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She burrows deeper into her seat, pulling my jacket tighter. “Tonight was fun.”

“Fun?” I scoff. “We were on the same tour, right? That was a nightmare.”

As we come down the mountain into Ravenslight, she doesn’t wait for me this time. She lowers the windows herself, letting the icy wind whip around her hair, and I catch her watching me out of the corner of her eye, waiting to see if I’ll complain. I don’t. That earns me a small private smile she thinks I don’t see.

As the sky begins to lighten, I drop her outside her apartment. She shifts in her seat, hand on the latch, about to get out and call an end to this long night.

“You handled tonight well,” I say.

She turns her head to the side.

“Take the weekend off. I’ll see you Monday.”

She’s halfway up the stairs with my jacket still on and I don’t say anything.

Chapter 14

Ellery

I’ve been dreaming about this day since I landed here. Tess left a bag of croissants on my doorstep before her shift at the cafe, the chocolate kind, because I wouldn’t stop whining about them. I’m still in my pajamas, eating one over the sink, slurping milky coffee from the chipped blue mug that came with the apartment.

A whole day that belongs to me. Well, half of one. It’s been mine for about an hour and I already don’t know what to do with it.

The latest edition of the Ravenslight Chronicle is spread across the kitchen table. The front page has a stern editorial about the proposed date change for the Fall Festival, written with a barely restrained fury usually reserved for war crimes. Roslyn Thorndale, Editor-in-Chief. I decide on the spot that I love her, sight unseen. Somebody gets paid to write an exposé about a date change. In a town this size, probably not much, but still, somebody does.

I’m halfway through the festival scandal when I catch myself doing it again.

Thinking about him.

Mostly, about what he said while we waited for Luca. He was thrown into a life, obligated by family, but there’s a version of Nick that never came back to Ravenslight Creek, and I can’t picture him. I don’t like thinking about that guy. And I like thinking about the version of me where the same thing happens even less. Where I go back to New York and fall into line.

He asked me why I came here. No one has asked me a question like that in years and actually waited for the answer, without telling me what it should be.

I’ve barely touched my coffee but I get up, refill it, and sit back down. I came three thousand miles to find some independence, and now that I have a day to myself, the quiet doesn’t feel like freedom. The last two weeks had a rhythm—show up, prove him wrong, fume.

My phone sits face down on the table and I flip it over, not quite ready to be reminded of the four missed calls from my mother. One every other day. No voicemails, because Claire Ashford does not leave voicemails.

I start typing.

Mom, I’m fine.

Delete. She’d read it as surrender. An opening to begin her offensive.

Mom, I need space.

Delete. In her language, that isn’t a reason—it’s a failure.

Mom, I…

And I don’t know how that sentence ends.

Nobody but Willow knows where I am. She wouldn’t tell them, which brings me some relief. It’s liberating being off their radar. It won’t last forever, but I can hold tight to it a while longer.

I delete the message and return my phone to the table, getting back to snowplow schedules and school spelling bee results.

I find his jacket when I go to do laundry.

I must’ve hung it on the hook by the door when I came in at dawn. He’d offered it to me like it was nothing, after a week of him hunting for my breaking point. It was obvious he was on a mission: make me angry enough to quit.