Page 150 of The Ashes of Summer

He stands with his hands loose at his sides and looks at Jackson for a long moment, and the thing I've been watching in his face since the first day I met him—that coiled, barely contained fury, the rage that was always looking for somewhere to put itself—simply isn't there.

Something quieter has taken its place. Something that's finally found its shape.

He looks at the women standing in their circle.

"Go get him, girls."

Then he puts his hand on my shoulder, takes in Adelaide with a nod, and turns us all toward the door.

"No—" Jackson's voice behind us, cracked and desperate. "No. No, no⁠—"

Then a sound that dulls as the door swings shut behind us, sealing itself into the room where it belongs.

We walk the corridor in silence. The Ridge stands around us one last time—the marble, the paintings, the expensive lighting that never once felt like warmth—and none of it touches me.

It's just a building. It was always just a building.

"I thought you were going to do it yourself," I say.

Jacob walks steadily beside me, one hand still at my back. "I wanted to." A pause. "Believe me, I wanted to."

He glances down at me and the expression on his face is one I haven't seen before. Not peace, exactly. Not relief either. Something settled.

"But every ounce of that pain belongs to them. Not me."

I look at him for a moment.

"I'm proud of you," I say quietly.

He doesn't answer. He just presses his hand a little firmer against my back as we push through the door at the end of the corridor and step out into the morning, into the garden, into the sun.

Chapter 45

The Breath I’ve Been Holding

Summer

Isee the treeline first.

That stretch of pine and shadow where the mountain road curves and the town disappears behind you and the world narrows down to just the track ahead. I've driven past it a hundred times without thinking about it. It was only ever the edge of where Jacob lived. The boundary between his world and everybody else's.

Now it feels like something I wasn't sure I'd ever see again.

My throat tightens before I can stop it. I press my lips together and stare through the windshield and tell myself it's just trees. Just a road. Just the same gravel driveway it's always been, pale in the afternoon light, winding up through the pines toward the house at the top of it.

Just a house.

Except it isn't. It's the place I learned what I was capable of surviving. It's the kitchen where I made coffee and pretended not to watch him. It's the bedroom where I lay awake in the dark and understood for the first time that what I felt for Jacob Darnell wasn't something I could reason my way out of.

It's every ordinary morning I didn't know to be grateful for, all compressed now into something I can barely hold.

Jacob doesn't say anything as we turn onto the driveway. But he's watching me. I can feel it the way I've always been able to feel it—that particular quality of his attention, the way it settles on me like something with weight.

The house comes into view.

And it looks exactly as we left it. That's the thing that undoes me.

I don't know what I expected. Something altered. Something that reflected the size of everything that's happened since the last time I stood in that doorway. But the windows catch the light the same way they always do. The porch boards look the same. The hanging basket by the door that Jacob never waters and somehow never dies is still there, trailing a little, quietly surviving on its own terms.