Chapter 24
HAZEL
The rest of the day came in pieces.
When I thought about it later, it was like flipping through a stack of Polaroids someone had shaken but never quite let dry.
Maude shooing me back to bed with strict instructions and a plate of something I barely remembered eating.
Gideon’s hand heavy and warm on my hip while I slept for what felt like five minutes and turned out to be hours.
Waking up to the low rumble of male voices downstairs and the smell of coffee and sawdust and Maude’s cleaning spray.
I drifted in and out of the kitchen in the afternoon, half participant, half ghost. The brothers took turns making me sit while they argued with each other and Maude about where cameras should go and how much wiring an old house could handle before it started complaining.
Lucas teased Ethan about the porch repairs.
Ethan pretended not to care and then spent fifteen minutes running his hand over the new railing, testing its give.
Elias tapped things into his phone, the lines around his eyes deepening.
Gideon never got more than a few feet away from me, his hand brushing my back or elbow so often it started to feel like punctuation.
Dinner was chaotic and loud and exactly what my nervous system didn’t know it needed.
Maude made shrimp and grits and something green she swore would keep us from scurvy.
Lucas tried to steal from Ethan’s plate and nearly lost a finger.
Someone told a story about Caleb falling off a yacht that made them all laugh so hard I worried about the structural integrity of the chairs.
For a while, Sam Jarrow existed only on the edges of my mind, like a bad dream you remembered in flashes but could almost convince yourself was just a movie.
By the time the house went quiet, my bones felt hollowed out and heavy at the same time.
Exhaustion wove through my muscles like lead wire.
Gideon insisted on walking me upstairs even though I could have made it on my own.
He checked the locks twice, even though I’d already checked them once.
He kissed me slow and sweet and careful at the bedroom door, like I was something he’d waited his whole life to have.
“I’ll be downstairs,” he said. “Don’t worry about anything. If you need me—”
“I know,” I cut in gently. “Say your name and you’ll materialize like a very attractive ghost.”
His mouth twitched. “Something like that.”
Sleep came fast and hard. No drifting, no tossing. Just a sharp drop into nothingness, like I’d stepped off a ledge and trusted the dark to catch me.
I didn’t dream. Or if I did, my mind was merciful enough not to let me remember.
The shouting ripped me back up.
Not a little noise, not the kind of raised voices you get when a pan boils over or someone loses a game. This was raw, ragged sound—men yelling with their whole bodies. It punched through the house and straight into my chest.
I sat up so fast the room tilled. For a second, I didn’t know what time it was or where I was or why my heart was already sprinting, but the next shout nailed everything in place.
“Stop right there!”
Gideon.
The hallway outside my room held the thick hush of late night. The lamp on the dresser cast a soft pool of light over the floorboards. My phone screen said 2:14 a.m. in harsh white numbers.
The shouting came again, fractured by the old glass in the windows. Another voice layered over Gideon’s—Ethan’s, deeper and carrying in a way that made my bones want to obey even before my brain translated words.
“Don’t take another step!”
Cold washed through me, fast and complete.
I was out of bed and moving before I could think, the floor cool under my feet. My hands fumbled the doorknob once, slick with sweat that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
The house felt wrong.
Not unsafe, exactly. More like it was holding its breath. The air in the hallway was too still. The usual night sounds—the old vents sighing, the refrigerator humming downstairs, the gentle click of settling beams—had all gone quiet, like the inn was listening.
Another shout.
“Sam, stop!”
Sam.
Not Mr. Jarrow. Not Jarrow. Sam.
My stomach rolled. I took the stairs too fast, hand sliding along the banister for balance, the wood warm from all the hands that had gripped it before mine.
Every step sent a jolt up my legs, my thighs shaking in that pre-collapse way I recognized from too many emergencies.
My brain was already trying to make a list—shoes, phone, keys, Maude—but my body had revolted, choosing momentum over organization.
The foyer light was off, but a strange flickering glow painted the front windows—white and red, white and red, like distant lightning trapped in glass. Headlights, my brain supplied, slow and syrupy. Floodlights. Something bright and artificial cutting through the marsh-dark.
I could hear them more clearly at the bottom of the stairs.
Gideon’s voice, first. “That’s close enough!”
Ethan’s, a rumble that shook the air. “Don’t move!”
Lucas, sharper, cutting in over theirs. “Hands where we can see them!”
Someone else. A thin, broken voice, carried in on the night air and the hollow of the open doorway. “They said—they said if I just—if I just—”
My father.
The sound of him hit me harder than the words. That specific pitch of panic, that wet thickness in his throat. The way he stretched his vowels when he was trying to sound sorry.
My knees almost stopped working.
The front door stood open, skewed a few inches off its frame like someone had flung it and the house had flinched. Cool air pushed in, smelling like salt and damp earth and the metallic tang of something I didn’t want to name.
Maude was in the foyer, back pressed against the wall just inside the doorway, a dish towel still clutched in her hand like she’d been snatched straight out of the kitchen. Her face was pale, mouth a thin line, eyes sharp.
“Don’t go out there,” she said when she saw me. Her voice was low and urgent. “Stay back, Hazel.”
“What’s happening?” My own voice sounded too high in my ears, like it belonged to a child.
Her gaze flicked briefly to the rectangle of darkness beyond the door. “Your father walked up the road,” she said. “The boys heard something on the drive. They went out to check. Found him coming toward the house.”
My heartbeat pounded in my throat. “He’s here?”
She nodded once.
Outside, another shout.
“Sam, stop walking!”
