Chapter 25 #2
“So,” he says lightly, eyes dark with something deeper. “What are we thinking? Pancakes or eggs?”
I blink, still catching up to myself. “Can I say both?” I ask. “I’m starving.”
“You, Sunny, can have whatever you want. All you have to do is ask.”
I snort, rolling my eyes. “Careful. That’s a dangerous thing to say to me before coffee.”
He chuckles, moving toward the fridge. “I’ve survived worse than your morning moods.”
“My morning moods are perfectly reasonable,” I argue. “You’re just sensitive.”
He glances back over his shoulder, eyebrow raised. “Sensitive,” he repeats dryly. “That what we’re calling it now?”
I grab the edge of the counter, pretending to consider it. “You're right maybe sensitive isn’t the right word. I mean, you did wake me up with an air raid siren.”
“Occupational hazard,” he says, pulling out eggs. “Firefighters don’t do gentle.”
I tilt my head, watching him crack an egg one-handed like it’s nothing. “You seemed pretty gentle about fifteen minutes ago.”
His lips twitch, but he keeps his eyes on the pan. “Sunny.”
“What?” I smile sweetly. “Just making an observation.”
He finally looks at me then, gaze warm and unmistakably fond. “You’re going to get yourself reassigned from breakfast duty.”
“As if I was even helping,” I say. “I’m moral support.”
“You’re distracting support.”
“I like to think that’s the best kind.”
“I’m not going to argue with that.” He turns back to the stove, flipping the pancakes with practiced ease. “But I do have to be at work in about an hour. So we are on a tight schedule.”
I groan dramatically. “Already? But I feel like I just got you.”
“Welcome to my life,” he says. “Which is why I’m going to need you to eat quickly. I have a couple more things I want to do before I leave.”
“Is that a threat or a promise you plan on keeping?”
He glances over his shoulder, eyes dark with something playful. “Depends on how cooperative you plan on being.”
I laugh, warmth blooming low in my chest. “You say that like I’ve ever been cooperative.”
“Fair point,” he says, sliding a pancake onto a plate and setting it in front of me. “Good thing you’re usually worth the trouble.”
Something in his tone settles me. A part of me still can’t quite comprehend he and I are having this conversation. But the other part of me feels like we have always been doing this.
He nudges my knee gently with his own. “Hey,” he says, softer now. “Don’t disappear into your head on me.”
I hesitate, then look up. “I wasn’t—”
“I know,” he says. “But I can feel it when you start to spiral.”
My chest pulls, but in a way that feels seen, not exposed.
“I’ll be off tomorrow morning,” he continues. “And when I am, we can talk about everything on the drive down to the lake. All of it. No rushing. Every thought, every emotion, every fear.”
I study his face, searching for doubt, for hesitation. I don’t find it.
“You promise?” I ask quietly.
“I promise, Sunny.”
Relief loosens something inside me. I take a bite of pancake, finally tasting it.
“Okay,” I say.
His smile returns. “Good. Now eat. We’ve got plans. And I need you to have your energy.”
Rhett leaves with a kiss pressed to my hairline and with a promise to text me when he is off shift. I watch him go, barefoot in my kitchen, wearing his shirt and smelling like him. The joy inside me feels enormous.
Dangerously enormous. Too bright for a girl who is used to the dark.
I inhale, steadying myself. No time to linger. No time to overthink.
I need to grab a few things for the lake trip—snacks, drinks, sunscreen, all the practical things that keep a weekend afloat. Something simple. Something my brain can handle.
So I grab my keys, lock the door behind me, and step into the day.
The grocery store is half-busy, humming with carts and low music. I’m floating, drifting through the aisles with a scribbled list and Rhett’s warmth still clinging to my skin.
I pass produce. Snacks. The baking aisle where some little kid is begging for confetti icing.
My cart fills without much thought: chips Rhett likes, wine for Margo, some overpriced trail mix I’ll pretend is for the group but is absolutely for me.
I’m halfway down the toiletries aisle, comparing two nearly identical travel-size sunscreens, when I feel someone step too close behind me.
So close that the hairs on my neck lift.
“Excuse me.” A woman’s voice filters through.
I sidestep, assuming I’m blocking the shelf, then I freeze when she says, “Are you… Rachel?”
I turn, confused to see a woman I don’t recognize.
The woman standing in front of me is in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. Pretty in a worn-out way, careful posture, nervous eyes. She twists her hands together like she’s bracing for something.
“Yes?” I say cautiously. “Do I know you?”
