14. Lucas
— ? —
Lucas
I drive her to the hospital.
Lily doesn’t speak the whole way, her hand gripping mine so tightly her knuckles are white. I can feel the tremors running through her - not crying, not yet, just her body trying to process a loss it hasn’t fully accepted.
I keep my eyes on the road and hold on.
The hospital corridors are too bright, too sterile, the fluorescent lights humming overhead like a soundtrack to grief. Nurses move past us in soft-soled shoes, their faces professionally sympathetic. I hate this place. I hate that she has to be here.
Eleanor Maxwell is barely conscious when we arrive. The machines beep in slow rhythm, tracking a heart that’s finally giving out after ninety years of fighting. The room smells like flowers and antiseptic and something else, something that feels like time running out.
But when Lily takes her grandmother’s hand, the old woman’s eyes flutter open.
“Did you do it?” Her voice is barely a breath, thread-thin but fierce. “Did you release it?”
“Not yet.” Lily’s voice cracks, and I watch her struggle to hold herself together. “I wanted you to know first.”
A ghost of a smile crosses Eleanor’s weathered face. “Then do it now. While I can see.”
Lily pulls out her phone. Her hands are shaking so badly she nearly drops it twice. I step closer, my chest against her back, steadying her without a word. She leans into me, just slightly, just enough, and my arm tightens around her before I decide to move it.
She opens the email with the flash drive’s contents attached. Every major news outlet in the country. Years of Burton family secrets, ready to detonate.
She presses send.
“It’s done.”
Eleanor Maxwell squeezes her granddaughter’s hand with surprising strength. Her eyes - Lily’s eyes, I realize now, the same dark depths - shine with something that looks like peace.
“Good girl.” Her voice is fading, but her smile is radiant. “My beautiful, brave girl. You did what I couldn’t. What your mother couldn’t.” A rattling breath. “Make them pay. And then... live. Promise me you’ll live.”
“I promise.” Lily is crying now, tears streaming down her face unchecked. “Grandmother-”
“I’m so glad I found you.” Eleanor’s eyes drift to me, standing behind her granddaughter like a guardian. “Take care of her.”
“I will.” The words come out rough, scraped from somewhere deep. “I swear it.”
Eleanor nods once, satisfied. Then her eyes close.
She doesn’t open them again.
The machines flatline with a sound I’ll hear in my nightmares for years.
The next few hours are a blur.
Doctors with clipboards and careful condolences. Paperwork that seems designed to make grief administrative. Phone calls to lawyers, to funeral homes, to people whose names I don’t recognize but who apparently need to know that Eleanor Maxwell is gone.
I handle everything I can. Not because Lily asks - she’s not in a state to ask for anything - but because it’s the only way I can help. The only way I can be useful when the woman I love is drowning in front of me and I can’t do a damn thing to stop it.
She sits in the hospital chapel for two hours, staring at nothing.
I bring her coffee she doesn’t drink. A sandwich she doesn’t touch. I sit beside her in the hard wooden pew and I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. I just stay.
That’s all I can do. Stay.
When she finally looks at me, her eyes are hollow in a way that makes my chest ache.
“She spent twenty years looking for me,” Lily whispers. “Twenty years. And I only got a few weeks with her.”
“She found you.” I take her hand, thread my fingers through hers. “That’s what mattered to her. She said it herself - she was glad she found you.”
“It’s not enough time.”
“It never is.” I think of my own mother, of all the things I never got to say to her. “But you gave her something no one else could. You gave her peace. Closure. She got to see you become the person she always believed you could be.”
Lily leans into me, her forehead against my shoulder, and I wrap my arms around her and hold on.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she admits. “Grieve someone I barely knew but loved anyway.”
“You don’t have to know how. You just have to feel it.” I press a kiss to her hair. “And you don’t have to do it alone.”
She pulls back enough to look at me, and something in her expression shifts. The grief is still there, but underneath it, something fiercer. Something that looks like need.
“Take me somewhere,” she says. “Anywhere that isn’t here. Anywhere that isn’t death.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Somewhere with water.” Her voice cracks slightly. “You told me once your mother loved the ocean. That she said it was the only honest thing in the world.”
I stare at her. I’d mentioned that in passing, weeks ago, in the middle of everything else. When we were still dancing around each other, still pretending this thing between us wasn’t inevitable.
She remembered.
