The car pings. The dashboard lights up with the small confirmation chime of a battery that has, in the past nineteen minutes of conversation, finished its work without our supervision.
“Okay,” Jude says, gentle. “Relax. Take your medicine — the new one. Sip the water. We have a few hours’ drive to the destination, and you have been awake since five-thirty on the back of three bad nights, so the appropriate course of action is for you to sleep through the next stretch.”
“Where are we going,” I try, one more time, hopeful.
“Go to sleep, Pinky.”
Damn it. Worth one more shot.
He cracks the door. He gets out to unplug the car. I watch him through the side window, in his black hoodie and the dark wash jeans and the toothpick-clean line of his back, doing the precise unhurried movements of a man who has, on a Wednesday afternoon at a charging station off the interstate, decided that the next two hundred miles of his life are going to be quiet and unsupervised.
I dig the small pill organizer Rémi packed for me out of the front pouch of my hoodie. I take the first of the new pills. I sip the water.
I sink back into the blanket.
Jude slides back into the driver’s seat. The Tesla, sensing him, brightens its dashboard a half-shade. He glances at me, registers that my eyes are already heavy, and the small uplift at the corner of his mouth does the small honest thing it does only for me now.
“Sleep,” he says, soft.
“Mm.”
The low refrigerator-hum of the electric motor lifts under the cab as he pulls back out of the charging stall. The amber-bourbon-and-vanilla of him layers itself over the pine-and-snow of Rémi’s borrowed blanket. The cool late-October sun comes through the passenger window in a long warm strip across my closed eyelids. The seat heater, sensing my body temperature, ticks itself on one notch.
Safe.
This is what safe feels like.
I do not, for the first time in three nights, fight it.
By mile thirty-seven, with the interstate humming under the wheels and Jude’s hand resting easy at three on the wheel and the warm strip of sun moving slowly across my face, I am fast asleep, feeling safe.
CHAPTER 24
Divine
~JUDE~
“A WHOLE.”
Iris is, on the gravel path between the car and the front porch of my grandfather’s cabin, holding the strap of her overnight bag with one hand and pointing at the building in front of us with the other, in the small wide-stride, wide-eyed posture of a small woman whose nervous system has, after a three-hour nap and the first dose of her new medication, returned to the population with prejudice.
“ASS.”
“O’Shea.”
“CABIN?”
Pinky.
“Are you,” she demands, swinging her finger around to point at me with the same conviction, “by any chance secretly a billionaire. Have I been living with a Cap who can sponsor cabin weekends out of a personal expense account. Was Jude Kavanagh, eldest of four sisters, the captain who carries a working pantry of canned soup back at the house because he refuses to pay grocery delivery surcharges, in fact a closetbillionaire the entire time. Have I been manipulated. Should I have been charging rent.”
The corner of my mouth lifts.
I do not, on principle, suppress it.
“Iris.”
“YES.”
