Brooke takes a turn. Her shovel lands with force. Dirt thuds down in heavy clumps.
By the time the hole is filled, the forest sounds normal again. Wind through branches, leaves shifting. Night insects starting up like nothing happened. Nothing left to mark what’s underneath.
Brooke wipes her hands on her jeans. I can see in her shoulders, the tension that hasn’t released yet. I step toward her, already reaching for her.
Her phone rings.
The sound slices through the quiet.
Brooke freezes. She looks down at the screen and I see the worry in her face before she even says anything. She doesn’t answer. Her fingers curl around the phone.
“Brooke.”
“I can’t,” she shakes her head once. “I can’t hear it if it’s—”
“Then don’t,” I take the phone from her hand and shove it into my pocket. “We’re going there.”
She looks up at me, eyes wide and glassy.
The truck doors slam and I’m behind the wheel before my brain catches up to my body. The engine roars to life. Gravel sprays as I throw it into gear and punch the gas hard enough to snap her back against the seat.
The road blurs. Trees streak past. The speedometer climbs into numbers I don’t register. My hands don’t shake. My vision doesn’t blur. Everything narrows to the road and the thought of Travis on a table somewhere, dying because of us.
Brooke presses her forehead to the window, breathing hard, whispering Travis’s name like a prayer.
Nothing about this feels like hope.
It feels like a race we’re already losing.
Chapter 77
Brooke
It’s been two weeks.
Two weeks of hell dressed up as silence. Two weeks since we ended Grant, since the ground swallowed him whole, and the world kept moving. It doesn’t bring back the people he took from us. It didn’t undo the damage. It left a space where rage used to sit, and that space hurts worse.
The air smells like flowers and damp earth.
Everyone here is dressed for mourning, but not the way I’m used to. No black. Seth and I are both in white. It feels wrong and right at the same time. As if saying this isn’t about darkness today, even if darkness brought us here.
My eyes burn. I stopped trying to wipe the tears away ten minutes ago. They just keep coming, sliding down my face without permission. I lean into Seth’s side, pressing my shoulder against his arm, grounding myself in the familiar weight of him. His hand tightens around mine. I feel it before I see it, the slight hitch in his breath, the warmth of a tear landing on my knuckle.
The service blurs. Words float past me, kind ones, hollow ones, sentences about loss and love and remembrance. I hear them, but they don’t stick. All I can think about is how unfair it is that grief keeps finding new ways to hurt. How even when you think you’ve bled out enough, there’s always more.
Seth’s thumb rubs slow circles against my palm. He’s here and I’m here. That feels like the only solid truth left.
People cry quietly. Some bow their heads. Some stare straight ahead like they’re afraid that if they look down, they’ll fall apart completely. I recognize that feeling. I live in it.
The tears finally slow, not because I feel better, but because my body has nothing left to give. My chest aches with every breath. I swallow hard and lift my gaze to the name etched into the stone near the casket.
Samantha Roberts.
This isn’t a funeral for the life we lost on the run. This isn’t for the chaos or the blood or the war we’ve been fighting.
This is for her.
For the woman who loved Seth even when she thought she’d lost him forever. For the mother who carried guilt for years and still chose love. For the voice on the screen that told him the truth too late. For the baby in the pumpkin hat who never stopped being hers.
