Chapter 4
GEMMA
He didn't touch me. That's what I can't stop thinking about. He was close enough to feel my breath, and he kept his hands at his sides and asked permission before he even stepped closer.
I've been replaying it all morning. The stockroom. The panic clawing up my throat. Will's voice cutting through the static in my head, low and steady, giving me something to hold onto when everything else was spinning out of control.
Five things you can see. Four things you can hear. Three things you can feel.
He knew exactly what to do. He didn't panic, didn't crowd me, didn't try to fix it with platitudes or tell me to calm down. He just sat there, three feet away, and talked me back into my own body.
Craig would have handled it differently.
The thought arrives uninvited, and I let myself follow it for once instead of shoving it away.
Craig would have told me I was being dramatic.
He would have sighed that particular sigh, the one that meant I was exhausting him with my emotions.
Then later, when I was wrung out and vulnerable, he would have used it.
Would have pushed me somewhere I didn't want to go, told me it would help me relax, told me I needed to get out of my head and let him take over.
And I would have let him. Because that's what I did. That's who I was with him.
I set down my coffee cup harder than I mean to, and the sound echoes through Cole's empty kitchen. He left for the shop an hour ago, and I've been sitting here ever since, staring at the same spot on the wall and running the same mental loops.
Will is not Craig. I've known Will half my life, watched him with Cole, with the Brotherhood, with Sarah. He's never been anything but steady. The kind of man who takes charge without weaponizing that power against people who can't push back.
But I've been wrong before. I looked at Craig and saw safety and was catastrophically, devastatingly wrong.
I'm not doing this again. I can't.
The coffee has gone cold. I dump it in the sink and grab my keys, desperate for something to do that doesn't involve sitting alone with my thoughts.
Molly Vance still lives in the same house she grew up in, three blocks from the high school where we used to skip fourth period together and smoke cigarettes behind the gym.
She's married now, two kids, runs a pottery studio out of her garage.
When I texted her last night asking if she wanted to get coffee, she responded in thirty seconds with an enthusiastic yes and three exclamation points.
We meet at the Daily Grind, a coffee shop that didn't exist when I lived here but has apparently become the town's unofficial living room. The walls are exposed brick, the tables mismatched, and every other person seems to know Molly by name.
"Gemma Holloway." She pulls me into a hug before I can brace for it, but it's quick and light and somehow doesn't trigger the usual alarm bells. "God, it's good to see you. How long has it been?"
"Too long since we actually hung out?" I do the math in my head. "I saw you at Sarah's funeral, but that was—"
"That doesn't count." Molly waves a hand.
"You were in and out so fast I barely got to hug you.
And you looked like a ghost even then." She slides into the chair across from me, studying my face with the frank assessment of someone who's known me since we were fourteen.
"You don't look much better now, if I'm being honest."
"Gee, thanks."
"I'm your friend. I'm allowed to say it." She flags down the server and orders us both lattes without asking. "So. What happened? Last I heard, you were living in Seattle with some finance guy, and now you're back in Anchor Bay looking like you haven't slept in a month."
"The marriage ended." I wrap my hands around the water glass the server left behind. "That's the short version."
"And the long version?"
"Is longer than I want to get into before caffeine."
Molly accepts this with a nod, though I can see the curiosity burning behind her eyes. She was always good at reading when to dig and when to let things lie.
"Fair enough. We'll table the interrogation." She leans back in her chair. "So what are you doing with yourself? Please tell me you're not just sitting in Cole's house staring at the walls."
"I'm working at the Ironside, actually. Helping with the books, some bartending."
"Oh, the Brotherhood bar?" Molly's eyebrows rise. "That's quite a crew. All those big, brooding motorcycle men. How are you finding it?"
"It's fine. They've been welcoming." I keep my voice casual. "Cole's been there forever, so I guess I'm grandfathered in."
"Cole's great. They're all pretty great, actually.
My husband did some electrical work for them last year when they renovated the back room.
