Page 159 of The Ashes of Summer

I close it carefully just as the catering company starts coming through the side gate.

After that it's chaos. Food trays. Flowers. Music checks. Mason swearing at folding chairs. Black nearly putting an entire crate of champagne glasses through the patio.

An hour later, I finally get upstairs to shower and change.

It's hot today, so I go with chino shorts and a white linen shirt instead of jeans, and it feels strange as hell wearing normal clothes. Most of my life has been spent in a uniform with a badge clipped to my chest.

Funny how fast things change.

By the time I come back down, people have started arriving properly.

Harris and Sarah got here a while ago, and seeing the two of them together still does something to me every time. Because every time I look at them I'm back in that warehouse. The old man tied to a chair behind a curtain. Sarah running the length of the floor toward him.

I think she and Summer help each other more than either of them knows. They talk most days now.

Reyes turns up about twenty minutes after them.

First time I've seen the man out of a hospital gown since the night we loaded him into the back of my truck. He's thinner than he was. There's still dressing taped under his shirt from the last surgery—I catch the corner of it at his collar when he turns.

And Mason is at the gate before Reyes has got both feet out of the car.

Which is interesting, because I've been watching Mason check that gate all afternoon. Four times. Maybe five. Every time a car slowed out on the road. I'd assumed he was waiting on the caterers or was keeping an eye out incase Summer returned early. He rushes up the driveway and takes the weight off Reyes's bad side without being asked. And Reyes lets him.

That's the part that stops me, actually. Because that man has never accepted help from another living soul in the entire time I've known him.

But he accepts it from Mason.

"You're late," Mason says.

"It took me longer to get dressed alone than I thought it would.”

Mason's mouth twitches. His hand stays flat against Reyes's back a beat or two longer than it needs to before he takes it away. Then he walks him over to a chair in the shade, comes back with a beer Reyes never asked for, and takes the seat beside him.

I've spent my whole career reading people across a table. It's about the only thing I've ever been consistently good at.

So I notice the way they look at each other. I see the way Mason squeezes his hand under the table and the way Reyes rubs his thumb over Mason’s knuckles.

I think about a hospital corridor at four in the morning. Mason standing at those double doors staring down at his own hands with another man's blood drying on them, refusing to walk away from them.

I'd like to stay, he'd said. I'd like to⁠—

He never finished the sentence. I never asked him to. Trauma binds people together in strange ways, and if there is something going on between them, hell, good for them.

Trauma has changed our lives too. I made damn sure Summer got proper help after all of it. A therapist out of LA who specializes in trafficking survivors, and it costs a fortune, and I could not care less. Her getting through this matters more than money ever has.

When we first came home from the Ridge, I barely let her out of my sight. Slept every night with her curled against my chest, because some part of me genuinely believed that if I loosened my grip for one second she'd be gone again.

And sex? I never pushed. Never initiated. Not once.

Here's the thing I've never said to her.

Jackson told me what had happened to her. He looked me in the face while I was chained to a chair and told me exactly what he’d done to her, and what he'd let his men do, and he enjoyed every second of the telling, and I have carried it every day since.

She doesn't know that I know.

She's never spoken about it. Not to me. Not directly. And I have never once asked her to—because the moment I do, it stops belonging to her. She gets to decide if she ever says it out loud, and when, and to who. If that day never comes, then it never comes, and I'll go to my grave holding it on my own.

Because whatever happened in that house changes nothing for me.