Chapter 33
thirty-three
She found him on the porch steps. Alone.
The main house hummed with activity behind the closed door—Brandt’s measured voice asking questions, Walker coordinating, X and Jax somewhere cleaning weapons or drinking or both.
The day had turned cold again, the kind of cold that sank past skin into bone, and River sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and his shoulders bowed under something Rainey recognized without needing to name it.
Evander stood at her side. He’d been there since Bear cleared the concussion—hovering, his dark eyes tracking every wince, his hand never more than six inches from her elbow. She loved him for it. She also needed him to stop.
“Go inside,” she said.
His jaw worked. “Rainey—”
“I need to talk to him alone.”
He looked at River. At the hunched shape of him on the steps, the way the cold had reddened his ears and he hadn’t bothered to pull his hood up.
Something passed across Evander’s face—calculation, concern, the particular wariness of a man who understood exactly what kind of conversation was about to happen and didn’t want to be the reason it went unsaid.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “Then I’m checking.”
She squeezed his hand. Once. Hard enough that he’d feel it through the bandages on her wrists. “Go.”
He went. The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded, in the quiet, like the end of something.
Rainey crossed the porch. Sat beside her brother on the cold wooden step. Her ribs protested. Her temple throbbed where Hobbs had hit her, the swelling gone down but the bruise spreading in ugly yellows and purples across her left eye. She didn’t care.
River’s hands came away from his face. His eyes were red. Swollen. He’d been crying, or trying not to, and the effort had left tracks on his cheeks that the cold air had dried to tight lines.
He held something between his fingers. A folded piece of paper, creased and soft along the edges from handling.
Rainey knew it before he extended it toward her—the note from her truck.
The one she’d written three years ago, after their father’s funeral, and never sent because sending it meant admitting she’d wanted to.
“You found it,” she said.
“Truck search. After you went missing.” His voice came out scraped. “I didn’t open it.”
He placed it in her palm. His fingers brushed hers, quick, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch her. The paper felt warm from his grip.
“You don’t have the right to read anything I’m not ready to give you,” River said. He’d rehearsed it. She could hear the shape of rehearsal in the words, the way they came out too clean, too measured, like he’d been carrying them since he found the note and waiting for a chance to return it intact.
Rainey turned the folded paper over. Her name on the outside, in her own handwriting. She didn’t open it.
“I need to say something,” River said. He stared at the dirt beyond the porch steps, at the boot prints frozen in mud, anywhere but at her.
“And I’m not going to justify it. There’s no justification.
I left for the Army and I told myself you were better off without me.
I went to prison and I told myself the same thing.
I stayed away afterward because facing you meant facing what I’d left you to survive alone with Dad, and I couldn’t—” His voice broke.
He swallowed. Started again. “I couldn’t do it.
So I didn’t. And every day I didn’t call, I told myself it was the kinder choice.
That I was protecting you from having to carry my shit on top of everything else. ”
The cold air burned her lungs. Rainey held the note. She didn’t speak.
“I was sixteen,” she said finally. Her voice came out steady.
She’d been afraid it wouldn’t. “When you left. Dad was still drinking. Still throwing things. Still putting his hands on me when the tequila ran out and the rage didn’t.
” She looked at the side of his face. At the way his jaw had gone tight, the muscle jumping beneath his ear.
“You were the person I believed would always come back. Every birthday you didn’t call.
Every Christmas I sat in that house alone with him because you had somewhere better to be.
Every year of silence taught me the same lesson, River.
Don’t expect anyone to stay. Don’t build your life around people who can walk away. Because they will.”
He nodded. Once. His eyes closed.
“I failed you,” he said. “I would undo it if I could. Every day of it. But I can’t. So I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give me now. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
The note sat in her palm. Three years of unsent words. Anger. Grief. The particular loneliness of being the one who stayed when everyone else found reasons to leave.
“Part of me has spent years wanting you to hurt as much as I did,” Rainey said. The admission cost her. She felt it leave her body like something physical. “I wanted you to lie awake at night wondering. I wanted you to feel it. The other part never stopped missing my brother.”
River’s breath caught. A small, broken sound.
She placed the folded note in his hand. Closed his fingers around it. “Don’t read it until I leave. I can’t sit here while you do.”
His head came up. He looked at her, really looked at her, his eyes wide and wet. “Leave? You’re leaving again?”
“No.” She almost smiled. Almost. “I’m going to Evander’s room. And I will see you at breakfast. Tomorrow morning. With eggs. And probably X singing off-key. And you will be there, and I will be there, and we will figure out how to do this without one of us running every time it gets hard.”
A sound escaped him—half laugh, half sob. He dropped his head and his shoulders shook, and Rainey reached for him before she could decide not to.
His arms came around her. Hard. Desperate.
He buried his face in her shoulder and she felt the wet heat of tears through her flannel shirt, and his whole body trembled against hers like something coming apart and rebuilding itself in the same motion.
She held him. One hand in his wild curls, the other flat between his shoulder blades where she could feel his heartbeat hammering against her palm.
They sat like that on the cold porch steps while the light faded and the house behind them held its noise, and for the first time since she’d walked through Valor Ridge’s gate two weeks ago, Rainey Beckett let her brother hold her without pulling away.