Chapter Twenty-five – Lark #2
That does earn me a real smile. Quick and crooked and young enough that I can see, for one instant, the easier version of him everyone keeps referencing. The one who laughed quicker and carried less and probably drove Claire half insane by pretending he didn’t need anything.
I miss him a little, that version, even though I never knew him. Maybe because I can see how much of him is still here.
We eat at the kitchen counter because neither of us suggests otherwise.
The casserole is absurdly good in the way things only taste when somebody who loves you made them specifically to keep you standing.
Rook settles under my stool and sighs dramatically every time one of us fails to drop something worth his attention.
The domesticity of it would be almost funny if it didn’t feel so dangerous.
Not because it’s false, but because I am sitting in Holt’s kitchen while another storm builds outside, eating food his mother left for him in dishes she probably told him to return, and some part of me has already stopped thinking of this as temporary in the clean, uncomplicated way I promised myself it would stay.
That thought follows me when I help him clear the plates. When we secure the windows. When he checks the weather radio like Claire told him to, muttering under his breath about her knowing him too well.
And when Hadley lets herself in without knocking twenty minutes later carrying a tote bag and enough energy to fill the whole room by herself.
“I brought board games,” she announces.
I blink. “Why?”
She tosses the tote onto the couch and looks between the two of us like the answer should be obvious. “Because if the power goes out and you two sit here in moody silence, I’ll feel personally responsible for the weirdness.”
Holt leans one hip against the kitchen counter and folds his arms. “You don’t even live here.”
“That has never once stopped me.”
Hadley steps farther inside, spots the dishes on the rack, the closed blinds, the weather radio on the counter, and her expression softens just enough for me to realize she’s not here by accident.
For the next hour, we sit in the living room with a deck of cards and a board game Hadley insists is “way more fun if everyone is a little competitive and moderately emotionally unwell.” She and Holt slide into a rhythm that belongs entirely to siblings who have spent a lifetime tormenting each other for sport.
It is fast and affectionate and relentless.
Hadley cheats loudly and denies it louder.
Holt rolls his eyes so often it becomes a language all its own.
At one point, she flicks a playing card at his face with deadly accuracy, and he catches it without looking, which makes her swear at him with obvious pride.
Watching them does something strange to my chest. Mostly, it makes me understand another piece of him.
The one who could still be funny in spite of everything.
The one who learned how to carry responsibility without letting it kill whatever brightness used to live underneath it.
The one who makes room, even now, for the people who claim him.
Hadley notices when I stop pretending not to watch.
“See,” she says, pointing across the coffee table at Holt like he’s a museum exhibit she personally curated. “Everyone thinks he’s all serious now, but deep down, he’s still a menace.”
Holt lifts his brows. “Deep down.”
“Fine,” she says. “Shallow down.”
I laugh, and both of them look at me at once. It shouldn’t feel like a trap.
“What?” I ask.
Hadley grins. “You’re staying.”
It’s something I can’t respond to cleanly. Before I can try, the lights flicker once. Outside, the wind picks up hard enough to rattle the back windows.
Holt is on his feet before the second flicker fully settles, moving toward the hall where the weather radio sits.
Hadley’s grin disappears instantly, replaced by the same watchful sharpness that lives underneath all the sisterly chaos.
Rook, who has been half asleep by my feet, stands and points himself toward the back door with a low whine.
The power holds.
Holt checks the locks again even though he already did. Hadley closes the curtains tighter. I stand in the middle of his living room and realize all at once that I have started reading his fear by the way he turns it into useful motion.
That should make me feel worse. Instead, it makes me move too.
I grab the flashlight from the kitchen drawer before he can ask.
Set candles on the coffee table. Fill another bowl with water for Rook.
Small things. Practical things. The same instinct that has always driven me toward work, just redirected now into protecting a space that suddenly feels too precious to leave vulnerable.
By the time the first hard rain hits the roof, all of us are quiet. Not tense exactly. Just listening.
The storm moves in slower than the last one, but there’s something more electric in it. More force gathered under the surface. Wind bends the trees at the far edge of the yard and sends something metallic banging softly near the barn.
Rook goes rigid. The hair along his spine lifts in one uneven line. Holt notices at the same time I do.
“Hey,” he says, crouching slightly, voice low and calm. “What is it?”
Rook barks once, then bolts for the back door. Hadley is already moving, but Holt gets there first, grabbing the handle just as the dog launches hard enough to force it open the second he cracks it.
“Rook!”
Rain and wind slam into the house in one cold burst. The dog is a dark streak across the yard before either of us can think.
“Dammit,” I breathe, already moving.
Holt catches my arm before I make it halfway to the porch. “Wait.”
“I’m not waiting.”
“Lark.”
The way he says my name should stop me. It almost does. Then lightning cuts across the field, white and immediate, and for one horrifying second the whole property is visible at once—the trees bent under wind, the lane slick and glistening, the barn doors shifting, and something else.
Movement near the far side of the property line gone the second the dark comes back. My pulse slams hard enough to make me dizzy.
“Holt,” I say.
He has already seen it. I know because the look on his face changes in the same instant.
Hadley steps up behind us, all traces of game-night ease gone. “What?”
No one answers right away because the storm is breaking open above us. And because whatever just moved near the tree line did not look like an animal. Something that smells, unmistakably, like the beginning of a fire.