Chapter 32
Becca
“Welcome to Somebody Said in Sweetbriar. I’ve been thinking about what it means to stand in a room full of people who are afraid of the same thing you are and decide to be afraid together instead of alone. And then do something about it.”
The morning of the meeting at Aggie’s. I woke to Levi’s heartbeat under my ear and the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest.
I didn’t move right away. Just lay there listening to him, feeling the warmth of his skin against mine, the faint scratch of stubble when I shifted my cheek against his collarbone.
His palm rested against the small of my back, thumb resting in the dip of my spine.
He stirred before I could move. His arm tightened instinctively, pulling me closer.
A low sound rumbled in his throat—not quite a word, more acknowledgment that I was still there.
“Hey,” I whispered.
“Hey.” His voice was gravel and sleep, thick with it. He didn’t open his eyes yet. Just nuzzled into my hair, lips brushing my temple. “Sleep good?”
“Yeah.” I traced the line of his collarbone with my fingertip.
He exhaled slowly, hand sliding up my spine in a long, lazy stroke that made me shiver. “Bad dreams?”
“No. Good one.” I pressed a soft kiss to the hollow of his throat. “You were in it.”
A small huff of laughter against my hair. “Tell me.”
“You were here. Just like this. And nothing bad happened.”
His fingers threaded into my hair, cradling the back of my head. “Nothing bad’s going to happen.”
I tilted my face up until our noses brushed. “You can’t promise that.”
“Well, I can promise I’ll be here if anything does.”
He kissed me then—slow, sleepy, achingly tender. No urgency. Just the quiet certainty of mouths that already knew each other. His hand slid down to cup my hip, thumb brushing bare skin where the hoodie had ridden up. I sighed into him, fingers curling into his shirt, holding on.
We kissed like we had nowhere to be, like the meeting, work, and the real world could wait another five minutes. He broke it first, resting his forehead against mine. “We should get up.”
“I know.”
Neither of us moved.
His thumb kept tracing slow circles on my hip. “You nervous?”
“For the meeting?” I exhaled. “A little. Mostly, I’m tired of being afraid.”
He pressed another kiss to my temple. “It’s all going to work out.”
We stayed like that a while longer until the sky outside began to turn the particular gray that meant morning was coming whether we wanted it to or not.
He kissed me one more time, then eased out from under me. “I wish I didn’t have to work today. I’d like to go to the meeting.”
“I’ll tell you all about it. It’s going to be fine.”
He got up, and I watched him move through the trailer in the half-light—broad shoulders, easy stride. He kissed me goodbye and told me to get some more rest.
By late morning, the campground was alive with movement.
I could hear it from the porch—footsteps on gravel, low voices carrying on the cool morning air, the aluminum scrape of someone’s folding chair.
It seemed as if Aggie had put the word out.
I dressed and headed to her place. Her Airstream could hold a lot of people if everyone made concessions about personal space, and everyone did.
The banquette table had been pushed against the wall.
Every surface that could support a person was supporting one.
Gerald was nowhere visible. He had assessed the crowd arriving in his domain, made his decision, and disappeared.
Aggie sat at the fold-out table at the front, laptop open, the first slide reading River Corridor Land Rights: What We Know and What We’re Doing About It.
She had spent the preceding weeks building a slide deck that cited three municipal codes, cross-referenced Carver Group operations in two other counties, and color-coded every finding by category of concern.
“You all know why you’re here,” she said. “Someone has been trying to acquire river corridor land in this valley. They’ve been doing it quietly, one property at a time, counting on us not to talk to each other.” A pause. “That was a miscalculation.”
The room was very quiet.
“I’m going to show you what we’ve found,” Aggie said. “Then we’re going to talk about what we do with it.”
She walked them through it—the color-coded findings, the planning documents, the pattern in two other counties. Same approach, same subsidiary names, same language buried in the indemnification clause on page six. The easement transfers. The properties that had already been sold.
A man from above the bend went still at slide seven. “My sister’s parcel,” he said. “That easement number is hers.”
