16. To Be Continued
Chapter sixteen
To Be Continued
Iwoke gasping, my hand pressed to my chest, heart hammering.
The moonlight pooled through the window highlighting a windowsill barren of roses.
It was just a bad dream. You’re okay. I count my breaths.
I refuse to allow Marcus to steal one more moment of joy from me.
I search for a thought, a place, powerful enough to disassociate.
I find it dancing with Callum under string lights: bodies closer than socially acceptable, intense, electric heat.
Then Jasper: effervescent, comfortable, safe and warm.
Sleep found me again somewhere between Jasper and Eli.
I wake up to sunlight and the memory of almost.
Almost kissing Jasper on the stairs. Almost crossing some invisible line I'd drawn in the dirt without quite knowing I'd drawn it. Almost forgetting every single reason I packed my bags and drove across the country to disappear into a town I'd never heard of.
I lie there and let the morning happen around me, the light moving across the ceiling, the sound of something moving below in the main house, the smell of coffee drifting up from somewhere, and I replay it like a film I've already memorized.
His breath against my lips. The roughness in his voice when he said I'm running out of reasons not to do this, like it was a confession he'd been holding too long.
The way time had done that impossible thing where it stretched and compressed at once, so that a single breath felt like an entire season.
And then, Eli's voice cutting through the darkness. Jasper. Callum needs you.
And then, Jasper's frustrated exhale, the laugh that wasn't really a laugh at all. The way he'd pressed a kiss to my knuckles instead; slow, deliberate, a punctuation mark rather than an ending. To be continued. Three words. A promise with teeth.
I press the back of my hand against my mouth and stare at the ceiling.
To be continued.
That's fine. That's good, even. Continued implies choice. Continued implies I still have time to decide what I want, who I am in this town, whether staying is something I'm doing intentionally or just something that's happening to me.
Continued implies I'm in control of this.
I'm very aware that I may not be in control of this.
I also remember what came after.
After I climbed the stairs and didn't turn on the lights. After I sat on my bed in the dark and tried to sort through everything: the heat of his hands, the almost-kiss, the shape in the trees on the walk home that Jasper had been too careful to look at.
I got up and crossed to the window.
Three figures crossing the yard in moonlight, moving with that fluid coordination I'd noticed before and filed away as eccentric old-money family; probably nothing.
The file was overflowing. Callum in front, that particular gravity to his movement, the way he led without seeming to try.
Jasper flanking, more subdued than I'd ever seen him.
Eli at the rear, his hands in his pockets, his attention sweeping the edges of the property as they went.
They disappeared into the preserve like they belonged to it. Like the dark opened for them.
And then, a moment later, the sounds of the night, the howling.
I'd heard it so often now, I'd told myself it was wildlife, because the alternative was a drawer I wasn't ready to open. But this time I was awake and listening, and I just couldn't tell myself that anymore.
It wasn't random. Not scattered and distant, the way animal sounds usually were.
It was coordinated, call and response, voices threading together across the dark, purposeful in a way that had nothing to do with wildlife.
Like a coordinated hunt, it sounded like a scripted thing, like a language.
It sounded like these creatures were saying something to each other, or to something else, out there in the trees.
It went on for a while. Then it stopped.
* * *
At the design studio, I can't focus.
I've been staring at the same logo concept for forty minutes. It's a perfectly reasonable logo. It doesn't deserve this level of hostility. I keep changing the typeface, changing it back and pretending I'm working, which is not the same thing as working, but my brain has other priorities today.
The memory of Jasper's voice is doing laps. I’m running out of reasons not to do this.
"You've got that look again," Lila says, not looking up from her screen.
"I don't have a look."
"You absolutely have a look." She swivels her chair. Studies me with those sharp eyes. "Also, you've changed that font four times. The font was fine."
"I'm workshopping."
"You're workshopping in the direction of someone who didn't sleep, or someone who almost did something interesting and then didn't." She tilts her head. "Which one is it?"
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"Oh, interesting." She swivels fully toward me now, arms crossed, expression delighted in the way Lila's expression gets delighted when she senses information she wants. "So something almost happened. Interesting. Very interesting."
"I didn't say—"
"You confirmed it by not denying it fast enough.
I know you, Serena. You're very good at redirecting, but only when you're actually prepared to redirect.
Right now you're just sitting there looking like someone interrupted a moment you'd been building toward for weeks.
" A pause, for effect. "Which Voss brother? "
"I really don't know what you're—"
"There are three of them," Lila says, "and they all look at you like you're the only person in the room.
Which, in a town this size, is not exactly subtle.
We notice things. I notice things." She grins, slow and satisfied.
"My money's on Jasper. He's been circling you since day one.
Every time you come in here he manages to happen to walk past the window at least once. "
I look at my screen. My traitorous face is doing something.
"Uh huh," Lila says.
"I'm not confirming anything."
"You don't have to." She turns back to her work, but she's still smiling; I can hear it in her voice.
"For what it's worth, Jasper is a good person.
He's annoying, obviously, and he thinks he's funnier than he is, which: he's exactly as funny as he thinks he is, which is the most dangerous kind of funny.
But he's good." A pause. "They all are. It's the Voss family curse. "
"What is?"