“I know a place,” I say. “A friend’s cabin, up the coast. It’s private. Quiet. Right on the water.”
“How far?”
“Two hours. Maybe less if there’s no traffic.”
She stands, and I see her pull herself together through sheer force of will - spine straightening, shoulders squaring. The woman who walked into that hospital broken is reassembling herself piece by piece in front of me.
“Then let’s go.”
The drive is quiet but not silent.
Lily curls into the passenger seat, her body angled toward me, her head eventually coming to rest against my shoulder. The highway unfolds ahead of us, empty in the predawn darkness, and I drive one-handed so I can keep the other wrapped around hers.
She dozes fitfully, jerking awake every few minutes like her body won’t let her rest. Each time, her eyes find me first - checking that I’m still here, that this is still real - and something in my chest tightens.
Three years I watched her suffer in silence. Three years I told myself it wasn’t my place to intervene.
Never again.
“Tell me about her,” Lily murmurs, half-asleep. “Your mother. What was she like?”
The question catches me off guard. No one asks about my mother. Not in my family, where her death is treated like an inconvenient footnote. Not among my friends, who learned long ago that the subject was off-limits.
But Lily isn’t asking to be polite. She’s asking because she wants to know. Because she understands loss in a way most people don’t.
“She was gentle,” I say slowly, the words rusty from disuse. “Too gentle for that family. She used to read to me every night, even when I was too old for it. Poetry, mostly. She said the Burtons needed more beauty in their lives.”
Lily’s fingers tighten around mine.
“She sounds wonderful.”
“She was. She just...” I swallow hard. “She couldn’t survive them. Victoria broke her down, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.”
“Like she tried to do to me.”
“Yes.” My jaw tightens. “Exactly like that.”
Lily lifts her head from my shoulder, and when I glance over, her eyes are fierce despite the exhaustion.
“But I survived,” she says. “Because of you.”
“You survived because you’re stronger than any of them. I just-”
“You saw me.” She cuts me off, her voice steady. “When no one else did. When I couldn’t even see myself. You saw me, Lucas. That’s not nothing.”
I don’t trust myself to respond. I just lift her hand to my lips and press a kiss to her knuckles, trying to communicate everything I can’t say out loud.
The rest of the drive passes in comfortable silence, her head on my shoulder, my hand in hers, the first gray light of dawn breaking over the horizon.
The cabin sits at the end of a winding dirt road, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It’s small - just one room with a kitchenette, a bed piled with quilts, and a stone fireplace that’s probably older than both of us combined.
Rain starts falling as I pull into the gravel drive, soft at first, then harder, drumming against the windshield like impatient fingers.
“It’s perfect,” Lily breathes, staring through the rain-streaked glass.
We make a run for it, laughing despite everything as the rain soaks us in seconds. I fumble with the key while she presses against my back, shivering, her breath warm on my neck.
Inside, the cabin smells like cedar and dust and salt air. I find matches in a drawer and kneel in front of the fireplace, coaxing the kindling to catch while Lily explores the small space.
“There’s only one bed,” she observes.
“I can take the floor-”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Her voice is soft, but there’s something underneath it. Something that makes my hands still on the matches. “I don’t want you on the floor, Lucas.”
The fire catches, flames licking at the logs, casting dancing shadows across the walls. I stand slowly, turning to face her.
She’s standing by the window, the gray light and rain behind her, her wet dress clinging to every curve. Her hair is plastered to her face, her makeup long since cried off, and she’s never looked more beautiful.
“Lily-”
“I need to shower,” she says. “I need to get the hospital off my skin. The death.” Her voice wavers. “Will you still be here when I come out?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She nods once, then disappears into the bathroom. The door clicks shut, and a moment later, I hear the water start.
I add more logs to the fire. Find a bottle of whiskey in the cabinet and pour two glasses. Try not to think about her in the shower, water streaming down her body, washing away grief and fear and everything that’s happened.
I fail spectacularly.
My hands are shaking when the water finally shuts off, grief and adrenaline and the impossible pressure of being strong for her when I’m barely holding myself together. The fire crackles. The rain drums on the roof. And I wait.
The bathroom door opens.
She emerges wrapped in nothing but a blanket, her hair damp and curling at the ends, her face bare and flushed from the hot water. She’s been crying again - I can see it in the red-rimmed eyes, the blotchy skin - but there’s something else in her expression now.
Hunger.
“Come here,” I say, my voice rough.