I edged closer to the doorway, ignoring Maude’s hand reaching for my sleeve. The old wood floor felt like it was vibrating under my bare feet, humming with a frequency that belonged to fear and engines and the click of safeties being switched off.
The porch boards were cool beneath my toes when I stepped out, the night swallowing me in damp air and harsh light. The brothers were spread out at the bottom of the steps, fanning out, guns drawn, bodies angled into that shape I’d seen before only in movies—protective, braced, ready.
Gideon stood in the middle, just ahead of Lucas and Ethan, his stance wide, arms steady, the gun in his hands as much a part of his silhouette as his shoulders. He was barefoot, still in his T-shirt and jeans, hair mussed like he’d been asleep seconds ago and snapped awake by danger.
The road that led up to the inn was washed in a mix of light—the inn’s front porch light, the wash of the distant security flood the brothers had rigged before sunset. The marsh on either side of the drive was a black wall, the grass whispering under a breeze I couldn’t feel.
And my father stood in the middle of it.
Sam Jarrow looked smaller than he had in the dining room.
Smaller than he’d looked when I was twelve and watching them drag him away in shackles.
The prison hand-me-downs were gone. He wore a dark jacket zipped to his throat, jeans that didn’t fit right, shoes that looked like they’d come from a charity bin.
His hair was thinner, his face more lined, his eyes wet and wild under the harsh light.
He was walking. Slow, unsteady steps, like each footfall had to be negotiated with his legs before they’d cooperate. His hands hung uselessly at his sides.
“Stop!” Gideon’s voice cracked across the night. “Don’t come any closer!”
Sam flinched, shoulders hunching like the words themselves hurt. But he kept moving.
“They said,” he called, voice wobbling, “they said I could fix it.”
My skin went cold.
Ethan took a half-step forward, gun aimed center mass, his expression carved from stone. “Stop walking, Sam. Right now.”
“I’m trying,” my father sobbed. “You think I want to be here? You think I—” His voice broke on a laugh that sounded like it had barbed wire tangled up in it. “You think I got a choice?”
Lucas’s gun tracked every inch of his movement, his jaw tight, eyes hard. Elias stood slightly off to the side, pistol raised, gaze moving between Sam and the shadows beyond the road as if he expected something worse to step out at any second.
“Hazel, get back inside.” Gideon didn’t turn his head, but his voice found me easily. I saw the muscles in his neck stand out, the tendons in his arms tight as cables.
I couldn’t move.
My father’s gaze snagged on me. Not on the guns. Not on the brothers. On me.
“Haze,” he called, voice cracking. “Baby girl. I knew you’d be here.”
The nickname hit my chest like a thrown stone. All the years I’d spent sanding that name out of my memory, replacing it with Hazel, with Bradford, with a new life built on new syllables—and he still found the old ones like a bloodhound.
“Don’t talk to her,” Gideon snapped. Rage threaded through his voice, dark and lethal. “You look at me, Sam. You keep your eyes on me.”
Sam blinked, tears spilling over. Under the lights, they looked like something else—sweat, or the shine off a fish belly, something slick and wrong. He scrubbed at his face with the back of one hand and only smeared whatever was already there.
“They said I could make it right,” he babbled. “They came to see me. Nice suits. Smiles like knives. Said, ‘Sam, old buddy, you want to make things square with your little girl? You want her taken care of?’”
His gaze flicked to the truck, then snapped back like he’d been yanked by an invisible string.
“They told me there was money,” he went on. “A chance. A way out. They said I could help you, Haze. Fix what I broke. I just had to—”
His voice dropped to a whisper I couldn’t catch.
“Sam!” Ethan barked. “Stop where you are.”
My father’s feet kept moving. Gravel shifted under his shoes with a crunch that sounded too loud in the thick night. He was maybe fifty yards from the porch now. Forty five.
My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my gums. I wanted to scream at him. Run to him. Run away. All of it piled up with nowhere to go.
“Please,” Sam said, voice shattering. “They said they’d—”
He reached for the zipper of his jacket.
Everything slowed.
Gideon’s shoulders tightened. His trigger finger flexed, then froze. Lucas swore under his breath. Ethan said something I didn’t catch.
My father’s hands fumbled with the metal teeth of the zipper. For a second it caught and I had a flash of relief, of irrational gratitude for cheap hardware. Then it slid down with an ugly rasp.
He opened his jacket.
Underneath, instead of a T-shirt or a button-down or the worn plaid he’d favored when I was a kid, there was canvas and metal and wire.
It took my brain a full, agonizing heartbeat to understand what I was seeing. Pouches. Cylinders. Straps crossing over his chest and around his shoulders. A small black box nestled against his sternum, a tangle of colored wires snaking out of it like veins.
Someone screamed. Later, I would realize it was me.
For a moment, Sam didn’t look like my father at all. He looked like an anatomy chart drawn by a madman, all his vital organs replaced with uglier ones.
“They said,” he sobbed, hands hovering helplessly over the vest but not touching, like he was afraid to disturb it, “they said if I walked up here and talked to you, if I made you listen—”
His gaze darted toward the porch, toward where I stood at the top of the stairs, fingers digging into the doorframe hard enough to hurt.
“Don’t move!” Gideon roared, voice breaking in a way I’d never heard before. “Sam, do not touch anything. Hazel, get back in the house.”
My father’s eyes found mine again. For one insane, suspended moment, the world shrank back down to just us. Him in the road, me on the porch, years of wreckage strung between like a too-tight wire.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. His face crumpled. “I didn’t know. I didn’t—”
His hands twitched toward the little black box on his chest.
Every gun at the bottom of the steps lifted that fraction of an inch that meant everything.