Page 47

I bow my head until my breath ghosts the soil.

“I didn’t freeze,” I whisper—not to the dirt, not to the sky. To her. “I didn’t hesitate.”

My lungs shudder. I pull air in through my nose, let it scrape on the way out. Again. Again. The ground stays. The world doesn’t move. That’s the deal.

My blood drips down my calf and darkens the grass at her headstone. I don’t wipe it away. Let it soak in. Let her have it if she wants.

For a moment—just one—the world stops reaching for me.

Then my vision blurs, heat crawling higher up my leg, and the breath I just earned turns shallow and wrong.

That’s when I know.

This wasn’t over in the barn.

Footsteps crunch behind me.

Heavy. Measured. Unavoidable.

I don’t look.

If I do, something inside me is going to split clean down the middle.

The ground shifts as he lowers himself beside me, his weight bending the earth like it recognizes him.

“Selah.”

A laugh tears out of me—sharp, broken, wrong. “Fuck you.”

He exhales. Not a sigh. Something rougher. Like gravel dragged through lungs.

“I asked you to make me stronger,” I snap, still staring at the dirt. “Not to shove me into a death pit and see if I crawled back out.”

“That’s the only way I know how to survive,” he says. No apology. Just truth laid down like a blade.

I huff, bitter and breathless. “Yeah. That much is obvious.”

He stands.

The shadow of him falls over me, wide and unavoidable, like a storm stepping closer.

“Listen, kid⁠—”

“Don’t.” I push to my feet, legs shaking, forcing myself upright until I’m standing in his shadow instead of kneeling under it. “Don’t call me that. You use that word like armor. Like if you remind yourself I’m younger, you won’t have to care.”

His jaw tightens. “You don’t know shit about my life.”

“No?” I step closer. My calf screams. “You flinch every time someone touches you. You carry guilt like it’s the only thing keeping you upright. You think not feeling makes you strong—“ my voice drops to almost nothing, “—but you’re just alone in a room with the lights off, calling it peace.”

Something tears loose in my chest when I say it.

“I’m not a child.” The words come out quiet, which is worse than a snarl. “The world didn’t give me time.”

I reach out, slow and deliberate, and drag one finger down the side of his calloused hand. A test. A challenge.

He flinches.

Barely—but it’s there.