7. The Sheriff is Coming
The Sheriff is Coming
Summer
The birds started an hour ago. I know because I've been counting the silences between them—the gaps where the sound drops out and the room presses in until all I have left is the weight of where I am and what happened last night to get me here.
I haven't slept. I don't think I was ever going to. Not in this bed that doesn't belong to anyone. Not with that red light pulsing in the corner of my vision every time I closed my eyes.
Sometime during the night, my bladder became impossible to ignore.
I lay there for as long as I could, hoping the feeling would dull if I stayed perfectly still, but it only grew more intense until I couldn't pretend anymore.
When I finally forced myself out of bed, I stood in the middle of the room staring at the bathroom, my eyes dragging over every wall, every corner, every inch of the floor as I searched for somewhere the camera couldn't see me, but without knowing the distance and width it caught, I couldn’t be sure if there was anywhere I could hide.
In the end, it came down to two choices. I could stand there until my body gave out, or I could let whoever was behind that camera watch me do something no stranger should ever have the right to see. I closed the bathroom door, even though I already knew it wouldn't make a difference.
I still have the red dress on from the warehouse, so hiding myself would be a struggle.
It's too tight to just pull up and drape over my legs.
I would have to physically lift it over my thighs to allow me the exposure needed.
In one quick motion, I rolled the dress up and took a seat as fast as I could.
Relief swept through me, but my body still tingled with the vulnerability of a prey animal.
I’d walked back over, sat against the headboard, and stayed in that position.
I think about Jacob.
One second I'm staring at the ceiling, the next my mind has slipped somewhere else entirely.
His kitchen just before six in the morning.
The coffee pot hissing quietly in the background.
The smell of fresh grounds drifting through the house, mixing with cedar and whatever laundry detergent he always used, somehow managed to cling to him no matter where he'd been the day before.
Pale morning light spilling through the windows over the sink, soft enough to blur the corners of everything it touched.
I can see him standing there with a mug in his hand.
The ceramic disappears beneath his fingers, steam curling lazily past his knuckles while he drinks without waiting for it to cool.
I remember reaching for the same mug once and jerking my hand back almost immediately, laughing because it was too hot to hold.
He'd looked at me like he didn't understand my problem before taking it from me as though the heat simply didn't exist.
I don't think I ever saw him hesitate. Not over pain.
Not over fear. Once he'd decided something, it became the only direction the world was allowed to move in, and everything else seemed to fall into place around him.
Even when it didn't. Even when the odds were impossible.
He carried himself like certainty had been stitched into his bones long before I'd ever met him.
I used to hate that about him.
I'd lie awake in my room after he’d scared me, another moment where he'd crossed a line I'd been certain he wouldn't cross, replaying every conversation until I could barely remember how they'd started.
I'd pick apart every word he'd said, every look he'd given me, every time he'd stepped close enough that I forgot how to breathe, convinced that if I examined it from enough angles I'd finally find the point where it stopped feeling so complicated.
I'd list every boundary he'd ignored. Every decision he'd made for me.
Every reminder that my choices weren't really mine anymore.
Eventually, I’d found myself listening for the sound of his truck pulling into the driveway. Learning the rhythm of his footsteps before they reached the hallway. Sleeping more deeply on the nights I heard the deadbolt lock because it meant he was home.
I don't know when that happened.
I don't know when the man I spent so long trying to escape became the first person I looked for every time I walked into a room.
Maybe there wasn't a moment.
Maybe it happened so slowly that by the time I noticed, it had already settled somewhere too deep to pull back out.
God, I miss him.
The thought steals the air from my lungs before I can stop it.
I miss the warmth of his hand finding me beneath the covers before either of us was fully awake.
The rough scrape of his jaw against my forehead when he'd kiss me without thinking.
The sound of him moving through the house before sunrise while I stayed curled up in bed pretending to be asleep just so he'd come back and check on me one more time before he left.
