Chapter 26
HAZEL
Ididn’t move.
I didn’t even breathe—not really. Air sat high and sharp in my chest, refusing to go any deeper, like my lungs had forgotten the sequence. Everything in me locked at once, my body latching onto stillness as if movement would make the world tilt harder, spill open wider.
My father lay in the road.
Or what was left of him did.
Except my mind refused to attach his name to the shape in the gravel. It was like trying to force two magnets together the wrong way—they pushed apart, repelled each other. Sam Jarrow. My father. The body on the ground.
No.
No.
No.
The night around me was too bright, somehow—the porch lights blasting harsh gold across everything, magnifying every detail I didn’t want to see. The red spatter on the rocks. The way one of his shoes had landed crooked, toe pointed sideways. A piece of fabric fluttering in the marsh grass.
I kept waiting for sound to come back, but everything was muffled, like someone had stuffed cotton in my ears. The men were shouting—Ethan, Lucas, Gideon—but it reached me faint and distant, underwater and warped.
My fingers dug into the doorframe so hard they went numb.
I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t shut my eyes. I tried, but my eyelids refused, sticking wide and dry, forcing me to take it all in. Every impossible piece of it.
A warm hand wrapped around my upper arm.
I startled so hard my whole body jerked.
“It’s me,” Maude whispered quickly, her voice fraying around the edges. “It’s just me, dear.”
Her fingers squeezed gently—steady, human, grounding. But my arm felt like it belonged to someone else. Like I was watching her touch me from twelve feet away.
“He—”
The word scraped out of me, thin and cracked, barely a sound at all.
“He …”
“I know,” Maude murmured. “I know.”
Her eyes flicked toward the scene, then back to me, and the immediate ache in them nearly undid me. She moved closer, stepping between me and the worst of it, blocking my line of sight with her small, fierce body.
But the image was already burned into me.
A smear. A shoe. A vest with wires.
A man who was my father and not my father all at once.
Gone. Instant. Final.
A sharp tremor hit me, starting in my hands and rippling through my arms, then down my spine. My knees softened, buckling, but I didn’t fall—Maude caught me with surprising strength.
“Easy,” she whispered, supporting my weight. “Let’s get you inside.”
I couldn’t step backward. My feet were fused to the porch, welded in place by something colder than fear. The kind of cold that sinks into your bones and locks every joint from the inside.
“I can’t,” I rasped.
“You can,” Maude said gently but firmly. “Hazel, dear—you’re shaking out of your skin. Come inside before you tip right over.”
Shaking.
Was I shaking?
I looked down—my hands trembled violently at my sides, fingers twitching involuntarily, like someone had attached strings to each one and was jerking them out of rhythm. My breath came in tiny, jagged pulls. My throat felt raw and tight.
A soft, broken noise leaked out of me. I didn’t recognize it. It was animal. Small and wounded.
“Oh, honey,” Maude murmured, pulling me against her chest, her arms wrapping around me with a strength that didn’t match her size. She smelled like flour and soap and something warm that reminded me faintly of my grandmother.
My face crumpled against her shoulder, but no tears came.
Just dry sobs, sharp and silent, like my chest was trying to fold in on itself.
“He … he was …”
Gone.
He was gone.
Exploded.
Erased.
Not by me.
Not by karma.
By someone out in the marsh with a rifle who decided the instant of his ending.
“He didn’t know,” I choked. “He didn’t know what they strapped to him.”
“I know,” Maude said softly. “I saw. I know.”
“He said he could fix it.”
The words tasted metallic. Bitter.
“He said—he said they told him he could fix everything.”
She smoothed my hair, rocking us slightly like the motion was instinctual.
I squeezed my eyes shut—finally, blessedly—but the image was still there behind my eyelids, bright and sharp. More vivid, even. The moment the vest appeared. The way time seemed to split open. The look on his face—fear, regret, confusion. And something else. Something like acceptance.
My stomach lurched.
“I’m going to be sick.”
“Come on.” Maude pivoted us both, guiding me inside with slow, careful steps. My feet dragged over the threshold like they weighed fifty pounds apiece. My vision flickered at the edges, black creeping in, the floor tilting.
I caught the banister with one hand, gripping it until my knuckles whitened.
It didn’t anchor me.
