And then the guilt arrives, swift and merciless.
Whitney.
Phillip.
The Seminoles.
All the questions I kept asking, all the suspicions I kept feeding, all the times I called Maverick because I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t crazy.
Did I drag him into this?
Did I hand him the rope and then act surprised when he started climbing?
“I never should’ve told you everything,” I whisper, thewords spilling out before I can stop them. “I never should’ve pulled you into this. And I should’ve listened to you that night, before my wedding, when you told me what kind of life I was marrying into. You were right, Maverick. About all of it. You were right and I was too arrogant and too stupid to hear you.”
His face changes at that, not much, but enough. Something softer moves through it, something pained.
“Don’t do that,” he says quietly, stepping closer. “Don’t make this about you failing me somehow. You didn’t put me here. I made my choices all on my own, and I’d make them again.”
Tears sting my eyes before I can stop them. I hate that I’m crying. I hate that this place, this moment, this whole ugly unraveling of my life keeps reducing me to something raw and shaken. But I step into him anyway, into the familiarity of his body, and when he wraps his arms around me I hold on too tightly, like if I let go too soon he’ll disappear into whatever darkness he’s brought me here to witness.
“What did you do?” I ask again, my voice muffled against his shirt. “Please, Mav. Just tell me.”
He holds me there for one beat longer, then two, and when he finally pulls back there is something grimly settled in his expression that makes my stomach turn. He looks like a man who has already accepted the consequence and is only now deciding how much of it to let me see.
“It would be better if somebody else explained it,” he says.
The words barely leave his mouth before I hear footsteps behind me.
I turn so fast it makes me dizzy.
Another figure steps out of the dark interior of the shack, moving slowly enough that I have time to dread the reveal. The light catches a cheekbone first, then a mouth, then eyes I know well enough to feel the blood drain from my face.
For one suspended second, my brain refuses to understand what I’m seeing.
The world seems to tip sideways beneath me.
Every thought I had on the drive here, every possibility I forced myself to consider, every fear I tried not to name, all of it fractures at once under the weight of this new, impossible reality.
“Hello, McCullough,” the figure says, voice smooth, composed, almost gentle in a way that makes it worse.
I can’t answer.
My throat closes around the shock, around the fear, around the sudden, violent realization that whatever truth I came here for is bigger than I imagined, uglier than I imagined, and far closer to me than I ever allowed myself to believe.
I glance back at Maverick, but he won’t save me from this. Not this time. He only watches me, tense and silent, as if he knows there is no softer way for this to happen.
“What…” The word catches, and I have to force the rest of it out. “What is going on?”
The figure takes another step toward me, and I feel my body lock in place, caught somewhere between instinct and disbelief.
“It’s time,” they say, “you learned the truth.”
And standing there in the half-dark, with my brother at my back and the bay breathing coldly beyond the walls of the shack, I know with sudden, terrible certainty that whatever comes next is going to split my life cleanly in two.
Chapter Forty-Six
The shack settles into a silence that feels almost deliberate, as if the world outside has pulled back to give this moment space to unfold. The tide moves somewhere beyond the walls, a low, steady rhythm against the shore, but inside it is still. The air hangs heavy with salt and rot, the boards beneath my feet soft with age and damp, and for a second I can’t seem to draw in a full breath. It feels like the space is shrinking, like something invisible is pressing in on all sides, tightening slowly around my ribs.
