Cara
Iwoke at the cabin the morning after the confrontation at Paige’s bar, wearing Jasper’s shirt. My wrist ached with a dull, persistent throb.
I surfaced slowly. I could hear him in the kitchen, the coffee maker, the soft set of a mug on the counter—and there was something about the deliberate quiet, how he was clearly trying not to wake me, that made me want to call out to him just to let him know he didn’t have to try so hard. I didn’t. I lay there and listened to him instead, and the shower came on a few minutes later, and I thought about him on the other side of the wall, and felt heat move through me that had nothing to do with the blankets.
When I finally got up, the cold floor hit my feet immediately, sharp against the bare boards, and that’s when I saw my wrist. The bruise had darkened overnight—four distinct marks pressed into the skin, purple and unambiguous. I stared at them for a moment and felt the warmth of the morning drain out of me, replaced by something flatter and more tired. Not fear, exactly. More like the grim recognition of something I was going to have to work on getting over. I tugged the sleeve of his shirt down overit, because I needed something simple to do with my hands, and because I didn’t want to look at it anymore.
The kitchen was warm and smelled like coffee. He had left a mug waiting on the counter, already poured, exactly the way I took it, and I stood there for a second looking at it with something pressing against the back of my throat. He always did things like that. Small, quiet things that he never mentioned and never seemed to need acknowledgment for, just—did them, because he had noticed what I needed and acted on it, as if taking care of me was simply part of how he moved through a day. I picked up the mug, held it with both hands, and sat at the small table by the window.
His phone lay on the counter where he’d left it. I wasn’t looking at it. I was watching the river. Then it buzzed against the wood, the screen flashing just long enough for a notification to catch the edge of my vision.
Emmett: Did you tell Cara yet? I mean it, Jasper. You’re going to blow it.
I sat very still.
I read the message again. And then again, the way you read something when the words are clear, but your brain is refusing to process them at full speed because some part of you already knows that once you do, something changes.
Tell me what?
The question dropped into me and didn’t come back up. I thought about the phone call during Mystery Night, the half-second pause before Jasper said it was Emmett, the careful neutrality of his expression when he came back inside. I thought about all the moments over the past weeks where something had sat just underneath the surface of a conversation, and neither of us had reached for it. I had told myself I was reading too muchinto things, that I was looking for problems because happiness made me nervous, that Jasper was one of the most honest people I’d ever known, and I should trust that.
And then there was the wordyet. Notdid you tell her,butyet—which meant Emmett had asked before. Which meant this was not a new conversation between them. Which meant Jasper had chosen, again and again, not to say it.
The job. It had to be the job. Emmett had been trying to get Jasper to work with him for months; everyone knew that much, and whatever the details were, Jasper had clearly accepted something or was considering something significant enough that his closest friend felt the need to intervene. And I understood that jobs were complicated, timing was complicated, and people needed space to work things out before they said them out loud.
But we had lain in this bed and talked about everything. He had told me things he said he hadn’t told anyone, and I had believed him, and I had given him the same in return, and now I was sitting here finding out from a text message that there was something Emmett thought important enough to push him about, something with ayetattached to it, and Jasper had looked me in the eyes and said nothing.
That was the part that hurt. Not the secret itself—I didn’t even know what it was yet. It was him choosing not to tell me. Every day he had a choice, and every day he had chosen not to tell me, and I had been here the whole time, thinking we were building something real.
I had spent so much of my life being careful with myself. Measuring how much to give, how far to lean in, when to hold back. And then Jasper had made it feel safe to stop doing that, and I had stopped; I had let him in further than I had let anyone, and it turned out there were still rooms he hadn’t shown me.Rooms he’d apparently been quite comfortable keeping closed while I walked around thinking I knew the whole house.
When he stepped into the kitchen—hair damp, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt—his face softened the moment he saw me. Then he really looked, and the softness vanished.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.
I kept my hands around the mug. “I need you to tell me what’s going on with Emmett,” I said. “Whatever it is. It’s time.”
He stood still in the doorway. His gaze flicked to the phone on the counter, then back to me, and I watched him understand what had happened—watched him work out exactly what I’d seen and how long I’d been sitting with it—and something in his expression changed. Not defensiveness. Something closer to a man who had been dreading a particular moment for a long time and had just arrived at it.
He crossed the room and sat down across from me. His hands were flat on the table between us, and he didn’t say anything right away, which was somehow worse than if he had.
“Emmett offered me a partnership,” he said finally. “In the firm. I told you about a job offer a while back.”
“I remember.”
“He’s been pushing me to come on full-time. Running the Willowmist Falls office with him. Surveillance, missing persons, some cases that would take me out of town for stretches.” He held my gaze. “He trusts me. He wants me there.”
I set my mug down carefully. My hands were not entirely steady, and I needed them to be. “Have you said yes?”
He didn’t look away. “Yes.”
The word landed and sat there between us. I had known. Some part of me had known there was something, had been circling it for weeks, and I had talked myself out of it every time because I had wanted to believe that what we had was as complete as it felt.
“How long?” I asked.
“A few weeks.”
A few weeks. I looked at the table. At his hands on the wood. At the mug he had left out for me this morning, already poured, exactly how I took it, because he paid attention to me, because he was so careful with me in all the ways that mattered—except this one. My eyes filled with tears, and I blinked hard and looked away because I was not going to cry yet, not until I had said what I needed to say.
