But I didn’t have a choice. The words lived inside me now, whether I wanted them or not, and someone had to let them out.
I took Lily’s hand. Her fingers—small and freezing—closed around mine instantly.
“Come on,” I whispered.
We stepped off the boat, the dock creaking and shifting under our weight. With each step, my legs felt heavier, the air thickening as we approached them. The men watched us, as did the red-haired woman.
I stopped a few feet away, my throat so tight that the muscles ached from holding everything in.
Fiona looked at me, her eyes already glistening, already spilling over, already grieving again despite the reunion still warm on her skin.
“He—” I started, my voice breaking, just as Fiona’s had on the boat. The two pieces fell away, leaving nothing but a raw, empty space where sound should have been.
I swallowed hard, pressed my nails into my palms, and tried again.
“He didn’t make it.”
Silence.
Not the quiet kind, but the crushing kind—the kind with weight and texture that presses down on your shoulders and fills your lungs with something heavier than air. The wind still moved through the trees, the water still lapped against the pilings, but every human sound on that dock stopped dead, as if the world itself had flinched.
Callan went completely still. Every part of him—his hands, his chest, his face—froze in place, the way a body does when the mind behind it refuses to process what it’s just been told.
“What?” he said, the word small and bewildered, so unlike the size of the man speaking it that something in my chest cracked further.
“We made it to the marina,” I forced out, each word tearing its way free from somewhere deep, raw, and reluctant. “There were too many of them—they came from everywhere, from between the cars, from the treeline, dozens of them all at once. Finn got Lily back to the boat first, and then he—” My throat seized, but I pushed through it. “Lily’s cat—the carrier had been left in the car. He went back for it. He wouldn’t let her lose it. He wouldn’t—”
The words disintegrated. I tried to catch them, to force them back into order, but my mouth just opened and closed around air that tasted like salt and copper.
“He went back,” I finished, barely a whisper. “And they surrounded him. And we couldn’t—we couldn’t get to him. We couldn’t see—”
Lily broke beside me, a sob ripping out of her so hard it bent her body at the waist. Her face buried into my side, her tears soaking through my shirt in seconds.
“I’m sorry,” she cried, her words muffled, fractured, and drenched in a guilt no child should ever have to carry. “I didn’t mean to drop it—I didn’t mean to—if I hadn’t—he wouldn’t have—”
I pulled her tighter against me, wrapping my arm around her head and pressing my hand flat against her hair.
Callan staggered back a full step, his boot catching on a dock plank. His hand reached out blindly, finding the older man’s shoulder—Lock—and gripping it so hard I could see the tendons standing out across the back of his hand.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, the word rough and thick. “No. Not Finn. He doesn’t just go down. You don’t understand; he always finds a way. He always—”
“He did fight,” I said softly, holding his eyes when I said it because he needed to hear this part, and I needed him to believe it. “He fought harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. He never stopped. Not for a single second.”
The silence that followed ate those words whole and gave nothing back.
Callan’s face contorted—a single, violent spasm of grief that rippled across his features and disappeared just as fast, shoved down, buried, locked away behind a jaw that clenched so hard I could see the muscles jumping beneath his skin. He turned from us to face the water, and his shoulders shook once—a deep, full-body tremor that started at the base of his spine and rolled upward—before he forced himself still through what looked like sheer, brutal willpower.
Lock let out a slow, measured breath through his nose, his eyes closing for a long moment before opening again, darker now, deeper, something behind them rearranging itself permanently. He didn’t argue, didn’t deny it, didn’t offer disbelief or false hope or any of the comfortable lies people reach for when the truth arrives covered in blood. He just stood there and absorbed it, his jaw tightening in increments, his hand still resting on Callan’s shoulder—holding him up or holding himself up, I couldn’t tell which.
The red-haired woman stepped forward, moving past the men with a quiet, deliberate grace. Her expression shifted from sharp assessment to something softer and more careful as her eyes found Lily’s shaking form pressed against my side.
“Hey,” she said, her voice pitched low and steady in a way that sounded practiced—not cold, but trained, the voice of someone who knew how to approach wounded things without spooking them further. “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay—”
“It’s not okay!” Lily cried, her head snapping up, her face swollen and red and streaked with tears and snot and fury. The rawness of it—the sheer, unfiltered agony pouring out of this 16-year-old girl on a dock at the edge of the world—hit every adult standing there like a physical blow.
“I know,” the woman said quietly, not flinching, not pulling back, not pretending. “I know it’s not. You’re right.”
She held still, crouched on the dock, not reaching for Lily, not forcing anything. She simply existed in the space beside her grief, letting it be exactly as terrible as it was.
