Chapter 7 #2
No rafts. No tourists. No half-drunk laughter drifting up from the water. Just the sound of the cicadas and the thick, weighted silence that’s been hanging between our cabins since she came home from the school yesterday looking like her insides had been carved out.
She didn’t tell me everything. She didn’t have to. But I know how to fill in the blanks from what she has said and what I saw myself.
I saw it on her face the second she stepped out of that car. She wasn’t panic. It wasn’t pain. It was something harder. The kind of resolve that only shows up when a person’s got nowhere left to hide. I hated that I recognized it, because that means I’ve felt it, too.
I don’t knock when I step up to her porch. I don’t ask if she’s busy. I just open the screen door, lean in, and speak like I’ve got every right. “You got a minute?”
There’s a pause. Then, the sound of bare feet on the floor before she opens the door. She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t look surprised. She just steps back and lets me in.
The place is warmer than it should be. Sun is filtering through the gauzy curtains. A box fan is on in the corner, struggling to circulate the hot air. She’s barefoot with her hair pulled up and wearing a grey tank top and cutoffs.
She looks like summer, but she carries herself like a storm.
“Do you need something?” she asks quietly. “Is everything okay?”
“I just need to know if you’re safe,” I reply, hating myself for needing to ask.
She folds her arms over her chest, pushing her breasts together. My gaze dips for a scant second as she says, “Define safe.”
I shake my head, “You think he’ll come back?”
Her jaw tightens and she exhales. “Yeah, I do. I think he’ll try. ” She shrugs. “He thinks I’m his. Not because he loves me, but because I dared to leave him when he told me not to. He’s not going to just let me go. I was stupid to think he would.”
I nod once. “Good, I’m glad you realize he isn’t going to stop. But I’ll be here.”
“I didn’t ask you to—” She sputters.
“I know. But I am. And you are safe, Blakelyn.” I cut her off.
I don’t say more. I don’t ask to stay. I don’t make promises to her I don’t have the right to keep.
I just walk to the back window, peer through the screen, and scan the bend in the river like it’s a habit I never lost, because I didn’t. I spent the entire night out there. Setting markers and trackers.
If Tyler is stupid enough to try to come for her that way, I’ll know.
I leave after five minutes. She doesn’t try to stop me. But when I step off the porch and hit the gravel, I hear her screen door creak open behind me.
I don’t turn. She doesn’t speak. But I know she’s watching me walk away. And I hate how much I want to turn back.
I’m counting tubes when Reece swings by the shack around noon after picking up some floaters from the first landing spot. He hands me a greasy paper bag and a drink and sits on the edge of the dock. He waits. I join him and both of our legs dangling off as we eat.
He asks, “You check on her?”
I grunt. “Yeah?”
He nods. “Everything good?”
I shake my head, and he leans back on his elbows and stares at the clouds as he says, “You think this town’s safe for her?”
“Nope.” I retort. “Not sure anywhere is though. With a man like that.”
“Yeah. But you want her to stay anyway.” I feel him looking at my profile, but I stare straight ahead and don’t answer.
It wasn’t actually a question. He knows it and I know it.
Of course, I want her to stay. But I also want her to want to stay.
And right now, I can’t give her a single fucking reason to.
He sighs and we stare at the water.
Midafternoon, I drive into town.
Not to the sheriff’s office. Not to the bar. Just to the shitty public library with the flickering fluorescent lights and the internet that crashes every twenty minutes.
Logging into a public computer, I start searching.
I’m not looking for anything fancy. I don’t want to search something that could flag a trace. I’m just… digging.
I start with his name. She told it to me the night he showed up.
Tyler Vaughn.
It’s too common to be helpful. Nothing comes up.
Nothing incriminating. So, I pair it with her name.
With the county she used to live in. With arrest records and civil court filings and news articles.
I finally find a report from two years ago—a disturbance at a high society fundraiser.
His name’s there. No charges. Just a warning issued for “escalated behavior during a verbal dispute.”
I keep digging. There’s a real estate license linked to his name. A business entity registered in Austin. His phone number’s listed in a cached contact form on a company website that hasn’t been updated in nine months.
Bingo. Got you, mother fucker.
I write it all down. Then, I log off and drive home.
It’s past seven when I hear her knock on my front door. It’s soft, hesitant, like she’s not sure I’ll open the door.
I do.
“Hey,” she says.
I grunt.
She shifts on her feet. “I was thinking… if you’re going to be watching out anyway, I could—maybe—cook?”
I blink, not saying anything.
She shrugs. “I just… I don’t like eating alone.”
I step back and she walks in.
She doesn’t ask if I’m hungry. She doesn’t chatter while she cooks. She just moves around my kitchen like she knows the rhythm of the place already. A pan sizzles. The scent of garlic and oil fill the room. Her fingers tremble once when she drops a spoon, but she doesn’t say anything.
Neither do I.
When she sets the plates down, I gesture for her to sit across from me.
We eat in silence.
Halfway through, she lifts her eyes and says, “You looked him up, didn’t you?”
I meet her gaze. Steady. I reply, “Yup.”
She nods.
Then, quietly, almost to herself, “Good.”
After she leaves, I sit on my porch and repeat the number over and over in my head.
I won’t call him. I won’t give him the satisfaction of hearing my voice, but I want him to know he’s being watched. I want him to feel it the same way she feels it every time she locks a door or flinches when she hears tires on gravel.
I won’t go looking because this isn’t my war.
Not yet.
But if he shows his face on my river again, it’ll be over before it starts.