He flicked his gaze back to her face.
“After the flood,” she clarified. “Your land. Naomi said the creek took out your cabin.”
He shifted his weight. Looked at a point somewhere past her left shoulder, then back at her face. “I’ll rebuild.”
“Why?”
His expression went flat. “Why?” he echoed.
Stop.Stop.
She didn’t stop. She looked at him — really looked at him, fifteen years of reading what people didn’t say out loud bringing him into focus. Cole was lean and hard the way men got when they worked their bodies past the point of comfort and kept going. His beard was wild and his hair was too long and his hands, when he turned the brim of his hat between them, were scarred and callused and steady.
His eyes weren’t steady. He’d been running for a long time. She didn’t think he knew how to stop, and she had spent years pretending not to notice because she’d needed him too. She’d needed a friend who didn’t ask her hard questions, and he’d needed one who didn’t push, and they’d built the whole thing on a careful agreement not to look at each other too closely.
She was going to break it. She could feel herself breaking it.
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” she heard herself say.
Across the room, somebody made a small sound. Johanna tightened her hand on the edge of the coffee table.
Cole just stared at her.
“Losing the cabin. It forced you out of hiding. Same way this—” She stopped. Swallowed. Started again. “Same way knowing about Alice forces me to face reality.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing.”
“No,” he said, deadly quiet. “It’s not.”
She held his gaze. She was on the floor with Atlas in her lap and a blanket over her shoulders, and she was wrung out and hollow and reckless.
“You’re lonely, Evander. You’ve been lonely for a long time.”
The room went so quiet she could hear the rain on the porch roof.
Cole didn’t move. He didn’t argue. He didn’t blink. He just stared at her, and she watched the door closing behind his eyes, the wall she’d somehow managed to breech going back up.
Dammit. Why had she said that? He hadn’t come here for a mirror. He’d come because she was hurting.
And she had hurt him back.
“I’m sorry,” she said, fast. “Evander?—”
“Good luck with it all.” Flat. Polite. He’d already left. His body just hadn’t caught up yet. He set his hat back on his head. “Take care of yourself, Greta.”
“Cole—”
He was already turning. Tilly rose and followed him without a sound. The screen door slapped shut behind them, and Greta watched through the window as Cole crossed the yard in four long strides and kept going, his silhouette swallowed by the dark beyond the porch light’s reach. His truck started up somewhere down the street, the engine rough and low, and then the sound faded and he was gone.
She closed her eyes.
“Greta,” Naomi said quietly.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No. Probably not.”
