Chapter Eleven
Briar
Rafe moves different in the morning.
His steps are careful in a way that makes my stomach twist. His shoulders stay tight when he reaches for the kettle. He forces slow inhales. The air around him feels uneven, unsettled.
I watch him from the bed, knees pulled to my chest, blanket around me. My body knows his moods the way it knows weather, and today something in him is shifting under the skin.
He doesn’t look at me at first. That’s how I know it’s bad this truth that he wants to tell me. I know he’s going to ask me to leave. And I’m not sure I’m going to survive it when he does.
He finally turns, and he tries to smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
The words are soft. His tone is warm. But the warmth doesn’t go all the way through.
I slide off the bed and cross the room on bare feet, slow and careful. His jaw tightens a little when I get close. Not at me. At whatever he’s holding inside.
I place my hand on his wrist.
He freezes for a moment—then covers my hand with his, squeezing once. His touch trembles.
Something inside me stirs. Fear, but not of him. Fear for him.
I pull the paper toward us and write:
YOU GOOD?
His mouth twitches, almost a flinch. “I’m fine.”
Lie. My body knows it. I touch his chest, placing my palm over his heart. His pulse jumps under my hand. He reaches up, catching my fingers, holding them for a moment longer than he means to.
“Just thinking,” he says softly.
Thinking doesn’t make him move this way. Thinking doesn’t make him hold his breath.
I reach for a cup, fill it with water from the basin, and offer it to him. A small thing. But I want to take care of him the way he takes care of me.
He stares at the cup for a long beat. Then he takes it, brushing my knuckles with his thumb. “Thank you.”
His voice is different. Lower. Rough at the edges.
He sets the cup down, then pulls me into him with both arms, burying his face in my hair. I hold onto him tightly, feeling the tremor in his chest.
He doesn’t usually cling. Not like this.
I wrap my arms around his waist, finding the place his heartbeat is strongest. His arms tighten more.
He whispers into my hair, “You’re alright. I’m here.”
But it sounds like he’s saying it to himself.
When he finally loosens his hold, he cups my face in both hands, brushing his thumbs over my cheeks. His eyes search mine.
I write:
NO LEAVE?
His mouth tightens. His hand comes up, then stops halfway to my face, waiting for me to let him finish the distance. I don’t move. I can’t. My chest is too tight. My body already knows something bad is coming, even if my mind is still trying to catch up.
“I’m not leaving,” he says, voice low and rough. “And I’m not asking you to leave either.”
My fingers loosen from his shirt, but only a little.
He reaches into his coat as I track every movement. When he pulls out a folded piece of paper, panic flashes through me so fast my vision blurs. Paper means rules. Paper means orders. Paper means proof of facts I do not want to know.
Rafe unfolds it carefully and turns it toward me.
My face stares back at me. My stomach drops so fast I think I might be sick.
I stop breathing.
Not this face. Not the one I know now. Not hollow cheeks and scared eyes and a mouth that forgot how to work. This is the girl from before. Bright eyes. Long hair. Full cheeks. A smile that doesn’t know anything about dark rooms or straps or the sound a leash makes when it snaps taut.
Not the girl who belongs to Rafe now.
My hand lifts before I think better of it. My fingertips brush the edge of the paper, then the shape of my own cheek in the picture. The word at the top blurs until I blink hard enough to force it clear.
MISSING
The room tilts.
Heat rushes up my throat, then drops straight through me. My ears ring. My hand shakes so badly the paper rustles.
Rafe shifts closer. “I found it in town. At the post office.”
I look at him, then at the page.
A line of smaller words swims beneath the picture. Reward. Information. Family. Looking.
Family.
My mother’s face flickers through me. My sister on the porch steps. The smell of coffee in the kitchen before dawn. The old yellow curtains over the sink. Things I have not let myself touch in so long they feel like someone else’s memories.
They never came for me. They never looked for me.
Maybe I was wrong.
“They never stopped searching for you,” Rafe says. “Your people have been missing you this whole time.”
Something breaks loose inside my chest. Not relief. Not exactly. It feels too sharp for that. Too big. My body doesn’t know whether to reach for the paper or throw it across the room.
I clutch it harder instead.
He found them.
He found where I came from.
He found the place I belonged before him.
My throat closes so fast it hurts. I grab for the pencil with clumsy fingers and scrape the words out crooked and dark.
SEND ME BACK?
The moment he sees it, his whole face changes, and he reaches for me so fast I flinch. Not because he moves wrong. Because I do.
The flyer crackles in my grip as I pull back, clutching it against my stomach. Panic threatens to overwhelm me. The room feels too small to hold me and that piece of paper and the life staring back at me from it.
Rafe stops himself before he crowds me. He drops to his knees instead, one hand braced on the floorboards, the other open between us.
