Page 132 of The Goat Next Door

The truck goes quiet again. I can feel her thinking beside me.

Part of me wants to take it all back because I sound insane. Too intense. Too late. But another part of me is just… tired.

Tired of pretending I don’t love her. Tired of acting like losing her didn’t crack something open in me this week.

“I look back, and I can’t even believe I convinced myself that was the right thing to do. It’s insane. You belong here. I can’t even picture this house, or this town, or my own damn life, without you in it.”

I pull into my driveway. I kill the engine, but I don’t turn off the headlights. I just grip the wheel, staring at the front of her porch.

“I’m not going to ask you to forgive me for that stupidity tonight,” I say, turning to look at her. “I know I have to earn that. But I’m ready to be whatever you need me to be, as long as you’re the one telling me what that is.”

I get out, my boots hitting the wet driveway, and carefully lift Sophie out of her seat.

When I turn back around, Ember is already stepping out of the passenger side, her shoulders hunched slightly against the drizzle.

“Ember,” I say, my voice rougher than I mean it to be.

She stops by the front fender of the truck, her yellow sweater dampening under the mist. “Yeah, Brooks?”

“Please,” I say. “Don’t go to sleep yet. Just… wait up for me. Please. Give me twenty minutes to put her down and change out of the blues. Just wait.”

Pride is a funny thing.

Feels enormous right until the moment you realize you’d trade every ounce of it just to keep someone from walking away.

“I know I don’t really have leverage here.” That earns me a tired little exhale through her nose. “But I’m asking anyway.”

Ember looks at me for a long second. “You always get like this when you’re scared?”

“Apparently.”

“You get bossy first.”

“Yeah.” I nod once. “Trying not to do that anymore.”

She looks at the way I’m holding Sophie, then up at my face. Her lips press into that straight line—the one that tells me she’s calculating the risk—but then her eyes soften just a fraction at the corners.

“Twenty minutes,” she says quietly. “Then I’m locking the door.”

She turns and walks across the grass toward her dark house, her sneakers squelching in the mud, her silhouette disappearing under the yellow porch light before she slips inside.

I don’t take twenty minutes; I take twelve.

I lay Sophie down on her mattress and pull the quilt up to her chin. I strip off the uniform shirt with the badge and the heavy leather boots, pulling on an old, faded gray sweatshirt and a pair of worn boots from the mudroom.

The screen door to her kitchen isn’t locked. I push it open, the small click of the latch sounding like a starter pistol in the quiet house.

Ember is sitting at her kitchen island, a fresh mug of tea between her hands, though she isn’t drinking it. She’s taken off her sneakers, her bare feet tucked under her thighs on the bar stool. She looks small in the big house, but she looks entirely complete.

I stop at the edge of the linoleum, my hands buried in the front pocket of my sweatshirt.

“I’m sorry,” I say into the silence.

Ember doesn’t look up from her mug. “You said that already, Brooks.”

“I said a lot of things already because I was panicked,” I say, taking two slow steps forward until I’m standing at the end of the counter. “But I didn’t say the right ones.”

Ember lifts her head, her gaze meeting mine.