And maybe it was the change in my voice, maybe it was the ground shifting beneath his feet, or maybe some part of him finally heard the ocean below rather than the blood rushing in his own ears, but he stopped.
His shoes scraped against stone near the outer edge, arms lifting as he tried to balance. I saw the moment his body realized what his mind had not. His shoulders locked. His breath caught. The wind pushed at him, dragging his damp hair across his face, and he stood there with the drop before him and the house behind him, caught between the fall and me.
I stopped several yards away.
Every instinct I possessed screamed to close the distance.
I wanted to seize him, drag him back onto stable ground, put the house between him and the cliff, and never allow him within ten feet of an edge again. I wanted my hands on him, not in anger, not in punishment, but in the primitive certainty that if I was holding him, he could not fall.
He turned slowly, each crunch of the rocks as his feet shifted taking years off my life.
I went to take half a step closer just as he faced me, and his hands raised as though he could ward me off with empty palms.
“Don’t come any closer,” he said, voice shaking so badly it was almost unrecognizable.
“I won’t,” I promised. “I won’t move.”
“You killed him.”
The words came again, broken by wind and sobs, less accusation than disbelief, as though repetition might eventually make the sentence stop being true.
“Yes,” I said.
Cove made a sound that tore at me, one hand pressing against his mouth while the other stayed lifted toward me. His whole body trembled.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why would you—why would you do that?”
“The man in there meant nothing to me.”
Cove stared at me. Then something in his expression twisted, horrified in an entirely new way.
“That’s the problem,” he shouted, the words cracking as they left him. “That’s the fucking problem, Tobias!”
“I—”
“He was a person,” Cove cried. “He was a person, and you’re talking about him like he was—like he was trash you had to take out. Did you even know his name?”
No, I didn’t.
Instead, I said, “He was a threat.”
“To whom?”
“To my home,” I said. “To my privacy.”
“To your privacy?” he repeated, voice rising into something almost hysterical. “You killed someone because he was inconvenient?”
He was sobbing now, not loudly, not dramatically, but in a way that seemed to shake through him from the inside. Tears caught the light on his face before the wind tore them away. He looked cold. He looked terrified.
He looked pained.
I took one careful step forward, but his body jerked in response, and I stopped immediately.
“Cove,” I said, softening my voice with effort. “You need to move left.”
“No.”
“The ground behind you is unstable.”
