Chapter 18 #2
“I went to the bakery the morning after she left,” Beck said, quieter now. “But you were closed. The sign was up. And I—“ He trailed off, turning the wineglass slowly between his hands. “I didn’t know what to say in a text. So I just didn’t say anything at all.”
Hazel nodded, but the motion was thin, mechanical. The fire snapped next to them, but the heat felt far away.
Her voice, when it came, was fragile around the edges. “I thought maybe I’d scared you off.”
Beck looked up at that— really looked. The lines around his eyes deepened, not in anger, but in something quieter. Something like regret.
“Or that I was asking for something you didn’t want to give,” she added, and this time, her voice carried more weight. She wasn’t being loud, just honest.
Beck held her gaze, steadier now in that familiar way of his. There was no shift in his expression, but Hazel felt the change in the air between them like a change in pressure, like the room had exhaled.
“I’m not scared of you,” he said.
Hazel’s throat worked around nothing. “No,” she agreed, after a beat. “Not me. But something else, maybe.”
The words landed harder than she meant. They always did, when she was trying not to sound like she needed more than she was allowed to have. But Beck didn’t pull back, he didn’t deflect. He just looked down at the glass again, his fingers curling around it in silence.
“I’m not good at this,” he admitted, shaking his head. His free hand lifted to the back of his neck, rubbing the skin there absently. “At saying what I mean. How I feel.”
Hazel studied him. The shape of his hands.
The faint, jagged scar just above his wrist. The way his shoulders seemed too big for the chair, like they carried more than they let on.
She felt something twist low in her chest, something thick with longing.
She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the sound of his voice until it filled the room again.
“I noticed,” she said, her voice gentle.
A faint smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. It didn’t last.
“But I want to try,” he whispered, his eyes lifting to meet hers. “With you.”
Hazel’s throat tightened. Her hand trembled slightly around the wineglass and she set it down before she risked dropping it.
Her eyes flicked to the corner of the room, where boxes were stacked unevenly near the window.
Next to the boxes, there was a framed photo of Hazel and her grandmother that she’d removed from the mantle but hadn’t yet packed, sitting awkwardly on the floor like a piece of unfinished grief.
“I’ve been meeting with a realtor,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’ve been packing.”
Her gaze dropped to her hands, the raw curve of her knuckles. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I just… I got tired of trying to be okay when I’m not. This house— this life— I thought I could build something here. But it’s hard to build when everything inside you still feels broken.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty, it was thick. Waiting.
Beck didn’t fill it. He didn’t rush to reassure her. He just waited, watching her like she might unravel if he moved too fast.
So she kept going.
“My dad just left me here, all those years ago,” she said, her voice trembling beneath the weight of the admission.
“And for a while, he said it was temporary. Said I could come live with him, that he’d come back for me when things settled.
But he never did.” She shook her head, the motion small, almost like she was trying to dislodge the memory itself.
“I don’t talk about it. Not because I’m ashamed…
just because I hate what it does to people’s faces.
That look they get, the pity. The way their voice changes when they talk to you after, like you’re made of glass and grief and nothing else.
Like you’re something broken they have to tiptoe around. ”
She lifted her eyes to his. Her pulse was roaring in her ears.
Beck still didn’t speak. He just looked at her like he was seeing all the spaces between her words and the weight of what it had cost her to say them out loud.
His brow was furrowed, not with pity, but with something heavier— something like grief for the child she’d been and rage for the people who had failed her.
His hands had gone still in his lap, his wine glass forgotten on the table, but his jaw tensed like he was holding back the urge to reach for her, to do something— anything— to ease the ache within her he couldn’t soothe.
There was no softening in his expression, no shift toward condescension or pity. Only that steady, storm-scarred kind of quiet that felt like a promise.
“I’m tired of being alone,” she admitted, the words softer than she’d intended. “But I don’t know how not to be. It’s second nature. And the only person I knew how to be around— well, she’s gone now, too. And I’m sitting here, in her house, feeling like I’ve done nothing but disappoint her.”
