Chapter 24 Ash
Ash
The bath helped until it didn't. Cass held me in the water until it went cold, his arms steady around my chest, his heartbeat slow against my back.
I felt safe in there. Warm, contained, surrounded by porcelain, steam, and a man who promised Marcus wouldn't get to me.
Then I got out, dried off, and put on clothes.
The walls of the bathroom shrank back to their normal size, which meant the world outside them expanded to its full terrifying scope.
I told Boone I needed air. He looked at me for a long moment, reading my face and then he nodded once and let me go. He didn't offer to come with me, didn't send one of the boys as an escort. He just said take your phone and I did, though I'm starting to wish I hadn't.
The property stretches out in every direction, the barn to my left, the east pasture rolling toward the treeline, the gravel drive cutting through the grass toward the road that leads to the rest of the world.
I walk past the barn without stopping, past Mabel's pasture, past the fence Cass repaired last week.
My feet know this land better than they know the apartment I shared with Marcus for two years.
I can navigate every trail, every gate latch, every dip in the ground where rainwater collects after a storm.
I memorized this place the way you memorize a prayer, repeating it until the words become automatic, until you don't need to think about them to believe.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and look at the screen without slowing my stride.
Unknown number. Different area code than the last one.
I blocked Marcus after the bath, my fingers still pruned from the water, Cass watching over my shoulder with an expression that said he'd break the phone in half if I asked him to.
Four missed calls and eleven texts in the two hours since he peeled out of the driveway, each one escalating from fury to bargaining to threats and back again. The blocking felt decisive for about ten minutes. Then the unknown number started calling.
He's using someone else's phone. Or he bought a burner at the gas station on Route 9, which is exactly the kind of dramatic, calculated move Marcus would make while pretending to be the rational one. The phone buzzes again in my hand, the same number, and I send it to voicemail without answering.
A text follows immediately.
I know you're there. I know what they're doing to you. This isn't love, Ash. This is abuse and you're too broken to see it.
I stop walking. My thumb hovers over the screen, the words burning up at me from the glass.
Too broken to see it. It's the same language he always used, the soft, concerned delivery that sounds like care if I didn’t look too closely.
You're too sensitive. You're too needy. You don't understand how relationships work.
I'm trying to help you. Always framed as though the problem was my perception rather than his behavior, as though the world was fine and the fault lay in the instrument measuring it.
I block the new number and keep walking.
I thought it would be enough. I thought ten days was enough time to rebuild me, here, at this ranch. It was just enough to crack the shell, enough to show everyone what's underneath, enough to lay out a new blueprint beside the old one and say look at the difference.
But the old blueprint didn’t disappear. It lives in my body, in the flinch response, in the way my shoulders climb toward my ears when a door slams, in the automatic calculations I run every time someone raises their voice, calculating how to make myself smaller, quieter, less of a target.
Ten days of Boone's hands on my neck. Ten days of Teague making me say what I want out loud.
Ten days of Ledger carrying me without being asked.
Ten days of Cass holding me in bathwater and promising no one would get to me.
All of that layered on top of two years of Marcus telling me I was too much and not enough in the same breath.
The weight of both things existing inside me at the same time is crushing something I don't have a name for.
My phone buzzes again. A third number.
You're making a mistake. When this falls apart, and it will, don't come crying to me.
I stare at the text until the letters blur. I turn the phone off completely and shove it into my pocket. My fingers are stiff, my breathing going fast as I climb through the rails without thinking, cutting across the grass toward the old equipment shed at the far edge of the property.
It's barely a building, three walls of corrugated metal, and a roof that leaks when it rains. It’s full of broken tractor parts, rolls of fencing wire, the kind of junk that accumulates on a working ranch over decades.
I duck inside and sit on the concrete floor with my back against the wall, pulling my knees to my chest. The space is small, dim, enclosed.
That's what I need right now, walls close enough to touch, a ceiling low enough to remind me where I end. Open space is terrifying when I’m this raw.
Open space means anything can get to me from any direction.
I should have just asked to sit with Boone. Or maybe had them fuck me out of this headspace. But in the moment, I did what I always do… run.
Tears start tracking down my face, ugly fat drops that twist my face into something unrecognizable. I press my forehead against my knees and sob into the denim, my whole body shaking, my fingers gripping my shins so hard my nails leave marks through the fabric.
I’m not even really sure why I’m crying except for the inability to deal with the chaos in my head.
Maybe it was because Marcus is such a hateful, angry man and I’m mad I couldn’t see it before.
Maybe it’s because even though Boone was inside me, my first instinct was to cover myself, to hide, to make myself small the way he taught me.