"Being genuinely good people who make everyone around them feel it." She clicks something on her screen. "It's very inconvenient."
I don't answer. I change the font again. The font really doesn't deserve this.
* * *
I take my lunch to the coffee shop because I need the noise and the normalcy of Mel sliding my order across the counter and saying you look tired without any actual concern, the way Mel always does.
"You look tired," Mel says.
"Thanks, Mel."
"Long night?"
"Something like that."
She gives me a look that suggests she knows something I don't, the same look half the town seems to have perfected, the one that sits just on the edge of I could tell you things without crossing into it, and then she moves on to the next customer.
I take my coffee and sandwich to a corner table and try to collect myself.
I'm about halfway through the sandwich when Eli sits down across from me.
Not asks if he can sit. Sits. Like it's a given, like the chair across from mine was always going to be his.
He orders tea, just raises his hand and Mel nods, because apparently Eli doesn't need to speak to be understood here.
Then he folds his hands on the table and looks at me with those precise, perceptive eyes.
He doesn't say anything for a moment. He just looks.
It should be uncomfortable. It isn't, quite, which is its own kind of uncomfortable.
"Did you sleep good last night?," he asks.
"Well, there was a lot of howling going on last night. How did you sleep?"
"Ah. I suppose I slept well."
I wrap both hands around my coffee cup.
He tilts his head slightly, something careful in his expression. "The howling bothers you?"
I consider lying. It's a reflex, the same one that kept me careful for three years, that learned to give the answer that closed conversations rather than opened them.
But Eli would see through it. He sees through most things, the way he's always a half-step ahead of whatever's happening, the way he looks at me like he's reading something in a language other people don't know exists.
"Yes and no," I say. "It’s not discomforting, not really, but—" I stop. "I do find it confusing. There’s a lot about this town that I find confusing. If I’m being completely honest, you and your brothers confuse me. The way you all—" I stop again.
"The way we all… ?"
I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t say, The way you all make me feel.
"The way you all move like you're connected to each other. Like you're aware of each other in ways that don't require words or—or sight, even. Like there's something... ," I set my coffee down. "Something I don't have a word for yet."
Mel delivers Eli's tea without fanfare. He thanks her with a nod. She goes.
"We’re close," he says. His voice is quiet, certain in the way Eli is certain about things—not arrogant, just accurate, the way a fact is certain. "We always have been, but you feel like a part of that, like family. We thought, maybe you feel the same?"
I go very still.
"That's the second time someone's said something like that to me."
"It won't be the last."
"Eli." I lean forward, keeping my voice low because there are other people in here and whatever this conversation is, it feels like it should stay between us. "That is very sweet, and I’m grateful to all of you, truly. But I’m still finding my place i this town, and there’s like a million questions I need you to help me answer. "
Something moves in his expression. Not reluctance, exactly. Like he's working with a sequence he can't yet disrupt. "I know."
He picks up his tea. "We can do that." He meets my eyes over the rim. "You ask good questions, the right questions, Serena. I enjoy that. Most people don’t wanna know."
"I'm not most people."
"No," he says it simply, like it's something he's observed and confirmed. "You're not."
He stands. Leaves exact change on the table; he always has exact change, I don't know how, and buttons his jacket.
"Eli—"
"Come find me when you have time." He's already moving toward the door. "I’ll be around."
And then he's gone, out into the afternoon light, and I'm left sitting in the coffee shop with a half-eaten sandwich and the uncomfortable sense that I'm standing at the edge of something… Something that's been there all along, waiting for me to look directly at it.
I turn my coffee cup in my hands and think about the howling.
We want you to feel like family.
I've spent three years trying to be invisible. Trying to be someone a town didn't notice, a person with no footprints, a woman who could fold herself small enough to slip through the world without being seen.
Magnolia Creek hasn't let me do that. The Voss family hasn't let me do that.
The town itself, the way people knew my coffee order and smiled like they'd been expecting me, the way Rowena's casseroles appeared, the way the magnolia tree caught the light exactly right every single morning, all of it called to me and none of it had let me stay invisible.
And now I'm starting to wonder if invisible wasn't safety after all.
If being found, truly found, by people who cared, might be something else entirely.
The coffee shop hums around me. Outside, a cloud moves and the afternoon light shifts, flooding through the window and laying gold across the table.
I don't leave right away. I sit there and let the feeling settle, the one that's been building since I arrived and keeps getting louder: the sense that I've stepped into the middle of a story that's been going much longer than I've been in it. A story that was waiting for a particular piece.
I've been hiding or running for years. Toward nothing. Away from something.
I like that feeling of belonging. I'm starting to think Magnolia Creek has been waiting for me.
I need to know what that means.
I finished my coffee and gathered my things. It dawned on me that I hadn't checked the locks on my way out this morning, and yesterday morning too. For the first time, that feels less like forgetting and more like a choice.
Outside, the afternoon is warm and alive with that special quality of light that this town does something with; turns it golden, turns it significant, like everything's being lit by someone who understands composition.
I walk back toward the studio. And the whole way, the back of my neck prickles with the certainty that the answer to whatever question I'm building toward is closer than it's ever been.
I just need to be ready to hear it.
Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice whispers, “You’re almost there.”
I almost didn’t hear over the one that said, “Did you really think you could hide from me?”