9. Jessica #2
Not cracked. Not fractured. Broke. The wall I'd been holding collapsed. My face crumpled. My chin trembled. My eyes filled and spilled over, and the sound that came out of me was awful — a wet, ugly, gasping thing that I had no control over and that I would have given anything to take back.
I pressed my hands over my face. "Oh, fuck. No. No, no, no. This is not happening. I do not do this. I am not a crier. This is —"
Hunter’s arms came around me. He pulled me into his chest — firm, complete, no hesitation. My face pressed into the space between his collar and his jaw, and he held me the way he held everything — steady, patient, like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be.
"I've got you, Jess." His voice was low against the top of my head. "You're my best friend. I'm not going to let anything happen to you."
I cried. Into his shirt. Into the soap and cedar smell of him. Into the arms of the only person in my life who I felt truly understood me. I cried harder than I had cried in years. His arms didn't loosen and his breathing didn't change and he held me through all of it without saying another word.
When it was over — when my breathing had steadied and my eyes were swollen and his shirt was ruined — I pulled back. Wiped my face with both hands. Looked at him.
"If you tell anyone about this, I will end you." My voice was wrecked. Raw. "I mean it, Hunt. Not a soul. Not Clay, not Maggie, not your mother. If a single member of your family finds out that I cried like that in this workshop, I will burn this barn to the ground and salt the earth."
The corner of his mouth pulled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
"Exactly." I wiped my nose on my sleeve. Elegant as always. Then, I took a shaky breath. Pressed my palms against my eyes one more time. Let them drop. "Okay. Okay. So we're doing this."
"We're doing this." His voice was steady.
His eyes were warm. And underneath the warmth, banked but visible, was something I'd never seen at this voltage — fury.
Not for me. For what had been done to me.
Controlled and directed and precise and the certainty of it, the protectiveness of it, made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with Garrett Calloway.
"Come to dinner," he said.
He walked me into the Blackwood kitchen where the whole family was mid-chaos — Maisie standing on her step stool arguing with Clay about whether gravy qualified as a beverage, Callie reading something on her phone with her glasses pushed up, Maggie and Jack at the counter, Stephanie telling Liam something that was making him laugh, Louisa at the stove, Owen in his chair — and he said it in front of all of them.
His hand was on the small of my back — not for show, not yet, just guiding me through the door — and his voice was calm and clear and carried the weight of a man who had made a decision and wasn't interested in discussing it.
"Jessica and I are pretending to be together. You can’t tell anyone. And this is why.”
The kitchen went quiet, everyone was frozen in what they were doing.
Then Hunter told them about Garrett. The texts. The flowers. The showing up. Penny's insistence. The professional trap. Short, precise sentences — the Hunter version, stripped of everything but the facts — and the facts were enough.
Callie straightened. Her eyes moved from me to Hunter then back. "Jessica," she said, her voice steady and practical. "I want you to start writing everything down. Every text, every time he shows up, every interaction. Dates, times, what was said. Keep a record." She paused. "Just in case."
Just in case. The three words hung in the kitchen air, and nobody needed to say what they implied.
Owen stood.
He didn't stand often. He communicated from his chair with an efficiency that made motion unnecessary. But he stood now — slowly, deliberately — and looked at me. Not at Hunter. At me. His eyes held mine with a directness that pinned me to the spot.
"Jessica." His voice was low. Unhurried. "You grew up in this house as much as any of my children did. You sat at this table. You ate Louisa's food. You ran through these fields with my son, and you are part of what we are. That hasn’t changed. Not in ten years. Not ever."
My breath caught. My hands went still at my sides.
"This family takes care of its own," Owen said.
"And you are our own. Whatever this man is doing and whatever he thinks he's entitled to, he is going to find out that he is wrong.
" He paused. His jaw moved — once, a single clench that carried the fury he was keeping below the surface. "Do you understand me?"
My throat closed. My eyes burned. I nodded because I couldn't speak — because the words had wrapped around something that had been tight and cold and frightened for weeks and held it.
Louisa crossed the kitchen and put both hands on my face — warm, dry, rough from years of kitchens and gardens and holding things together — and her thumbs traced my cheekbones, and she didn't say a word because Owen had said it all and her hands were saying the rest.
The kitchen held its breath.
And then Maisie's voice — bright, clear, cutting through the silence with the precision of a six-year-old who has been listening to a conversation she doesn't fully understand and has arrived at her own conclusions.