“I know,” She said quietly. “I’m sorry. Slide nine is what can still be done.”
Luke McCabe, Levi’s brother-in-law, spoke before slide nine finished loading. He was standing near the back wall with his arms crossed. He was the kind of man who didn’t speak until he was certain of what he wanted to say.
“I need to put something on the table,” he said.
“The inquiries on our south parcel—I reported those to Sweetbriar PD and wrote letters, and I thought that was enough. But two weeks ago, I got a phone call.” He paused.
“They said they were calling on behalf of a land trust and wanted to discuss options. When I told them we weren’t interested, they said they hoped we’d reconsider.
That the valley was going to change whether we wanted it to or not.
” His jaw tightened. “They said it would be better for my family if we were on the right side of that change.” He looked at Aggie. “I took that as a threat.”
“Because it was one,” Aggie said.
The murmur that moved through the room wasn’t a surprise. It was the sound of confirmation—of people hearing something they had already understood, said plainly at last.
The man I had recognized from the Stop & Go raised his hand near the window.
“Emmett Harrington,” he said. “I’m a PI out of Willowmist Falls.
My family’s held land on the north corridor for four generations.
” He looked around the room. “We’ve had more than phone calls.
Letters first. Then two of my cousins got visits—not at their businesses, not with appointments.
At their homes, at night. From men they didn’t know, who knew their children’s names. ”
The room went still.
“One of them mentioned which elementary school my cousin’s daughter attended.
Casually. Like it was small talk.” His voice was controlled in the way of someone who had been controlling it for a while.
“It wasn’t small talk. That started eight months ago, and it’s been escalating.
I’ve been building a file on Carver Group for months. I’m here to help.”
One of the ladies from across the river spoke next: “A man came to my door in September. Very friendly. He mentioned my daughter by name—where she worked, how long she’d been there. Said he hoped she was happy.” She looked at Aggie. “She lives in Medford. She has nothing to do with this.”
The man from above the bend said, quietly, “Someone left a note under my windshield wiper. No name. A dollar figure, a phone number, and the words while the offer stands.”
Matt, at the back wall, had been still and quiet in the way he was when he was building something in his head that was going to matter later. He looked at Harrington. “I need a copy of your file.”
“I brought it,” Harrington said, and produced a folder that was nearly as thick as Aggie’s.
The room opened up after that—one voice at a time, people saying things they hadn’t said out loud because they didn’t know who to tell.
Aggie let it run. She understood that people needed to be heard before they could be organized, and she fielded questions, redirected tangents, and held the room together with the patient, practiced ease of someone who had been doing it her whole life and was not going to stop tonight.
I stayed near the door. This was not my room to run. I had said what needed saying into a microphone, and these people had taken it and brought it here and made something real of it.
Matt walked them through what was in motion—the attorney general inquiry, the journalists, the commissioner on record, Luke’s letters in the record, Harrington’s file now added to all of it. What still needed to be done. He was brief and precise.
“I need everything,” he said. “Every offer letter, every note, every phone call you can document. If it felt like a threat.”
Papers moved across the table toward him.
Luke looked at Aggie. “I’ve got to meet the kids at the bus stop. You call if you need me. Anytime.”
“Same,” Emmett said, already gathering his folder. “I’ll be available whenever needed.”
Aggie nodded once to each of them. “Thank you. Both of you. Drive safe.”
They left quickly, quietly, the door closing behind them with soft finality.
It was in the final item on the agenda—Aggie’s draft letter to the planning commission, which was as thorough as everything else she produced, when Eileen said, without particular urgency, “Who is that at the window? Dark blue jacket. He was standing there a moment ago.”
The room shifted. Several people looked.
Matt was already moving. He stepped outside, phone to his ear. I watched as he got into his truck and took off. My phone rang a few seconds later.
“Car on the road. Gone before I could get a plate, but it looked like Travis’s BMW. I’m going to follow the road and see if I can pick it up again. Call me if anything changes here.”
I nodded and ended the call.
