add.”
Cassie stared at him, unblinking.
Was he messing with her?
But no—heactuallybelieved that.
“Forget it,” she muttered, flicking the cigarette into the dirt and turning toward the door.“You don’t even know what you don’t know.”
“What does that mean?”he called after her.“Cas—what the fuck does that mean?”
Her hand stilled on the door and for a breath, she thought about it—about turning around, about finally saying it out loud.
“Nothing,” she eventually muttered, pushing the door open.“It doesn’t matter.”
She was here for Connor—to bury her brother beside their parents…not to dig up the past.
The door shut behind her, cutting off the night…
and Nash.