I miss the certainty that if I woke up frightened, all I had to do was reach across the mattress and he'd be there.
My eyes burn. I press the heels of my hands against them until stars bloom behind my eyelids.
Don't.
Don't do this.
Not here.
Not where that red light is still watching.
But when I try to force Jacob out of my head, my parents come flooding back instead.
Mama, standing in the kitchen the night Jacob came for me, folding clothes that neither of us wanted packed. Her hands never stopped moving.
Lift. Fold. Smooth. Stack. Lift. Fold. Smooth. Stack.
She treated every dress, every sweater, every pair of jeans with the same careful attention she'd always given them, as though neat corners and straight seams could hold together a future that had already split wide open.
She never looked at me while she did it.
I didn't understand why then. I do now. If she'd looked at me, she wouldn't have been able to keep going.
I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs listening to her and Papa.
I heard her heart fracturing in every shaky breath she tried to swallow before it reached me. In the way her shoulders lifted just a little too high each time she inhaled.
A sob tears its way out of me before I can stop it. It catches somewhere behind my ribs, painful enough that I have to brace one hand against the mattress just to stay upright.
The camera can have it.
Let Jackson watch.
Let him sit behind that lens and mistake this for surrender if it helps him sleep at night. Because this has nothing to do with him.
This belongs to her.
To the woman who kissed my forehead every night before bed even after I insisted I was too old for it.
Who always remembered exactly how I liked my grilled cheese.
Who tucked loose strands of hair behind my ear whenever she thought too much wind was blowing across my face.
The woman who packed my suitcase knowing she had to send me with Jacob.
"Mama." The word barely makes it past my lips before something inside me gives way.
I fold forward, my forehead resting against my knees as the tears come harder than they ever did in the helicopter, harder than they could while I was fighting to survive the night.
They leave me shaking so violently I can't tell where one breath ends and the next begins, my fingers twisted into the sheets beneath me until they ache.
I don't fight my tears—not anymore—she deserves this much. She deserves to be mourned by someone who loved her enough to break.
By the time the sobs begin to loosen their grip, the light creeping around the edge of the curtains has softened from gray to the pale gold of morning. The birds haven't stopped singing. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and draw in a slow, uneven breath.
I'm still here. I'm still breathing.
For now, that's enough.
A soft knock at the door sends ice racing up my spine.
Every muscle in my body locks before my mind catches up, my pulse stumbling hard enough that I feel it in my throat. Not Jackson. Jackson doesn't knock. He never has. Which means someone else. Someone sent to do whatever comes next.
The handle turns. The door opens just enough for a body to slip through.
Harris.
He’s the last person I expected to walk through that door, but in some messed up way, I’m happy to see him.
He slips through the doorway sideways, a breakfast tray balanced carefully between both hands, his eyes fixed on the floor in the practiced way of someone who's learned that looking too closely at what's happening inside this house only leaves scars you have to carry afterward.
He doesn't say a word.
The china rattles softly against the saucer with every step he takes, the faint tremor in his hands impossible to miss no matter how carefully he tries to hide it.
He crosses to the table beneath the window and lowers the tray with painstaking precision, nudging it a fraction to the left until it's perfectly straight, his attention lingering on it a second longer than it needs to. Anything to avoid looking at me.
"Harris..." My throat burns around his name. "Please... tell me what they're going to do to me." The words barely make it out before my voice breaks.
He still doesn't answer.
He turns for the door, his shoulders tight beneath his shirt, each step measured, almost mechanical, as though he's following a routine he's repeated so many times he no longer has to think about it.
His fingers close around the handle. Then they stop. Not for long. Barely a blink of an eye. But long enough for the silence to shift.
His shoulders rise with a slow breath that never quite reaches his lungs, and I see it then—the fight he tries so desperately to keep hidden.
It passes through him in the smallest of movements, a tightening of his jaw, a flex of his fingers around the handle, the faint dip of his head as though guilt has finally become too heavy to hold upright.