“No.” The word comes out rough. Immediate. “No, Briar. I’m not sending you anywhere.”
My eyes burn. I shake my head anyway because men say one thing while meaning another. They soften you up before they move you where they want you. They make it sound kind.
I shove the flyer toward him with a shaking hand. Take it back. Take it away. If I do not hold it, maybe it cannot change anything.
He does not take it.
His shoulders lock. He looks wrecked in a way I do not understand. Not angry. Not relieved. Hurt.
“I didn’t tell you because I wanted you gone,” he says. “I told you because it’s yours to know.”
Mine to know?
That word hits wrong. Too tender for something that hurts this much.
He shifts closer by inches, slow enough that I could pull away. “Your mama and your sister have been looking for you. They deserve to know you’re alive.” His voice drops lower. “And you deserve the choice of what comes next.”
Choice.
My chest jerks around a breath that does not fit in my lungs.
I grab the pencil again. My fingers tremble so badly the first mark tears across the page instead of shaping a letter. I start over beneath it.
GO NOW?
The words blur before I finish them. My eyes are full. My hand cramps.
Rafe sees the question and closes his eyes for one hard second, pain lining his expression.
When he opens them, there is nothing soft or slippery in his face. Only truth.
“I don’t want you to go.” Each word lands plain. Heavy. Sounding like they cost him something. “I want you here with me.”
My whole body stills.
He swallows. Looks down once, then back at me. “But I won’t keep you by hiding the world from you. I won’t do what he did. I won’t make your life smaller so I can feel safer in it. They’re torn up inside. They deserve to know you’re okay, no matter what you decide later.”
The flyer slips in my hands.
I stare at him, ruined by the shape of that. Not only that he wants me. That he would still let me walk away. That he would rather risk losing me than cage me.
He drags a hand over his beard. “I was scared. Scared you’d see there’s something better down there and realize I was only the place you landed while you healed. That your future could be bigger and better than me.”
The words hit so deep I can’t move.
He thinks I could leave because he is not enough. That thought hurts more than anything on the page.
Tears slide down my cheeks before I feel them. I lower myself to the floor across from him and write one word with a hand that will not stop shaking.
STAY?
The word feels bigger than the cabin. He leans closer, eyes on mine.
“Yes,” he says. “You don’t have to decide anything right now. You can stay here as long as you want while you think about things. You’re safe with me. Always.”
And the way he says it breaks something open in me.
I stare at the flyer in my lap until the girl in the picture stops looking like a stranger and starts looking like someone I buried with my own hands.
My thumb moves over the corner where the paper is creased.
There’s a smudge near the bottom where somebody touched it before the ink dried.
My eyes catch on a tiny detail in the photo I almost missed.
The freckle by my mouth.
My sister always said it looked like a drop of coffee. She used to tap it with her finger when she wanted to annoy me. Nobody outside the house would have cared if it showed in the picture. Nobody but family would have picked this one.
They kept looking.
The thought hurts worse than if they had stopped.
Rafe stays where he is, close enough that I can feel the heat of him, far enough that I do not feel cornered. He lets me hold the silence until it settles around us instead of crushing me under it.
“When you feel ready,” he says, voice quiet and steady, “I’ll take you to see them.”
I close my eyes.
My mother’s porch. My sister’s hands. Their faces when they see what’s left of me.
The thought turns my stomach. They will know. Maybe not every detail, but enough. They will see the scars. Hear the silence. Watch me flinch. I do not know how to stand in front of people who loved me before and let them meet this version instead.
My fingers tighten on the page.
I look up at Rafe. He is watching me like I am the only thing in the room that matters as he patiently waits for the truth.
He says, “You don’t have to decide anything but what you want.”
Want.
The word still feels too large. Too dangerous.
I grip the pencil. My hand shakes, but less this time. I write slowly so the letters come out clear.
YOU PROTECT?
Rafe does not even blink before he answers.
“Yes.”
The word lands hard and sure, and the tension inside me loosens. Not all the way. Enough.
I write again, pressing harder.
YOU STAY?
His face changes then. Not relief. Not victory. Something quieter. Something that makes my chest ache.
“I’ll be with you the whole time,” he says. “You want to leave, we leave. You want to stay five minutes, we stay five minutes. You want me beside you every second, that’s where I’ll be.”
My throat tightens around a sound that almost becomes his name. Not yet. But close.
I fold the flyer carefully instead of crushing it. That feels important. Like if I can do this one thing gently, the rest of me might survive it too.
Then I crawl across the space between us and place the folded paper against his chest.
He covers it with his hand. Covers mine too.
Soon he will take me down the mountain.
Tonight, I lean into the only steady thing I know and let myself believe I will not have to face the past without him.