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“Girl, where is your other shoe, Willow?”

“Why are you looking at my feet when my nephew is sitting in the back seat?” she shouted over the storm, jogging right up to the passenger side.

“Because that’s a legitimate medical and safety question.”

“Kaidence!” she squealed.

The rear door clicked, and before I could even tell him to wait for an umbrella, Kaidence unbuckled himself and launched his little body straight into her arms.

“Auntie!”

Willow caught him with an exaggerated grunt, staggering back a step before burying her face in his neck, leaving loud, dramatic kisses against his cheek while he squirmed and giggled.

“Look at you! You got huge! What did your mama feed you? Fertilizer?”

“Granola bars!” Kaidence yelled proudly.

She set him down on the dry patch beneath the porch overhang, then turned her dark, sharp eyes on me as I grabbed my purse and climbed out into the drizzle.

“You look exhausted,” she said, looking me up and down.

“And you look like you got evicted from a sleepover,” I playfully quipped.

Willow looked down at her single slipper with complete pride. “I am in the comfort of my own home. That is what peak luxury looks like.”

“Whatever.”

I laughed, grabbing our backpacks from the back seat, but the humor died in my throat the second I looked past Willow’s shoulder.

Granny was standing just inside the screen door.

My chest squeezed so hard it felt like a fist clamping down on my ribs.

She looked smaller, not withered. Granny had too much fight in her blood to ever look frail in spirit, but the physical toll of the last year was carved into every inch of her frame. Her shoulders were slightly hunched beneath an ivory knit cardigan, and she was leaning on the doorframe just enough to keep the weight off her knees.

Pulmonary fibrosis had been quietly stealing the elasticity from her lungs, replacing healthy tissue with thick, stubborn scarring that made every single breath an uphill battle. The medication slowed the progression, but there was no curing it. Some days her oxygen saturation stayed steady, and she was her usual sharp-tongued self; other days, the shallow rattle in her chest and the gray tint around her lips terrified the life out of Willow and me.

Seeing her standing there, working just to draw in the damp afternoon air, wiped away every ounce of hesitation I’d had about packing up my life and leaving the city.

When I was working, I spent my shifts monitoring ventilators, adjusting arterial lines, and catching decompensating patients before they crashed. There was no universe where I was going to stay almost five hours away while the woman who practically raised me fought for breath in an empty house.

When our mom died from an overdose in a run-down motel bathroom when I was only ten years old, the state had been ready to split Willow and me up and send us into the foster system. Willow had clung to my sweater crying until her nose bled, too young to fully understand why Mama wasn’t coming back from her “rest.”

Granny marched into that family services office in her Sunday best, planted herself in front of that social worker, and signed every paper they put in front of her. She took on two grieving, traumatized little girls on a retired school secretary’s pension, and never once made either of us feel like a burden.

Watching my mom slowly destroy herself had done something permanent to me. I remembered the mood swings, the shady men drifting in and out of our house, the promises that she was finally getting clean, then the days or weeks when nobody knew where she was. By the time she died, instability had already taught me what it could take from you.

That was why I craved security the way some people craved love. It was why I paid attention to exits, why broken promises stayed with me longer than they probably should have, and why letting anybody get too close had always felt dangerous. It was also the exact reason Caspian Black scared the hell out of me from the moment I realized who he really was.

Caspian wasn’t some neighborhood nigga standing on a corner moving a few bags and calling himself the plug. He was the plug… the kind other dealers answered to. His reach stretched well beyond Hallowridge and into cities I had never even been to. Men drove hours to do business with him. Money came in amounts I didn’t want to know too much about, and the people around him moved with the kind of discipline that told you mistakes could cost more than money.

Everybody knew Caspian had power. What most people didn’t know was just how far that power reached… and that terrified me.

My mom had died because drugs owned too much of her life, and then I fell in love with a man who had made millions putting those same kinds of substances into other people’s hands. I never let myself dress that truth up just because I loved him. Caspian knew exactly how I felt about what he did, too. It had caused more than one argument between us, especially in the beginning.

He was everything my mom’s world had taught me to stay away from: money tied to danger, power that created enemies, men showing up at odd hours, phones that rang with conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear, and a life where something could go wrong before you ever saw it coming.

And still, I loved him with an intensity that made every sensible part of me furious.