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I huffed out a breath. We jogged, slower this time. Not running. Not chasing. Just . . . moving forward. And finally since I saw him, it didn’t feel like I was trying to escape when I ran. It felt like I might actually be heading somewhere.

Nineteen

Cali

Morning came slower on the farm. Not the kind that barged in with vehicle horns blaring and a to-do list already running circles in your head before your feet even touched the floor. On Saturdays, it unfolded gently, as though it had nowhere else to be. I woke to a tranquility so complete it almost felt unreal. Just . . . stillness. Broken only by the faint creak of the old house settling and birds chirping somewhere beyond the window. For a second, I didn’t move. Didn’t open my eyes. I just lay there, breathing it in. It felt . . . unfamiliar. And worse—precarious. Because peace had never lasted long in my life. Not the genuine kind. Not the kind that didn’t come with a catch or a countdown. I remembered counting down the days until I turned eighteen so I could move out. Grandma and Grandpa had already done so much for Mom and me. I couldn’t bear the thought of becoming one more burden they had to carry.

I let myself absorb the haven of silence for one more second before I sighed and pushed the covers back. The floor was cool under my feet as I stood, stretching the stiffness from my back. The house carried that early-morning smell—old wood, something faintly sweet from the life that used to fill these rooms. I padded down the hallway, fingers brushing dated wallpaper, reminding myself this was real, that I was actually here. Back. Despite the things I hated about Kennedy, it had always felt like home.

The kitchen came into view first, sunlight spilling through the window over the sink in soft golden lines of morning. Grandpa—Jimmy—sat at the table. He had a spoon in his hand and a bowl in front of him, but he wasn’t eating. Just . . . staring at it as if he’d forgotten what came next. A pressure gathered in my chest, that now-familiar ache settling in.

“Morning,” I whispered.

His head snapped up, eyes lighting as if I’d just appeared out of thin air. “Hey!” he said, grinning wide. “You came back!”

I swallowed hard and forced a smile. “Told you I would.”

He nodded as if that made perfect sense, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I was waiting.”

Of course he was. This was almost a daily routine. Him rediscovering who I was. Dr. Shannon had confirmed what I’d already suspected after several tests. Grandpa most likely had Alzheimer’s. At some point—though he couldn’t remember when—he’d also suffered a traumatic brain injury. Alzheimer's explained the forgetting. The TBI explained the childlike moments.

Guilt wrapped around me like a weight pressing against my lungs. I couldn’t do anything about the past, but I was here now, and I would do whatever I could to make his last days as good as they could be.

I crossed the kitchen and took the seat across from him, glancing at the bowl. Dry cereal. No milk.

“Want some help?” I asked.

He looked down at it, then back at me, completely unbothered. “It’s crunchy.”

I huffed a quiet laugh despite myself. “Yeah. It’s supposed to be less crunchy.” Standing, I grabbed the milk from the fridge and poured it over his cereal. He watched me as if I were performing some kind of magic trick.

“Wow,” he said.

“High-level skills,” I teased.

He nodded seriously. “You’re really good at that.”

Something in my chest twisted because he’d always been this way. He had a way of making me feel like I was worth something when I really wondered in my teenage years. It quieted the fear that I would be just like her.

“Thanks,” I breathed.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs—heavy, uncoordinated, unmistakably teenage.

“Please tell me there’s food,” Jace muttered as he appeared in the doorway, hair a disaster, eyes half closed.

“Depends,” I said. “Are you planning on being a functioning human today?”

“No promises.” He shuffled into the kitchen like a walking puddle. He dropped into the chair beside me, reaching immediately for the cereal box. “This house is weirdly quiet,” he said around a yawn, scratching his chin with the back of his hand.

“Yeah,” I said. Weirdly quiet. Or maybe just . . . normal quiet, but he had never experienced anything that didn’t have the traffic hum of the city and the chaos that constant noise thrived on. He poured himself a bowl, then glanced between me and Grandpa, who was now happily eating as if nothing had ever been wrong.

“Did you sleep okay?” I asked, trying not to be too obvious.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

He shot me a look. “I said yeah.” I had heard his nightmare from my room last night, but by the time I got there, he was awake and chugging water from the bottle on his bedside table.