Page 40 of Wild Thorns

“Make it blue,” I said. “Blue is both dynamic and calming. It’s science.”

“It’s already blue.”

“Bluer.”

She threw a stress ball at me. I caught it, which felt like a small victory.

We worked in comfortable silence for a while. The studio had become familiar over the past month; the way the light moved across the floor in the afternoon, the specific creak of Lila’s chair when she leaned back to think, the coffee maker that sounded like it was dying but produced surprisingly decent espresso.

“You seem different,” Lila said eventually.

I looked up from my screen. “Different how?”

“Less like you’re waiting for something bad to happen.” She said it casually, but her eyes were careful. “When you first got here, you had this... I don’t know. Vigilant look. Like you were always checking the exits.”

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t realized it was visible.

“You don’t have to tell me what you were running from,” she continued, turning back to her computer. “But I’m glad you’re not running anymore.”

“Me too,” I said. And meant it.

***

Walking home that evening, I found myself again listing the things I couldn’t explain about the Voss family.

The way they always seemed to know when someone was approaching. Not just a glance at a car coming up the drive; I’d seen Callum turn toward the road a full thirty seconds before headlights appeared. The way they communicated without speaking, exchanging looks that carried entire conversations. The odd hours they kept, slipping out into the preserve after dark and returning with the dawn.

The way the property felt different from anywhere else I’d been. Safer, somehow. Enclosed. Like the boundaries of the estate were more than just property lines.

I’d filed these observations under “eccentric old money family” and moved on. The file was getting thick, and some of the observations didn’t fit the folder.

Like the way animals avoided the yard. I’d seen deer at the edge of the preserve, squirrels in the trees just beyond the fence line, but never on the actual property. As if there was an invisible boundary they wouldn’t cross.

Like the howling I sometimes heard at night, it was too coordinated to be random wildlife. Too close to be coming from anywhere but the preserve itself.

Like the way Rowena looked at me sometimes, not suspicious, but knowing. As if she could see something about me that I couldn’t see myself.

I told myself there were rational explanations for all of it. There probably were. But I couldn’t quite convince myself to look for them.

Part of me didn’t want to.

I ran into Callum on the stairs.

He was coming up as I was going down, and we met in the middle, close enough that I could see the individual flecks of gold in his dark eyes. Close enough that the smell of wood smoke and something earthier wrapped around me, primal.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

Neither of us moved.

The morning light caught the side of his face, and I found myself noticing things I’d been pretending not to notice: the hard line of his jaw, the way his shoulders filled out his shirt, the visible restraint in every line of his body. He held himself like a man keeping something leashed. Like he was always a half-second away from doing something he’d decided not to do.

"You look different," he said finally.

"Different how?"

"Rested." His eyes searched my face. "Settled."