“No,” she whispers. “No, you don’t. But I—I know who you are.”
“Oh, okay.” She can tell I’m hesitant to continue this conversation, so she fills in the silence.
“My name is Victoria. Uh, well, used to be Victoria Hayes. I’m Rhett’s mother.”
My pulse spikes, a hot, dizzy feeling rushing through me.
Rhett’s mother. The woman who disappeared. The woman who broke him. The woman he hasn’t spoken of without shaking. I have never met her, and yet I hate her with a devotion that surprises me. Would it be inappropriate to punch a stranger in the sunscreen aisle?
I stare. “You—why—” Words tangle in my throat. “What are you doing here?”
She tries to smile but it falters immediately. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I—I recognized you from pictures. From things people told me.”
My brain stutters. “Pictures? People? Who—”
She lifts her hands, palms out, surrendering. “I know Rhett’s been looking for me. I tried to talk to him the other day, out on the street, but he ran from me.”
A sharp, painful beat pulses through my chest.
“He has been looking for you?” Suddenly, I feel left out. Before last night Rhett and I haven’t been the best at communicating, but I helped him through his panic attack when he saw her. Why wouldn’t he tell me he was looking for her?
Victoria nods, eyes glassy.
“I heard,” she murmurs. “He’s my son. I have always known where he is, what he is up to. Messages passed along by people I have watching him. That’s how I know he tried looking for me for four years. He didn’t give up.”
I should feel compassion. Understanding. Something gentle. But all I feel is heat.
“You knew,” I whisper. “You knew he was looking for you and you didn’t even bother to—”
“I wasn’t ready to be found,” she says quietly.
“He was twelve.” My voice cracks. “You left your twelve-year-old son. Without a word. You—you shattered him. Do you understand that? You don’t just leave a kid and say you ‘weren’t ready.’ You broke him. You—”
“I know.” Her voice trembles. “I know. And I’m not asking for forgiveness. I just—” She presses her fingers to her mouth, gathering herself. “I just needed to see him again.”
Anger boils under my skin, fierce and protective but not unfamiliar. “Then why are you talking to me? Why not go to him, if he was looking for you?”
“He doesn’t want to see me.”
“Are you shocked by that? You went twenty years without him. What is the sudden change?”
“I saw him,” she says. “On the news the other month.”
I blink. “What?”
“That fire in Nashville,” she continues. “The warehouse that collapsed. The news showed a clip of it, and Rhett was on it. I almost didn’t recognize him. He was—he was on a ladder, pulling someone out. And there was a moment where he slipped.”
My stomach twists at the mere suggestion.
“He almost—” She doesn’t finish. “It terrified me. I didn’t realize he was risking his life every single day. I realized that my son could die before I ever speak to him again. Before I get to try and build a relationship with him.”
There it is. The desperation. The truth beneath it all.
And it strikes somewhere raw, somewhere unprotected, because suddenly the fear I feel isn’t about this moment at all.
It is about Rhett. About losing him the same way I lost Josh.
The same way loss seems to follow everything I love, patient and inevitable.
“I reached out to you,” she continues carefully, “because you’re close to him. He cares for you. I thought maybe you could help me reach him.”
“I’m not helping you do anything,” I reply. “You don’t deserve to talk to him, not unless he wants it.”
Victoria studies me, then speaks with a gentleness. “I just wanted to tell him I’m sorry. I wanted to help him heal from the situation I created. I know he still carries it.”
“Carries what?” I snap.
“Being left,” she says. “Being abandoned. It leaves a mark. Makes you chase the people you have no business having. Makes you hold on to love you’re afraid you can’t keep.”
The way she says it is too practiced. Like she’s naming something she’s lived with, not something she’s studied. A thought flickers through me: this happened to her, too.
“It makes you reach for the kinds of people who stay just out of reach. Because that’s what feels familiar. ” She tilts her head. “I think that’s why he held on to you all these years.”
And suddenly I’m not thinking about Victoria anymore. I’m not thinking about her past, or the loss that shaped her, or the way she speaks like someone who learned survival the hard way.
I’m thinking about myself.
“You don’t know anything,” I whisper.
Victoria’s eyes soften with something that looks too much like pity. “I may have left,” she says quietly, “but he is still my son. I know my son.”
My throat tightens until I can barely breathe. The edges of my vision blur, like my body is already preparing for impact.
Because suddenly everything rearranges itself. Maybe I’m not seeing what happened between Rhett and me clearly. Maybe I never was.