But this wasn't a bull. And she wasn't asking me to ride. She was asking me to sit at this table and hear her.
"He offered a college fund. Half a million. Maisie's name, no strings." She laughed — short, brittle. "Like Preston Ashford has ever done anything without strings."
"Then what?"
"Then he cried." She stared at the table. "Actual tears. And I sat there watching them, and I couldn't tell if they were real. Eight years, Clay. I have known this man for eight years, and I cannot tell when he's lying." Her voice cracked. She caught it. "That's the part that makes me want to scream."
You can.I wanted to say it.You got out. You drove three hours in the dark with your kid. You see him fine.But she wasn't done.
"He touched my hand. When he was leaving." Her voice dropped. "He reached across the desk and put his hand on mine and said, 'I just want us to be a family again, babe.' And my whole body locked up. Every muscle. My hands went flat on the desk, and I pressed down so hard my fingernails left marks." She held up her right hand. Four small crescents in the palm. "These. I did these to myself because it was the only thing keeping me in the chair instead of under the desk."
The kitchen was quiet. The fridge hummed. Down the hall, Maisie murmured something in her sleep — a word I couldn't catch, then silence.
"I called Savannah the second he left." She straightened in the chair — the paralegal, the fighter. "She thinks this is a playbook. Charm first. Then something legal. The flowers, the tears, the reconciliation offer — it's all documentation. He'll tell a judge he tried."
"You think he's coming for custody?"
"I think Preston doesn't do anything without a plan." She wrapped both hands around the mug again. "Savannah says we document everything. Every visit, every text, every interaction. We build our own file."
"I need you to not do anything."
The words landed like a hand on my chest.
"I can see it in your hands right now." She was right — my fingers were curled against the table, not quite fists. I flattened them. "If you confront him — if you so much as look at him wrong in public — he uses it. He makes you the problem."
I breathed. Let it move through me.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"I hear you. I won't touch him." I held her gaze. "But you need to hear me, too. Whatever Savannah needs — whatever you need — I'm in it. All the way."
The armor cracked. Her chin dipped and her eyes went bright, and the woman underneath — the one who'd been holding herself together with her fingernails all day — surfaced for one breath.
"I'm so angry, Clay." Her voice was barely there. "I'm so angry that he can still do this. That he can walk into my office and my body just — reverts. Like everything I've built doesn't matter." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "And I'm terrified. Because I have this life now — this beautiful, messy, chaotic life with you and Maisie and this town — and he's going to try to take it apart. That's what he does. He finds the thing you love, and he takes it apart piece by piece and calls it reasonable."
I got up. Walked around the table. Sat beside her, my knee against hers.
"Look at me."
She dropped her hands. Red-rimmed and furious and scared.
"He walked into your office today, and you didn't break. You threw his flowers in the trash and called your lawyer before his car was off the street." I put my hand on the back of her neck. "That woman in Dallas? She's gone. The woman at that desktoday — the one whose hands shook but whose voice didn't — she terrifies him. That's why he's here."
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against my collarbone and exhaled — long, shaking, the kind that empties everything.
"Just stay," she said. "Can you just stay tonight?"
I stayed.
Two a.m. Callie asleep against my chest. The cottage dark and quiet.
I stared at the ceiling and replayed the diner. Preston at the counter saying "our family" to June Parker, like the word belonged to him. The nod he'd given me — that dismissal, that nothing — like I was a temporary obstacle in a plan he'd already mapped.
I thought about the word "babe." Such a small word. Two syllables. But it wasn't a word to Callie. It was a frequency. A sound that her body remembered even when her brain had learned to fight back. He'd used it in her office, in front of her colleagues, because he knew exactly what it did, and he wanted to watch it land.
I tightened my arm around her. She shifted in her sleep, pressed closer, her hand curling into my shirt.