We were about to start passing out cookies Eileen brought when I smelled it. A wrongness in the air beneath the pine and the cold river smell, something sharp and chemical that my body registered before my mind caught up with it.
Aggie’s face changed at the same moment mine did, and she was on her feet before I could speak.
“Out,” she said. “Everyone out now. Fire.”
They moved. Everybody through one door in under two minutes, fast and together. Aggie and I were near the back.
I could hear it now. Not just smell it—hear it in the woods behind us, the low building roar of something that had been patient and was done being patient.
The orange glow at the perimeter shone bright, flames racing along the dry grass and scrub oak with terrifying speed, driven by the morning breeze straight toward Aggie’s Airstream.
The fire moved like it had purpose—hungry, fast, leaping from brush to brush, eating distance in seconds, the heat already radiating through the thin aluminum skin of the trailer.
We were outside, off the porch, and headed to the road when Aggie stopped.
“Gerald,” she said. Her hand was on my arm, and her face had gone still.
“He was hiding,” I said. “He was scared of all the people—”
“He goes to the closet,” she said. “The narrow one beside the bed. Every time there are people he doesn’t know. Eleven years.” She looked at the door. At the fire. At me. “He goes to the closet.”
I knew that. I had seen it. I had been in that Airstream enough times to know exactly where Gerald went when the world became too much.
“Go to the road,” I said. “Go with everyone. I’ll get him.”
“Becca—”
“Go, Aggie! Now! Don’t make me worry about you, too.”
The look on my face made it clear I was going in. She didn’t argue.
“Becca! Oh god!”
I heard Aggie shout my name. I heard the sharp edge of her voice as I put my shoulder to the door and went in.
My eyes stung immediately. The smoke was still thin enough to see through, but it had a weight to it, a presence, sitting in my chest with the first breath in a way that made something primal in me want to turn around.
I didn’t turn around. I dropped low and crawled toward the bedroom, pulse loud in my ears, the floor warm under my palms in a way that floors shouldn’t be.
The heat found me before the flames did—skin-tightening, airless, the kind that pulls the moisture right out of your mouth.
The trailer had caught. Flames came through the open window and licked up the far wall, catching the curtains, moving with a speed that didn’t seem real, racing along the thin paneling, feeding on the dry interior like it had been waiting for exactly this.
Like the whole summer had been building toward this one moment in this one trailer.
My throat tightened. Not just from the smoke.
Gerald. Closet. Go.
The closet door was cracked open. I yanked it wide.
Gerald was curled in the narrow space, eyes wide with terror, fur standing on end, body rigid and trembling. The sight of him—so small, so frightened, so completely certain that the closet would save him—did something to my chest that the smoke hadn’t managed yet.
I reached in and scooped him up in both arms, tucked him tight against me.
He hissed once, claws digging hard into my hoodie, piercing through to skin, but he didn’t fight me.
I held him secure, one hand cradling his head, the other under his bottom, and I turned back toward the front of the trailer.
It was worse. The smoke had thickened in the time it had taken me to find him, pouring under the doorframe in rolling black waves.
Flames had reached the kitchenette, leaping across the small counter, heat flashing in pulses that I felt on my face, my arms, the back of my hands.
Something popped—glass shattering somewhere to my left—and I flinched hard, heart lurching into my throat, and made myself keep moving.
Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.
Gerald’s heart was hammering against my ribs, fast and frantic, his whole body vibrating with it, and I focused on that—on the small desperate presence of him pressed against me—and kept my legs moving. The roar was louder than I’d expected. Fire wasn’t quiet. I hadn’t known that.
The front door was a rectangle of orange-black smoke.
My lungs were burning now, a deep raw ache that was going to be worse tomorrow, and I had one clear thought—Aggie, she’s waiting, get out—and shoved forward with everything I had, pushed through the doorway just as the fire surged behind me, a wall of heat at my back like a hand between my shoulder blades, pushing me out into the cold dark air and the sound of voices and the smell of grass and river and smoke and someone shouting my name.