Nothing did.
Maude shepherded me toward the kitchen without letting go of my arm. The house felt wrong again—wrong in a different way this time. Too quiet. Too bright. Too aware of what had just happened in its front yard.
She nudged me toward the sink right as my stomach clenched violently. I braced both hands on the counter as a wave of nausea wracked through me. But nothing came up—just dry heaves that left my ribs aching and my throat burning.
“Oh, honey,” she murmured, rubbing slow circles between my shoulder blades. “Breathe. In and out. Stay right here with me.”
I tried.
But every inhale caught halfway, snagging on invisible barbs. Every exhale shook.
“It’s my fault,” I whispered hoarsely.
“Absolutely not,” Maude said, voice sharp with certainty. “Don’t you say that. Not even once.”
“He came here for me.”
“He was sent here,” she corrected. “There’s a difference.”
“He called me … Haze.”
Her hand stilled briefly on my back. “I know.”
“I hate that name.”
“I know that, too.”
I gripped the sink harder, the porcelain cool and steady under my palms. The tremors came in waves now—shaking my legs, my arms, rattling my teeth.
“Maude …”
My voice cracked.
“I don’t know how to feel.”
“You don’t have to know,” she said. “Not tonight.”
“I should be—”
I swallowed hard.
“I don’t know. Sad? Angry? Or relieved? Am I awful for feeling relieved?”
“No.”
The word was immediate. Fierce.
“You’re not awful. You’re human. And you’re in shock. And that man—Hazel, that man hurt you in ways no father ever should. Feeling relief that he can’t hurt you again isn’t wrong. It’s normal.”
Normal.
Nothing about this felt normal.
I pressed a trembling hand to my forehead. My skin was cold and damp. “I don’t want to look at him again.”
“You won’t,” Maude said firmly. “The boys will handle anything that needs handling outside. You stay right here with me.”
The “boys.”
They were still out there.
Gideon was still out there.
At that thought, another surge of dizziness rolled through me. A fresh spike of fear—not about my father this time, but about the man I loved stepping into darkness with a sniper lurking.
“Gideon,” I whispered, almost inaudible.
“He’s fine,” Maude said gently. “He’s coming back. He’ll walk through that door, you’ll see.”
My throat tightened. I stared down into the empty sink, watching my tears leave tiny dark spots.
I hadn’t even felt them fall.
“Here,” Maude said softly, reaching past me to fill a glass with water. The sound of it was too loud—sharp, cascading, almost violent. She pressed it into my hands. “Sip.”
I tried. The glass rattled against my teeth. Water dribbled down my chin.
“You’re all right,” she soothed. “You’re right here in our kitchen. You’re safe.”
Safe.
The word thudded inside me like a heartbeat.
Safe, even though everything felt shattered and raw and trembling.
I leaned forward, resting my forehead against the cabinet door. My breaths came shallow, but deeper than before.
A little more mine.
Maude stayed beside me, quiet and steady, her hand warm on my back like a lighthouse beam—constant, guiding, impossible to ignore.
Outside, faint voices rose—urgent, low, overlapping. A car door slammed. Boots pounded on gravel. The marsh wind shifted, rattling the porch swing.
I flinched at every noise.
My body was still trapped on that porch, even if I wasn’t.
“Hazel?”
Maude’s voice was a soft tether, gently pulling me back into the room. “Sweet girl, look at me.”
I lifted my head.
Her face blurred through tears I couldn’t feel falling.
“You’re going to get through this,” she said. “I’ve got you. Gideon’s got you. You’re not doing any of this alone.”
Alone.
For so long I’d carried that word like a shield. A punishment. A truth.
Now it felt strange.
Ill-fitting.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“I know,” Maude said. “Anyone would be.”
The kitchen swayed slightly. I blinked until it steadied.
A new sound drifted in from the porch—footsteps on the stairs, measured and heavy and unmistakably familiar.
Maude’s hand tightened on my arm. “There he is.”
I didn’t turn.
Not yet.
Didn’t trust my legs to hold me up or my face not to crumple into something wild and hysterical.
But I felt him—
the shift in the air,
the warmth behind me,
the quiet exhale that was all Gideon.
And for the first time since the moment the shouting woke me, my body remembered how to breathe.