I huffed out a laugh that hurt my ribs, and I didn’t care. “Timing’s weird. The dead walk the earth, and Callan Ward finds a second woman willing to put up with his ass. That’s not weird timing; that’s a biblical sign the end is here.”
“Are you done?”
“Not even close. And Ethan?”
“The kid’s dad saved us, got us here. Definitely a story for another time,” he said. “Ethan’s sixteen. Good kid. Solid head on his shoulders. A pain in the ass, but the useful kind.”
“Nice.”
Callan smirked, and the familiarity of it settled around me like a warm coat after hours in the cold.
“We’ve been here since,” he said, his tone shifting, growing quieter. “Keeping things going. Fortifying the property. Running supply runs to the mainland when we have to.” He paused. “Waiting for you. Lock and I both figured you’d gone for Fiona—that you’d come back when you had her.”
“I did.”
His expression shifted, something careful moving behind his eyes.
“When the girls showed up earlier…” he said, slower now, choosing his words, “they told us you didn’t make it off the mainland. Said the dead overran the marina, and you went down covering their escape and rescuing a damn cat.”
I winced.
“Yeah,” I said. “That got… complicated.”
“Complicated.” He repeated the word slowly, as if tasting it, filing it away for later.
I looked down at the dock, jaw tightening until my teeth ached, staring at the grain of the wood between my boots without seeing any of it.
A long pause stretched, broken only by the lapping of water against pilings and the soft rustle of wind through the trees onshore.
Then Callan’s voice dropped, not softer, but stripped of its usual edge—the voice he used when something mattered enough to warrant careful handling.
“What’s Libby to you?”
I went still.
Of course he’d ask. Of course he’d seen it—or heard it, or pieced it together from the way the girls talked about me, and how one of them in particular had fallen apart at the thought I’d died on that shore. Callan had always read people the wayother men read maps: accurately, with an attention to detail that missed nothing.
I leaned back against the dock post, tilting my head to look out at the water for a long moment before answering. The darkness stretched endlessly, the surface catching no light. Somewhere out there—twenty miles back—the mainland sat, rotting, overrun, and full of things that had tried to pull me apart tonight.
“She’s…” I started, but the sentence stalled. I exhaled through my nose and tried again. “She’s the reason I’m sitting on this dock right now instead of floating face-down somewhere between here and the coast. She’s everything, man.”
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t joke. He just waited, as he always knew how to wait when it counted.
“I spent my whole life not getting attached,” I went on, my voice dropping lower, rougher, scraping against the truth of it. “You know that. You watched me do it for years.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
“One-night stands. Women whose last names I never asked for. No strings, no one waiting up, no one giving me that look when I came through the door at three in the morning. Kept things simple in a sad way, I guess.”
“Also kind of pathetic,” he said, his voice low.
I snorted. “Yeah, well. It worked. It worked for a long time.”
I paused, picking at a splinter on the dock plank beside my leg.
“Then the world ends,” I said. “The dead start walking, everything collapses, and suddenly I’m stuck with people. Not by choice but by circumstance. Responsibilities.” I shook my head. “My worst nightmare, handed to me on a silver platter by the apocalypse itself.”
Callan smiled faintly in the dark. “Poetic.”
