Chapter 38
Jen dried plates because her hands needed something to do.
Because every time she looked out the window and saw Wyatt standing in the shed with his brothers, something in her chest tipped dangerously toward wanting.
She hadn’t known this version of him.
She’d seen him in darkness. Gunfire. Cold ocean water.
She hadn’t seen him here. And this version was worse.
Sophie’s kitchen ran on quiet systems—foil pressed over leftovers, containers stacked by size, the dishwasher humming after Ty had come in and thumped the back panel like that counted as maintenance.
Jen put a plate in the wrong cupboard.
Twice.
Sophie gently nudged her hand toward the right one without comment.
She’d never had this. Growing up an only child in a house that ran on silence and good grades, she understood family dinners like blueprints—orderly, theoretical, not something you stood inside and belonged to.
This was flour on the counter. Ellie’s chocolate fingerprints still smeared on the table. Conversation spilling through the open kitchen door.
Through the window above the sink, floodlights lit the equipment shed in hard white. Ty was revving the snowmobile engine while Ryder leaned on the trailer. Caleb pointed at something underneath the cowling.
And Wyatt.
Hands in his pockets. Dark hair. Shoulders braced against the cold. The shape of him did something low and dangerous in her chest. Like her body had already voted.
“Jen?”
She spun, dish towel in one hand and a glass in the other.
Sophie’s smile was knowing. “He watches you the same way. When you’re not looking.”
Heat climbed Jen’s neck. She folded the dish towel with more precision than it required. “It’s… we’re still figuring things out.”
Sophie nodded slowly, the way people do when they hear what you’re saying and also what you’re not. She set a container in the fridge, closed the door, and leaned her hip against the counter. “Can I tell you something I learned the hard way?”
Jen fiddled with a ragged thread on the corner of the dish towel. “Sure.”
“When I was younger. I worked in biotech. I uncovered something the company didn’t want found. When I tried to report it, they sent men with guns after me.” She said it the way you say things that have lived inside you so long they’ve worn smooth.
The dishtowel thread snapped in Jen’s hands.
Men with guns. Different from a stolen patent and a blacklisted career, but the shape of betrayal was the same—people you trusted turning the ground to glass beneath your feet.
“Ty was a security guard at the company. Ex-Navy, like Wyatt. Barely said ten words to me in six months.” Something shifted in Sophie’s face—a softness that came from deep down, bedrock-level.
“But he left these tiny origami animals on my desk every morning. A crane. A fox. A bear. I still have them in a box upstairs.”
She shook her head at the memory. Then her gaze found Jen’s.
“He got me out and kept me alive. He took me to his cabin in the mountains and I was so sure that what I felt was adrenaline. Chemicals doing what chemicals do when someone saves your life.” She met Jen’s eyes.
“I kept waiting for it to wear off. For the morning I’d wake up next to him and think, well, that was the cortisol talking. ”
She shrugged, smiling. “The adrenaline faded. What I feel for Ty didn’t.”
The kitchen was quiet. The dishwasher hummed. Outside, one brother laughed.
Jen pressed her palms flat against the cold counter. The kitchen closed in.
“I don’t know what this is.” The words came out rougher, more honest than she’d planned.
“What happened on the rig—I can’t untangle it from everything else.
The fear. The danger. Fighting together to stay alive.
” She swallowed. “I don’t know if what I feel survives normal life.
Grocery shopping. Quiet mornings. Nobody trying to kill us. ”
Sophie didn’t rush to fill the silence or offer easy comfort, and Jen was grateful. Instead, she turned to the window. The men were still out there, breath fogging white under the floodlights.
“They’ve been discussing that thing for ten minutes.
” Sophie huffed a quiet laugh. “Four grown men standing in sub-zero temperatures staring at a snowmobile like it’s Christmas morning.
” She shook her head. “I raised warriors. Somehow I also raised twelve-year-olds.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “Some things are stronger than war.”
She turned back to Jen. “Wyatt is my firstborn. I named him for what I hoped he’d be—brave in war. Because I knew what the world does to boys like him.”
She stepped closer and took Jen’s hands in hers.
Her grip was warm, her knuckles etched with fine lines.
A plain gold band glinted as her thumb brushed over Jen’s skin—capable hands that had packed lunches before dawn, shoveled snow before coffee, and raised three wild boys through long Alaskan winters.
The steadiness of her made Jen aware of how tightly she’d been holding herself.
“But I think I got it wrong,” Sophie said. “He’s been brave in war his whole life. What he’s never been brave in is this.” Her eyes were bright, but her voice didn’t waver. “He doesn’t bring people here,” she said softly. “Do you understand what that means?”
Jen swallowed.
She wasn’t at the edge of this.
She was already inside it.
Sophie pressed her thumbs against Jen’s knuckles before she let out a slow breath.
“He doesn’t let people in. Not really. He’s the most closed book I have ever loved.
” A faint, almost incredulous smile touched her mouth.
“And tonight he was different. With you, he’s open. I have never seen that before.”
The kitchen blurred and Jen blinked hard because if she kept looking at Sophie, she was going to lose it entirely.
“Whatever you’re afraid this is,” Sophie said gently, “don’t talk yourself out of it.”
The words settled into her like stones dropping through water—down past the doubt, past the fear, into the quiet place where she’d been keeping the truth she hadn’t let herself acknowledge.
She didn’t just want him in the dark.
She wanted him in the light and quiet, at a kitchen table of their own.
The back door opened, and cold air rolled through the kitchen. The men came in, stamping snow from their boots, dragging the night in with them. Ryder was still talking, bumping Caleb’s shoulder just enough to throw him off stride as they came through the doorway.
Sophie gave Jen’s hands one last squeeze and released her.
Wyatt came in last.
His eyes found hers before he’d fully crossed the threshold, as if confirming she was still there.
Something in his face had changed—as if he’d set something down out there in the snow and decided to leave it there.
Sophie crossed to Ty, who slid his arm around her shoulders without looking. She leaned into him as he pressed a quiet kiss to the top of her head.
All these years, and it was still there.
Something hot and fiercely guarded loosened in Jen.
She didn’t want a story that burned bright and brief.
She wanted this with Wyatt.
The kind of love that didn’t end when the war did.