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My dad passing away just before my eighteenth birthday? That was different. It turned my world inside out. It didn’t just hurt—it hollowed me out. Crushed whatever fragile illusion of safety I’d been clinging to. And for the first time, I felt it—bone-deep, skin-tight loneliness. The kind that made the air feel thinner. The kind that made it hard to breathe.

If it hadn’t been for Mags stepping in and taking us under her roof until I officially turned eighteen, Soph and I would’ve been separated, each sent to different group homes. That wasn’t an option. I would’ve burned the whole damn system down before I let anyone take my sister from me.

And Magnolia Wilder knew that. That’s why she opened her door, gave us a place to land when everything else was falling apart.

Because I didn’t have anything left.

And I would be damned if they took the only thing I had left in this whole wide shitty world. That wasn’t something I could live with. I would’ve taken Soph and disappeared if I had to. No plan, no money—just the fire in my gut and her hand in mine.

The fact that I had asked to stay with him tells me just how hard I hit rock bottom. Pride has always been my armor—stubborn, jagged, and welded tight—but asking Henry Wilder for help? That is the sound of it cracking wide open.

I’ve loved Henry most of my life. Not in some soft, fairytale way—but with the kind of ache that lives deep in the bones. Something about him has always drew me in—dangerous and magnetic, like standing too close to the edge of a storm. And no matter how many times I tell myself to walk away, some part of me always stays tethered.

The last time I’d asked him for anything, it didn’t have a damn thing to do with me—it was about Evie. She needed legal documents in her new name. A driver’s license. Social security card. Birth certificate. All the things the world demanded before it would see her.

I remember stalking into his office like I owned the damn building, heart in my throat, jaw set. He was mid-call, sitting back in that creaking leather chair of his like he had all the time in the world. I didn’t. I marched right up to his desk, snatched the phone from his hand, and slammed it back into the cradle hard enough to make him blink.

Then I laid it out—what I needed and why.

Then that bastard—he just smiled. That damn smile that lit him up like the Fourth of July, all heat and mischief and something too dangerous to touch.

“Whatever you need, wildflower,” he said.

Wildflower.

The word still scrapes against me. I scoff now, shaking my head at the nickname he gave me back when I still thought I could outrun the world. He never cared to explain it. Just dropped it on me one day and stuck to it like it meant something.

I mean, I wasn’t a saint growing up. Far from it. I was angry—white-hot, aimless, and loud as hell about it. I picked fights I didn’t need to win and burned bridges just to feel the heat. So maybe Wildflower wasn’t a compliment. Maybe it was Henry seeing something in me I didn’t—something wild, stubborn, and half-feral. Something that refused to die no matter how many times life tried to rip it out by the roots.

I was angry. Angry that my mama left without looking back. Angry that my daddy worked himself into the ground just to make ends meet, and angry that we had to spend so much time with the damn Wilders. I didn’t want someone else’s family. I wanted mine. My house. My table. My rules. Not the ache of being a guest in someone else's life.

Mags and the boys—they never made me feel like I didn’t belong. They folded me and Soph into their mess like we’d always been part of it. But Harold? Mags’s ex? That man made sure we knew we weren’t his problem.

He didn’t yell. Didn’t need to. Just dropped those bitter little comments like poison in the air. “Extra mouths to feed.” “Where the hell is their daddy?” Casual as weather talk. But they landed sharp.

Every time Soph or I walked into a room, his lip would curl like we were something he stepped in. Like our existence offended him.

And the worst part? It worked.

Wasn’t the disgust in his voice that cut deepest—it was the way I started to believe it. That we were unwanted. That we were just shadows haunting a house that wasn’t ours.

Even now, years later, that voice still shows up. Uninvited. Unrelenting. Every time someone offers me a place at their table, a bit of warmth, a sliver of safety—I flinch. I brace. I start counting the seconds until it’s taken back.

I wait for the look. The shift. That flicker of realization when they finally see it—see me—and decide I’m too much, or not enough. That I don’t belong.

Still just an extra mouth to feed.

But that stopped the day Maddox came home and found Harold had thrown Merc into the china hutch, and whipped up on Mags to the point she was curled in a ball in the corner. Glass everywhere. Merc laid out in a pile of blood and porcelain.

Then—to find out that piece of shit had been putting his hands on Mags this whole time? Leaving bruises in places nobody could see, smiling in her face while we all sat at the same damn table?

Well, let's just say to this day, I don’t know exactly what he did. All I know is Harold disappeared not long after, and nobody cried. Wouldn’t shock me one bit if Maddox carved him up like deer meat and dumped the pieces in the lake. Good riddance motherfucker.

Maddox is good like that.

You have a problem? He solves it—with fists, with fury, with that terrifying calm that only shows up when a man’s already made peace with what he’s about to do.

Some local piece of shit demands you put out? Maddox breaks his arm without batting an eye.