"Is Daddy going to teach Jessica to wrestle bears, too?"
The kitchen exploded.
Clay choked on his water. Callie's forehead hit the table.
Louisa's hands dropped from my face to cover her own mouth, her shoulders shaking.
Wyatt made a sound that wasn't quite human.
Stephanie grabbed Liam's arm and buried her face in his shoulder.
Liam's jaw was clamped shut, and his eyes were streaming.
Maggie turned away, and Jack caught her.
They held each other and laughed with their faces pressed together.
Even Owen — Owen, who had just delivered the most powerful speech I'd heard in my life — couldn’t contain himself.
Hunter’s hand tightened on my back, and his laugh — the real one — slipped out and added the chaos. The laugh that came out of me was broken and wet and mixed with the tears still on my face. It was the ugliest, most beautiful laugh of my life.
Maisie looked around at all of us with her hands on her hips and her pink boots planted wide. Her face said very clearly that she had asked a reasonable question and the adults in her life were being ridiculous.
The tension that had been coiling in the kitchen for the past five minutes snapped clean, and the room filled with the particular sound of a family that knows how to hold something terrible and something beautiful in the same hands and let the beautiful win.
And then we ate dinner, as simple as that.
The night wound down, and Hunter walked me out.
The porch light was on. It was always on.
The night air was warm and the ranch was dark beyond the reach of the light.
Hunter silently walked beside me to my car.
The quiet between us was full — not empty, not waiting, just two people carrying the same evening in their bodies and not needing to narrate it.
I opened the car door. Turned to say goodnight. And he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me.
His chest was solid against mine. His arms closed around my shoulders — not tight, not tentative, just complete.
My face pressed into the space between his collar and his jaw, and I breathed him in.
Soap and cedar and something underneath that was just him — a scent that my body registered as safe before my brain had time to name it.
My arms wound around him, and my whole body did something it hadn't done in a very long time.
It stopped. The running, the planning, the fourteen-track brain, the Jessica Williams operating system that never powered down — all of it went quiet.
Just his arms and his chest and his breathing slow and even against my hair, and the rise and fall of it moving through my body like a tide.
Hunter’s lips pressed against the top of my head.
Soft. Warm. A kiss that landed on my hair and reached places I didn't have names for.
My eyes closed. My fingers tightened on his shirt.
He held it there for a beat and something shifted in my chest. A door I'd been leaning against cracked open and the thing behind it was warm and so terrifying that I shoved it closed with double the effort.
He's your best friend. He's being your best friend. That's what this is. That's all this is.
He let go. Stepped back. The cool air filled the space where his body had been, and my skin registered every degree of the difference.
"Text me when you get home.” His voice was quiet in the dark. His face was half-lit by the porch light, the other half in shadow.
"I will."
I got in the car. Started the engine. He stayed, watching me, until I drove off and he was nothing but a spec in my rearview.
Even with the windows down, Hunt’s scent was still on my skin, and the ghost of his mouth still on my hair. Louisa's hands on my face. Owen's voice in my bones. Maisie's bear question made me laugh every time it surfaced, which was approximately every forty-five seconds.
I parked. Locked the door. Pressed my back against the wall in the dark apartment and closed my eyes.
My phone was in my hand. I typed two words.
Home safe.
His reply came in four seconds.
Good.
One word. I stared at it. Then I pressed the phone against my sternum and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor — my spot, the place I always ended up when the walls weren't enough — and I sat there with the phone over my heart and his arms still on my skin and his kiss still in my hair.
He was my best friend. The man who had agreed before I'd finished asking and held me while I cried and kissed the top of my head in the dark like it was the most natural thing in the world. That was friendship. That was what friendship looked like when it was this deep and this old and this good.
Except my hands were still shaking. And my skin was still humming where his chest had been pressed against mine.
And the door I'd shoved closed in his arms was pressing open again, and the thing behind it wasn't friendship.
It wasn't friendship and I knew it and I wasn't going to look at it.
Not tonight. Not yet. Because if I let myself name it, everything changed.
The safe, solid ground I was standing on would turn into something I could fall through, and I wasn't ready to fall.
Not when I didn’t know if Hunter would be there at the bottom to catch me.
I pressed the phone harder against my chest. Closed my eyes. Breathed.
He's your best friend. That's everything. That has always been everything.
The voice in my head was firm. Certain. Practiced. The voice of a woman who had been telling herself this story for a very long time.
The voice in my chest said something else entirely, and I told it to shut up and go to sleep.