Chapter Three
~ Carter ~
Macon didn’t say a word. He just reached out—slow and deliberate, telegraphing the move like you would with a half-wild animal—and took my elbow. The grip was light, but I could feel his pulse in the way his thumb twitched, even through the layers of sweater and denim.
I braced for him to snap, to say something cutting or mean or even just final, but instead he steered me around the pickup and toward the battered farmhouse, where the porch lights still burned yellow against the encroaching dark.
The air was sharp and tasted like last year’s pine needles and distant hay. My chest hurt so bad I thought I’d throw up, or maybe that was just the heartburn again.
When we hit the porch steps, he let go. The separation left me colder than the wind ever could, but I followed him up, both hands dug deep into the kangaroo pouch of my too-big sweater.
There was no way to hide the curve of my belly, not anymore, so I just curled around it and tried to look smaller.
He leaned against the porch railing, both palms splayed flat and white-knuckled on either side of his thighs.
For a long minute, he didn’t look at me.
Just stared out at the field, where the sun was bleeding away behind the fence posts and the only movement came from the silhouettes of goats head butting each other for fun.
“Are you going to yell at me?” I said, voice high and thin.
I hated how brittle it sounded.
He shook his head, jaw clenched so tight the muscle twitched under the stubble. “You think I’d ever yell at you?”
“You left before I woke up,” I said. “Most people yell at least once before they bail.”
He grunted, but his gaze didn’t waver from the horizon. “Wouldn’t have made it easier. For either of us.”
I hugged my middle and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “You want to get it over with? Say whatever you’re gonna say? I don’t think there’s a punch line I haven’t already run through in my head.”
He went silent again. The porch boards creaked when I leaned on the post for support. There was a spider spinning a frantic web in the eave above us, and I watched it to avoid looking at his face.
Finally, Macon said, “Why’d you come back?”
“Why’d you leave?” I shot back, the retort automatic, but it felt like lobbing a pebble at a brick wall.
He flinched anyway, and something ugly twisted in my gut.
I let the silence stretch until it felt like a bad prank, then said, “I don’t know.
Maybe I wanted to see if you’d actually stand in front of me and say you didn’t care.
Maybe I’m just bad at taking hints.” I forced a laugh, but it didn’t sound right, even to me.
“I’m not good at closure. Or beginnings. Or the stuff in between.”
His head bowed, chin almost touching his chest. “Didn’t think I was worth the effort.”
I looked at him, really looked. There was a tiredness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a hint of gray in the stubble, and his hands on the railing were trembling.
“Are you okay?” I asked, softer now.
He barked a sound, halfway between a laugh and a cough. “Yeah. Sure. Peachy.” The knuckles of his right hand blanched as he tightened his grip on the rail. “Saw you out in the yard and thought I’d finally cracked. Hallucinated you, maybe. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Guess you’re not the only one,” I said, and for once, there was no bitterness.
He finally turned to look at me, and the weight of that stare knocked the wind out of my lungs. There was too much in it: anger, hunger, longing, a regret so deep it looked like it hurt to carry.
“I thought you hated me,” he said.
“I did. For about five minutes.” My arms loosened around my stomach, and I blinked hard. “Then I got busy. Turns out, having a baby takes up a lot of your time.”
His breath caught, a tiny hitch that wouldn’t register to anyone who didn’t know him as well as I did. “How far along?”
“Seventeen weeks. Give or take.” I shrugged. “I didn’t do it on purpose, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He nodded, eyes shuttered.
I rubbed a palm over the bump. “It’s okay if you don’t want—”
“Don’t,” he said, so quietly it was almost a plea.
I stopped.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked up at the porch lights as if searching for guidance. “I spent every day since thinking about that night. Wondering if I made it up. Wondering if you were better off without—” He stopped himself, jaw snapping shut.
“You didn’t make it up,” I said, and the words felt like a kind of surrender.
He nodded. “I know.”
The cool air pressed in around us, dense with the kind of silence that makes you hear your own heartbeat.
I was the first to crack.
“I didn’t mean for you to find out like this,” I said. “I had a plan.” I laughed, sharp. “It was a good one, too. Sell off the Hargrove place, take the cash, disappear. New country, new name, maybe learn Portuguese. I’d already lined up a goat farm on the coast.”
He stared at me, brow furrowed. “You bought the Hargrove land? Why?”
