Chapter 37
Ethan
The wind comes in sharp off the water, colder than it should be for this time of year, carrying that mineral bite that only exists here—iron, stone, and old ghosts.
It slides through my shirt, raising every hair along my arms. The sun’s bright, high, mercilessly clear, but the wind wins anyway. It always does in this place.
The quarry spreads out below me, carved into the earth like a wound the world never bothered to close.
A wide bowl of impossible blue, still and deep enough to swallow sound.
Sunlight cuts across the surface like a blade, glinting in long, bright strokes that make me squint.
It’s too bright today. Too clean. As if the earth scrubbed itself of memories overnight.
Like the world doesn’t remember anything that happened in it.
I stand at the edge anyway. I always do.
Hands in my pockets. Spine straight. Heels planted over ground I know far too well. It’s the same stance I used to take on uneasy perimeters in another life—when everything depended on being steady, silent, unshakeable. The stance I fall into when I don’t know how to stand at all.
Lily thinks I come here to “look at the pretty water.”
Lucky doesn’t yet know about this place.
This place has been my pressure valve, my graveyard, my confession booth. When my head gets too loud, when the quiet at home feels sharp instead of safe, when everything inside me crawls under my skin—I come here. Sit with the ghosts. Try to make sense of the parts of myself I pretend don’t exist.
Right now, those parts are deafening.
I inhale slowly, hold it, let the air settle into the hollow spots in my ribs. It tastes like dust and sunlight and the faint echo of who I used to be. Saltless. Sterile. Bare.
“Mara,” I say quietly.
Her name barely makes it past my throat. It scrapes out of me like a confession I’ve rehearsed in silence for months. My voice doesn’t shake, but my ribs feel too tight. Always the ribs—my body’s favorite place to store the things I never say.
The surface of the water ripples. A small shift. A shiver. Wind or memory, I can’t tell. Maybe both.
“I’m moving on,” I say.
The words drop between me and the water like stones. Heavy. Too heavy. Too late. Too much. I wait for the guilt to crush me, but it doesn’t—not all the way. It just presses against my chest, testing the seams, reminding me it exists.
My jaw clenches on reflex. It always does when emotion forces its way through the armor. My pulse picks up, that old familiar thrum—fight or flee or freeze. My fingertips curl inside my pockets. But I stay exactly where I am. Staying is the new battlefield. The braver one.
Lucky’s laugh flickers across my mind—sharp, messy, beautiful in a way that feels like chaos and salvation at once. The way she looks at me like I’m safe, like I’m solid, like I’m someone worth leaning on.
Her bruises.
Her stubbornness.
Her stupid courage.
Her choosing me, over LA, over the noise that feeds her, over the entire world she could go back to in a heartbeat.
Something shifts deep in my chest. Not soft. Nothing about this is soft. It’s the grinding of tectonic plates—slow, destructive, inevitable. A reshaping.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit into the empty air. “But I want to.”
My voice is low, the kind of low that happens only when I’m admitting something I’d rather swallow. The quarry absorbs the words, unhurried. As if it’s been waiting years for me to say them.
Above me, a hawk circles in a lazy pattern, riding the warm thermals. Stones crack under the sun’s heat. A single leaf skates across the water’s surface, drifting aimlessly, but free.
It’s absurdly peaceful here. Wrongly peaceful. Peace like this shouldn’t coexist with the things I’ve buried in this place—the grief, the guilt, the fear that loving again is the same as inviting disaster.
But maybe that’s precisely why I’m here.
I rub my thumb against the scar on my palm—old habit, old comfort. A tether to the version of myself who needed something to hold onto. “I loved you,” I say quietly. “I always will.” My throat tightens, but the words keep coming. “But I’m not supposed to stay frozen with you.”
The breeze picks up. Warm, this time. Less bite. More… permission.
My voice drops lower. “She’s… different.” A huff leaves me—something almost like a laugh. “Loud. Chaotic. Terrible at closing kitchen drawers and cooking.”
I shake my head once, staring at the water like it might offer some kind of answer. “And she’s the first person who’s made me feel something human in years.”
Years.
The last time I’d felt anything this bright…
Silence settles back in. Not judgmental. Not heavy. Just there, like moss growing over old stone.
I let my shoulders drop. Slowly. Carefully.
As if my body’s forgotten how. The tension has been a living thing inside me since the kidnapping—since the moment I found the tire marks, since the sedan in the woods, since hearing Sheifer’s voice echo through the trees.
Since I nearly lost Lucky before I was even brave enough to tell her how much she mattered.
“I’m not replacing you,” I say, almost a whisper. “I’m letting myself live.”