Even with Boone's arms around me, even with Cass between Marcus and the bedroom, the old programming fired before the new wiring could catch it.
“How could I have been so stupid?” I mutter, heaving on the last word as a sob tears through my chest.
My thoughts take a more dangerous turn as they land on the men I’ve come to trust and depend on in the last several days, men I’m falling for. Men I want to permanently spend time with.
How can I want this? How can I want four men at once?
How can I let myself be passed between them, shared, used, filled, and call it safety?
How can I kneel on a porch, open my mouth for a man twice my age, and feel more respected than I ever felt lying beside the man I was supposed to love? What kind of person does that make me?
The sobs slow to hiccups and the hiccups slow to long, shuddering breaths that leave me emptied out and aching. I wipe my face on my sleeve and stare at the wall of the shed, at the rust patterns on the metal.
Footsteps just outside catch my attention, Ledger pushing inside in the next moment.
He doesn’t say anything. He just sits on the floor about three feet to my left.
Not touching me, not close enough to crowd, just present.
He leans against the wall, stretches his legs out in front of him, crosses his ankles and waits.
The silence between us is different from the silence I had with Marcus.
Marcus used silence as punishment, withdrawing it and leaving me desperate to fill it, to apologize, to perform whatever contrition would make the water turn back on.
Ledger's silence is the other kind. The kind that doesn't need filling.
The kind that says I'm here, I'm not leaving, you can talk when you're ready or not talk at all. The outcome is the same.
I talk. Because Ledger earned it by sitting on a concrete floor without being asked.
"I don't think I want to leave."
The words come out cracked, barely louder than the wind outside. This is now the third or fourth time I’ve said it and each time it comes out of my mouth, I feel a little more confident in my answer.
"This morning, when Marcus was in the house.
When I could hear him shouting. Boone had his arms around me and I was terrified, Ledger.
I was shaking. But I didn't want to run.
" I swallow against the thickness in my throat.
"I wanted to stay exactly where I was. In his arms. In this house.
With all of you. And that terrifies me more than Marcus ever could, because I don't know if I'm choosing this because it's right or because I'm so broken that anything feels better than what I had. "
Ledger is quiet for a long time. I almost think he's not going to respond at all, that his brand of comfort is purely physical, presence without language.
"You're not broken," he says.
I look at him. He's staring straight ahead, not at me, his pale eyes fixed on the far wall.
"Broken people don't choose. They freeze.
They stay where they're put." He turns his head.
Those gray eyes find mine and the weight of them pins me to the wall.
"You drove forty minutes to this ranch every Tuesday for a year and a half because you liked it here.
You stopped coming because you were brave enough to know what you felt.
And you came back because my father showed up on a dark road and you got in the truck.
" His gaze doesn't waver. "Every step of that was a choice, Ash. Yours."
My chin trembles and a fresh tear slips down my cheek, tracking through the salt of the ones that already dried. Ledger reaches over and wipes it with his thumb, a single point of contact, before his hand returns to his own lap.
"Marcus doesn't get to tell you what you are," he says. "He lost that privilege when he left you on the road."
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and breathe. Ledger sits beside me without fidgeting, without checking his phone, without any of the small signals that tell a person their crisis is inconveniencing someone else's schedule.
"How did you know where I was?" I ask.
"You always go small when you're scared." He says it like he's reporting the weather. "Corners, closets, tight spaces. I watched you at Easter two years ago squeeze behind the couch when Marcus raised his voice about the dishes. You think nobody saw that."
I didn't think anybody saw that. I thought I'd hidden it perfectly, a seamless exit from the conversation disguised as looking for a dropped fork.
Marcus had been annoyed about something, the way the plates were stacked or the fact that I'd used the wrong towel.
His voice had gone sharp and I'd slid behind the couch before I'd made the conscious decision to move.
I came back thirty seconds later with a smile and a fork, an excuse that I was just grabbing the lost utensil. Nobody had said a word.
"I'm scared of what happens at the end of two weeks," I tell him, because Ledger is the person in this house I can say this to without it becoming a conversation about feelings. He won't reassure me, won't promise things he can't guarantee, and won't feed me hope dressed up as certainty.
"Then stay."
"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple. The complicated part is what you're doing to yourself right now, sitting in a shed convincing yourself you don't deserve it."
I open my mouth and close it. He's not wrong.
The shed, the spiral, the Marcus voice in my head telling me I'm too broken.
All of that is me standing between myself and the thing I want, building walls out of fear and calling them logic.
Cass already told me he wanted me here. Teague has more than made it obvious.
And now Ledger is telling me the only problem… is me.