“Not for the view,” I said. “Though, honestly, the satellite images don’t do it justice.”
His lips twitched. “Always thought you were the smartest in the family.”
I snorted. “The bar’s in hell.”
He looked back at the field, then down at his hands. He flexed them, opening and closing his fists, as if weighing something he couldn’t name. “Why’d you want to disappear?”
I traced the porch’s grain with the toe of my boot. “You know my father. You know what he’d do if he found out I was having a kid. Especially… this kind of kid.” I gestured at my stomach, at the parts of myself I’d never had the nerve to say out loud. “He’d try to buy it away. Or worse.”
He nodded, the movement tight and angry.
“I figured if I left before anyone noticed, I could at least keep some of it safe. Even if it meant…” I swallowed. “Even if it meant never seeing you again.”
He exhaled slow, like he was blowing out a fuse.
For a second, I let myself imagine it: the cottage in Portugal, the ocean, the goats, the little person with my DNA and maybe his eyes. I let myself want it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and I almost missed it.
“What?”
He finally looked at me, full-on, no walls left. “I’m sorry. For leaving. For not being braver. For letting you think I didn’t want this.”
The words hung in the space between us, raw and true. I felt them settle somewhere under my sternum, tight and hot.
He let go of the railing, but his hand shook so bad he stuffed it in his pocket. “You know why I left, don’t you?”
I stared at him, not trusting myself to speak.
He pressed his lips together, the muscle in his jaw pulsing. “I was scared of Rawley. Not of what he’d do, but of what he’d think of me. I’ve never had a brother. Or a family. And when I found it, I didn’t want to risk losing it.”
I swallowed. “So you cut me loose.”
He nodded, jaw tight.
“That’s not the kind of family I wanted,” I said. “I wanted the kind that keeps you, even when you mess up.”
He reached for me, then stopped. His hand hovered between us, fingers trembling. “Do you want this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I want you to want it. Even if it’s just for tonight.”
He let the hand drop to his side, and it curled into a fist. “I want it. I want you. I just don’t know how to not fuck it up.”
I smiled, and it felt shaky but real. “Join the club.”
He leaned back against the post, eyes red-rimmed, and we stood there, shoulder to shoulder, not touching but not apart, either.
“Are you going to run again?” I asked, and my voice was so small I barely recognized it.
“No,” he said. “Not this time.”
The relief was a physical thing. It loosened something inside me, and I found myself laughing, really laughing, for the first time since I’d left.
He watched me, a smile tugging at the edge of his mouth. “I missed that,” he said. “The way you sound when you’re not scared.”
“I’m always scared,” I said, and it was the truth.
“Me too,” he admitted, and that was the first time I believed we might actually survive this.
We stood in the dark for a long time, the only sound the wind in the pine and the faint click of the spider weaving her web above us. I wondered if she’d have a hundred babies, or if they’d eat each other before they ever made it off the porch.
Maybe that’s how you survived in this world: you just tried not to eat your own.
I shivered, and he noticed. Macon slipped off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders, careful not to brush my skin unless I wanted it. I did. I always would.
The porch light flickered as someone inside the house flipped a switch. Macon straightened, and for the first time since I’d arrived, he didn’t look like he was about to bolt.
“You want to come in?” he asked, voice gruff.
“Yeah,” I said, and it was the easiest thing in the world.
We went inside together, steps matched, our shadows tangled on the old pine floor. For the first time, the house didn’t feel haunted. It felt like a home.
The house felt different with Macon inside it. The walls didn’t pulse with old arguments or freeze your bones the way they used to, back when the only warmth came from the oven or a bottle.
Maybe it was just that he was here, close enough to brush my knuckles when he reached for the light switch, or maybe I was different, too tired to carry all the old shit.
We hovered in the kitchen, neither of us quite sure what to do next. Macon leaned against the counter, hands braced wide, head bowed so I could see the whorls in his hair. He looked like he could punch through the linoleum or collapse, and I wasn’t sure which I wanted more.
I hovered by the fridge, the hum of the compressor almost deafening in the silence. I rested my palm on my belly, felt the steady, insistent thump from within, and wondered if it would always feel like this—like I was one step away from shattering into a thousand hopeful, terrified pieces.
He didn’t look at me. “You hungry?” he asked.
“No,” I lied.