The wind shifts direction, brushing past me. Just a subtle change in pressure. But something in me recognizes it for what it is: a nod. A release.
A benediction.
My chest expands, and the air goes in easier than before. Not perfectly smooth. Not painless. But freer.
I take one last look at the quarry—the grave of old things, the keeper of my shame, the quiet witness to everything I wasn’t ready to face. The water glints back at me, blue and bright and unmoved.
I’ve said enough.
I step back from the edge, my boots grinding against the dirt. Then I turn. The path up the ridge is marked by years of my footsteps, carved into the earth the same way the quarry is carved into me.
But this time… it feels different.
It feels like leaving something behind instead of dodging it.
The trees rustle as I step into their shade. The air shifts, warmer and smelling faintly of sap and sun-warmed pine. Homeward air. Living air.
Lucky’s waiting. Probably pacing and pretending she’s not.
And for the first time in a very, very long time—
I’m ready to be someone worth waiting for.
The engine hums beneath me as I take the long road back from the quarry, dust rising behind the truck in soft spirals.
The sun hangs low, warm through the windshield.
My chest still feels cracked open from what I left behind in that clearing of stone and ghosts—but lighter too. Like something finally unclenched.
Home is ten minutes ahead.
My phone vibrates in the cup holder. Lily’s name flashes across the screen.
I hit the speaker. “Hey, bug.”
“Daddy!” Her voice fills the cab—bright, loud, exactly what I need. “Is everything good at home?”
“As good as it can be,” I say, eyes flicking to the treeline rushing past. “How’s Nana spoiling you?”
“She gave me chocolate after dinner,” she whispers conspiratorially, “but don’t tell Aunt Charlotte. She’s trying to make me eat… broccoli.”
I huff a laugh. “Poor thing.”
There’s a rustling, like she’s shifting on the sofa. Then—softly—“How’s Lucky?”
My grip on the wheel tightens, but in a good way. “She’s okay. Resting.”
A beat. “She misses you.”
A delighted gasp. “Really?”
“Really.”
Silence. A thoughtful kind. Then Lily says, in that small, earnest voice of hers, “I miss her too. Nana’s fun, but… Lucky’s like… I don’t know. She’s nice. And she listens. And she talks to me like I’m her friend.”
My heart squeezes, slow and hard.
“She thinks the world of you,” I tell her.
Another pause. A long one this time.
So I nudge it. “What do you think about her moving in? With us.”
She doesn’t answer immediately.
Then—“Is she your girlfriend yet?”
I blink. “Yet?”
“Yeah,” she giggles. “Nana and Aunt Charlotte have a bet about it. They wanted to see how long it takes for you two to get your stuff together.” She lowers her voice. “They didn’t say stuff.”
Of course, they didn’t.
“I’m going to have a word with both of them,” I mutter.
She giggles again—carefree, innocent, something I will burn the world down to protect.
“I can’t wait to come home,” she says. “And live with Lucky.”
The smile pulls at my mouth before I can stop it. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “I think that’s going to work just fine.”
We say our goodbyes. The call ends.
The quiet that follows is different now—less heavy. Less haunted.
But the memories still come.
A few days ago, everything could’ve ended differently. Spectacularly worse. The kind of ending that rewrites a man in the ugliest ways.
But you don’t come into my territory. You don’t follow someone I care about. You don’t put your hands on her. You don’t make her bleed.
And you sure as hell don’t walk away from it.
I didn’t tell Lucky what happened after she smashed that rock into Sheifer’s skull—not the part she must never know.
She thinks Sam and I “made him disappear,” and that’s the version she’ll keep. The clean version.
Because the truth?
That blow she gave him… the sickening crack…
He never recovered. She shattered bone. By the time Sam hauled him to my old fishing shack—mile off-grid, forgotten on purpose—Sheifer was already gone. Neck slack. Eyes empty. Dead weight in every sense of the word.
Lucky will never know she ended him. And I’ll burn that secret before I ever let it touch her.
Sam and I handled what was left—quietly, efficiently, permanently. The sort of job we were trained for. The sort the government pretends doesn’t happen.
Sheriff Dawson filed his report on the bank yesterday. Faulty wiring, he wrote.
I snort. My jaw ticks.
Faulty wiring, my arse.
He hates covering for me. Hates pretending he didn’t see the pieces we didn’t leave behind. Hates knowing I acted outside the system, and he backed it.
But he also hated Sheifer. And he loves Lily.
We all have our reasons.
The road curves. Home comes into view—my house, Lucky’s figure on the front porch with her guitar, the life I didn’t think I’d get another shot at.
I roll my shoulders back. Shift into park.
Yeah.
Everything’s different now.
And I’ll kill a hundred more ghosts if it means keeping them safe.