Page 57

“You tell her everything before you get in that truck. Not the version where you decide which facts she can handle.” Gavin took a breath.

“I will.”

The words were quiet, but nothing in them suggested he intended to evade her.

When Georgia asked how they had met, his answer softened again. A work injury had sent him in with a deep cut across his hand; he’d insisted it wasn’t serious while bleeding through a towel. Piper had been the nurse who stitched him up and remembered him when he came back for follow-up.

Georgia laughed for the first time since the call began. “Of course you told a nurse you didn’t need stitches.”

“I was wrong,” Gavin admitted, and the quick surrender made Georgia laugh harder.

Gavin laughed too, and the sound transformed him more completely than the photograph had.

For a moment, the years between them seemed less impossible.

They agreed he would speak to Piper, pack, and call again before he left Alder Creek. Georgia made him promise the call, and he did.

When the connection ended, Georgia sat motionless with her phone still in her hand. I waited until her first tears came, quiet and sudden.

I stood and crossed toward her without asking whether she wanted me to. Georgia rose at the same time and stepped into my arms, burying her face against my chest.

I held her there without trying to reassure her. Her brother was alive, he loved her, and he had hurt her terribly. He was coming home because another woman might finally be ready to undo the secret he had spent seven years protecting.

Eventually Georgia drew back and wiped her face. “He has a girlfriend.”

The detail had apparently survived everything else. She shook her head, almost laughing now. “A nurse.”

“So I heard. She sounds useful.” Her damp-eyed laugh came easier this time.

I did appreciate practical people, but the warmth in her face eased the joke into something quieter.

I touched her cheek with the back of my fingers.

There was more I needed to tell her, but not yet.

Gavin had agreed to return in principle. He had not told Piper, packed, or started the drive. I wasn’t going to force Georgia from one emotional cliff directly onto another when the facts could still change within the hour.

We went back to work instead, and the decision turned out to be useful for both of us.

Georgia finished reconciling the vendor charges she had promised Annette. I returned calls and cleared the routine North Fork matters I had ignored while we searched. The office settled into the same working rhythm we had found almost from the beginning, except now Georgia occasionally stopped typing and looked at her phone as though she could make it ring by attention alone.

Around four, she went upstairs and returned with apples, cheese, and crackers from her groceries. She set half of them beside my laptop.

“This is not dinner,” she said while taking her seat.

“I didn’t accuse it of being dinner.”

The look she gave me made it clear she knew my history.

I ate the apple.

The food kept either of us from reaching evening with nothing in our stomachs, and the simple act of sharing it made the waiting easier.

Gavin finally called a little after five, and Georgia put him on speaker.

His voice sounded worn out before he said a word about Piper.

Georgia asked how it had gone.