“I know you have.” Her voice softens for half a second before the edge returns. “But monitoring is not the same as doing something about it. I’ll get a cool cloth and some water. Daniel, go start the coffee. Give your brother some room before the two of you turn this into a testosterone summit.”
“We’re talking about this later.” Then the sound of boots already moving toward the kitchen.
“Later,” Ethan agrees, his voice edged with impatience.
The woman pauses by the couch. I feel her gaze on me the way you feel sunlight through a window.
“She drove a long way to get here,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.” Ethan’s voice, rough. “She did.”
“Good. She’s where she’s supposed to be.”
The words are spoken so softly that I almost miss them.
Her footsteps move toward the kitchen. A drawer opens. Water runs.
My groggy brain files her in the place I keep important data. The woman with brown eyes and careful hands, who tucked the blanket around me as if she’d done it a thousand times. She recognized that I needed tending, and she tended.
Burrowing deeper into the cushions, I let the fog take me under.
I wake again, more aware. Tucked into the corner of a couch with cushions propped on both sides like a deliberate fortress, built by someone who understood that waking up in a strange place is its own kind of violence.
My shoes are off, neatly lined up where I can see them. My clothes are intact, every button fastened, every zipper closed.
The flash drive.
I instinctively reach for the pocket of my jacket, which is bunched up beneath me. My head screams, and the room tilts.I need that flash drive. Without it, I’m just a woman who stole nothing and ran nowhere, and every risk I took is?—
Boots scrape against the wooden floor.
“Easy.”
My chest tightens. I’ve heard this voice every night for six months through a phone speaker.
I push my smudged glasses up my nose. The familiar habit buys me a moment as my mind struggles to catch up. He has a face. Of course, he does. But I didn’t expect it to be this one—lean, a bit tired, a jaw covered in stubble that’s grown beyond mere scruff, and striking blue eyes. Phone calls don’t tell you about eyes the color of a wide-open sky on a clear day.
“Ethan.” My voice is a rasp; his name both a confirmation and a question.
“Hey, Jen.” The corner of his mouth lifts, not quite a smile, but something more private.
He’s the only person who has ever called me Jen.
“I made it,” I manage.
His face softens. “You made it. You’re at Stoneridge.” His drawl is more pronounced than on the phone, with flatter vowels and softer consonants. “The ranch. You found it.”
“I found—I crashed—My car is?—”
“In the ditch. I know.” He doesn’t move closer or crowd me. He stays exactly where he is, with three feet of charged air between us. It might as well be three inches from the reaction of my oversensitive nervous system.
“It’s where I found you this morning. Brought you back here. You’ve been out ever since.”
His hands are wrapped around a coffee mug. I’ve imagined those hands. The calluses from fence work, the steady grip he described when telling me about pulling a calf in a storm. The right one is scarred across his knuckles, far more vivid than anything I created in my mind.
He sets the mug on the side table as if he forgot he was holding it, as if my presence made him forget.
I glance at the blanket on his chair and the dent in the cushion. “Have you been sitting here this whole time?”