" She takes a sip of the latte that's just arrived, watching me over the rim with a look I remember from high school.
The one that meant she was about to say something she found very interesting.
"So. Will Lawson. You two working closely together? "
My heart does something inconvenient at his name. "I'm doing the books. He's around. Why?"
"No reason." Her grin says otherwise. "It's just that he's been basically a monk since Sarah died.
I mean completely off the market. Five years, Gemma.
Five years and nobody has seen that man so much as glance at another woman.
" She leans closer. "But my husband was at the Ironside last week and he said Will couldn't stop watching you behind the bar. "
Heat creeps up my neck. "He watches everyone. It's his bar."
"Uh huh." Molly's grin widens. "That's not what Danny said. He said it was different. Like he couldn't help it."
"Molly." I pick up my latte just to have something to hold. "I just got out of a marriage. The last thing I need is—"
"I know, I know. I'm just saying." She holds up her hands in surrender, still smiling. "You knew them, right? Him and Sarah? They were together when you left."
"I knew them." The words come out quieter than I intend. "I used to watch them at Brotherhood events. The way he looked at her, like she was the only person in the room. I thought—" I stop, swallow. "I thought that's what love was supposed to look like."
Molly's expression softens. "And then you went out and found something different."
"Something that looked the same from the outside." I stare into my latte. "At first, anyway."
The silence stretches between us. Molly reaches across the table and squeezes my hand, and I let her.
"I'm sorry you went through that," she says.
"Yeah. Me too."
She doesn't push for more, and I'm grateful.
Instead, she steers the conversation toward safer waters—her kids, her pottery, the new restaurant that opened on Main Street and closed three months later.
By the time we part ways an hour later, I feel closer to normal than I have in months.
Like a person who has friends and drinks coffee and talks about small things without a constant undercurrent of dread.
That sense of almost-normal lasts until I pull into the driveway of my parents' house.
I haven't been able to make myself come here. Haven't been able to make myself face it.
The house looks smaller than I remember. The paint is peeling on the porch rails, and the garden my mother used to tend has gone wild with weeds. Cole said he comes by to mow the lawn and check on things, but there's only so much one person can do, and he's been doing it alone for three years.
Because I wasn't here. Because Craig convinced me a funeral was too morbid, too expensive, too inconvenient. Because I let him.
I sit in the car for a long time, hands tight on the steering wheel, staring at the front door. The engine ticks as it cools.
The anger, when it comes, is so sudden and so fierce that it steals my breath.
Not at Craig. Not this time. At myself.
I wasn't there when they lowered my parents into the ground.
I wasn't there to hold Cole's hand or hear the minister speak or throw dirt on their coffins.
I missed it. I chose to miss it, because a man I'd given my power to told me I should, and I was so deep in his control that I didn't even fight.
My mother would have been devastated. She'd spent her whole life worrying about me, checking in, sending care packages to my Seattle apartment that I had to hide from Craig because he didn't like me "depending" on my family. And when she died, I didn't even show up to say goodbye.
My father would have been furious. He'd taught me to be strong, to stand up for myself, to never let anyone make me smaller than I was. And I'd let Craig shrink me down to nothing while my father was still alive to see it, even if he didn't know it.
The sob that tears out of me is ugly and raw. I press my forehead to the steering wheel and let it come, let the grief and the rage pour out of me in waves I can't control. Years of suppressed guilt, of telling myself I'd make it up to them somehow, of pretending I could live with what I'd done.
I can't live with it. I can't undo it. And I can't keep carrying it like a weight I'll never set down.
When the tears finally stop, I feel hollowed out. Empty. But lighter, too, in a way I don't entirely trust.
I wipe my face with my sleeve and get out of the car.
The key still works. The door swings open with a creak that sounds exactly like it did when I was sixteen, sneaking in past curfew.
The smell hits me first—dust and stale air and, underneath it, something that's still unmistakably home.
My mother's lavender sachets in the hall closet.
My father's pipe tobacco, even though he quit smoking a decade before he died.