Her eyes narrow. She stands slowly, pressing both palms flat on the table. "Before you what?"
"This was supposed to be temporary." My voice sounds foreign to me. Hard. The voice of a man building walls in real time. "You needed a roof. I gave you one. But this, us, whatever this has become, it's a complication neither of us planned for, and now you're telling me there's a violent ex-husband out there who might show up at my door."
"So send me away." Quiet. No anger. Just the resigned tone of a woman who's heard this song before. "Put me on a bus like you wanted to the first day."
My hands are shaking. I shove them in my pockets.
The smart thing to do is agree. Let her go. Protect what's left of the stone wall I've spent forty years building around the part of me that breaks when people leave. She's got one suitcase. She knows how to disappear. She'll be fine.
Except she won't. And I know that. Because the woman standing in my kitchen with her chin raised, daring me to reject her while her fingers tremble against the tabletop, is barely holding herself together. She told me her worst secret, the heaviest thing she carries, because she trusted me enough to set it down.
And I just made her pick it back up.
"Naomi."
"Don't." She holds up one hand. "You're right. This was supposed to be temporary. I'll figure something out in the morning."
She walks past me. Down the hall. Into the spare room, where her suitcase is still stored in the closet because she never fully unpacked it there, just the dresser and the Bible. Always ready to run.
The door closes. Quiet. No slam. Somehow that's worse.
Standing alone in the kitchen, surrounded by the spices she alphabetized, the coffee she taught me to make right, the crossword book she was working through with the pencil tucked in the spine exactly the way Gran used to leave hers, I understand with brutal clarity what just happened.
She gave me her truth. I gave her my fear. And fear won.
The porch swing creaks in the night wind. Gran's swing. Gran's cabin. Gran's matchmaking scheme that brought a woman into this house who needed safety, and found a man who was too terrified of loss to give it.
Every person I've loved has left. But for the first time, standing in this empty kitchen, I'm the one who made someone go.
CHAPTER SIX
NAOMI
The suitcase is packed by midnight.
Took less time than it should have. Clothes folded, toiletries zipped into the front pocket with the broken zipper, shoes lined up by the door. My grandmother's Bible sits on top, cracked cover facing up. Everything I own, organized and ready to move in under fifteen minutes. Running is a skill, and I'm very good at it.
Sitting on the edge of the spare room bed, I stare at the bag. The room is dim, just the moonlight through the window casting silver across the floor. Down the hall, the cabin is silent. No creaking floorboards. No coffee machine. Sully is either asleep or sitting in the dark, which seems more likely.
My hands aren't shaking anymore. They shook for the first hour. The hour after telling a man my worst truth, watching his face close down, hearing him reduce everything we've built in a week to the word "complication." Now they're steady. Numb. The body's way of preparing for what comes next.
Edmonton after I left Matt. Saskatoon after he found me in Edmonton. A shelter in Winnipeg that smelled like bleach. A church basement in Thunder Bay where a woman named Gloriagave me a coat and a phone number for Sanctuary Match. Each place smaller, quieter, further from anything resembling a life.
And now this. The furthest I've ever run, the most beautiful place I've ever found, and the first man who made me think maybe I could stop.
Gone in the morning.
Pulling my knees up, I press my forehead against them. The ache in my chest is enormous. Not the sharp, panicked ache of Matt's violence, but the slow, crushing weight of having something taken away by someone who was scared of keeping it.
Because that's what happened. Sully didn't reject me because of Matt. He rejected me because of himself. Because his mother left, his father died, his grandmother died, and every person who's ever mattered to him has disappeared. Loving people is a losing bet in Sullivan Cross's universe, and I walked in holding a hand full of cards he didn't want to read.
He's scared. I know scared. I've been scared for two years. But fear doesn't feel any less devastating when you understand where it comes from.
Three a.m. The cabin settles around me. Wood contracting in the cold. An owl outside, distant, patient. The Herefords are quiet in the pasture. Everything peaceful except the wreckage in my chest.
Then the floorboards creak.
Slow. Deliberate. Stopping outside my door.