The words sat between them, raw and whole and unvarnished. Hazel didn’t regret them, not exactly. They left her feeling empty, hollowed out. Like she’d poured too much of herself into a room that might not have space for it.
Beck didn’t speak right away. He leaned forward again, elbows still resting on his knees, hands loose like the space might help him shape the right words.
“I lost my team in a roadside explosion outside Kabul,” he said, his voice flat, but not empty— just weighed down by the kind of memory that never stops echoing.
“We were supposed to rotate out in two weeks. Just two more weeks.” He paused, jaw clenched, and when he spoke again, his words were quieter.
“They weren’t just soldiers, they were my friends…
but more like family, I guess. Men and women I’d trained with for years and slept beside in the dirt.
Breathed through firefights with. Laughed with on the rare nights we could forget where we were.
They were the kind of people you learn to trust with your life because you already gave them everything else. ”
Hazel didn’t move, didn’t breathe. The stillness between them was sacred now, shaped by grief and the kind of honesty that left nothing hidden.
“I thought I might be one of them,” he admitted, voice shaking.
“Didn’t expect to wake up. But I did, two days later in a field tent, missing most of my leg and all of my faith in the world.
” His hand shifted, like he was remembering the feel of the cot beneath him, the smell of antiseptic and blood in the air.
His fingers drifted over the arm of the chair beneath him, as if the upholstery could ground him in the present, keep him from floating away on the back of a memory he’d tried to lock away.
“I didn’t want to live through it. I still don’t know why I did.
And afterward… everyone kept telling me how lucky I was.
How grateful I should be.” He exhaled, a harsh sound that didn’t quite qualify as a laugh.
“But it didn’t feel like luck. It felt like being left behind. I know how it feels, Hazel.”
His voice cracked there, just barely, but enough.
He looked up and met her eyes with something raw and almost small. Something fragile.
“I didn’t think I’d ever let someone in again,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Not really. But then there was you.”
Hazel’s breath caught. She felt it lock in her chest and hold there, trembling.
“I still don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “But I want to try, with you. Even if it’s hard. Even if I mess it up.”
And this time, when he said it, she didn’t look away.
She felt the moment shift, a quiet tectonic movement. Not explosive, just inevitable.
The final pieces of their dark corners had been ripped free, forced beneath the light, exposed and bleeding and bared for all eyes to see.
The fire snapped in the hearth. A book shifted and slid from the stack by the fireplace with a soft thud. Outside, snow tapped faintly against the windows.
Hazel’s hands remained in her lap for a beat too long, fingers curled loosely like she was still holding something fragile.
“I want to try, too,” she whispered, though her voice didn’t waver.
She didn’t know who moved first, not exactly.
Maybe it was both of them, pulled by something older than fear, something that hummed beneath everything they’d said and everything they hadn’t.
But Beck stood, moving slow, the joints of his body unfolding like someone moving through fog.
He crossed the room in three quiet steps, his shadow stretching across the rug like a bridge between them.
And then, he sank.
He dropped to his knees in front of her, his palms flattening against the worn, fraying rug that had belonged to her grandmother, the one she’d once played on as a child with a bowl of dry cereal and a stack of illustrated books.
The colours were faded now, the edges curling, but it still smelled faintly of hearth smoke and old wood, and somehow, in this moment, it felt like sacred ground.
Beck didn’t reach for her right away. He just looked at her, his face tilted up toward hers, his eyes dark and steady and unbearably open.
The firelight danced across his features— shadow and gold, flicker and burn— and Hazel felt something inside her twist with such intensity it left her breathless.
His hands were on his thighs, motionless, but the air between them vibrated like a wire stretched too tight.
His closeness made her dizzy. Not with nerves, but with the sheer gravity of him, how solid he was, how still, how impossibly gentle even when kneeling on a rug that scraped against the bone.