Chapter Thirty-Six
Elise
The cabin door sealed with a soft, mechanical thunk, locking us into the pressurized silence of the jet.
For a few minutes, there was only movement: the quiet instructions from the flight attendant, the low hum of the engines rising beneath the floor, and the sharp tilt of acceleration pressing us deep into the cream leather seats.
Outside the window, the Nevada desert dropped away in a violent blur, dissolving into long, dark ribbons of empty highway. Inside, the air smelled of recirculated cold, polished wood, and the untouched tray of catering sitting on the side table like an expensive afterthought.
Brady didn’t look at me. He sat nearest the window, his jaw tight, one large hand wrapped around his phone while the other rested flat against his thigh.
His fingers were splayed, pressed hard into the denim, as if that was the only thing keeping him from coming apart.
The easygoing, open-hearted man from Roy’s garage was still there; that was the awful part.
I could see him beneath the silence, buried under panic, hurt, fear, and a kind of stillness I didn’t know how to reach.
My brain kept trying to organize the situation into something useful: cause, effect, damage, repair.
I had spent my entire life solving problems by isolating the break and building around it.
But this wasn’t a system. This was Brady.
And I hadn’t just made a mistake; I had hurt the only man who had ever looked at the strangest parts of me and treated them like something worth keeping.
The pilot’s voice cut through the overhead speakers, clear and flat. “We’ve leveled out at our cruising altitude, Mr. Holliston. Flight time to New Hampshire will be just under five hours. We’ll update you the second we get closer to the transit checkpoints.”
“Thank you,” Brady said. His voice was polite, empty, and the complete lack of warmth in it made my chest physically ache.
I unbuckled my harness and stood, the slight sway of the cabin rocking my balance as I crossed the narrow aisle.
I sat in the leather seat directly across from him, forcing myself into his peripheral vision because I didn’t want the safe distance of the aisle anymore.
I reached for a bottle of water from the table and set it beside his locked hands, along with a small packet of crackers.
“Eat something,” I said quietly. “I’m not trying to manage you, but I don’t want you walking into Firebrook Valley running on panic and nothing else.”
Brady’s eyes flicked down to the plastic wrapper, then slowly rose to meet mine. The hurt in them hit me harder than anger would have. “Is that what this is?” he asked, his voice rough. “You taking care of me?”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
His mouth tightened. “I want to believe that.”
The words landed exactly where he aimed them. “I deserve that,” I said.
He looked back out the window. The silence between us expanded until it filled the cabin as the engines hummed beneath our feet. On the side table, the ice in the untouched glasses shifted with a faint, delicate clink.
“I thought I was earning your trust,” he said finally. My breath caught. He didn’t look at me when he continued. “At that house. At the storage unit. Every time you let me in a little more, I thought it meant something.”
“It did.”
He turned then, slowly. His eyes were dark and raw, and the sight of them stole every prepared word from my mouth. “Did it? Because from where I’m sitting, it feels like you watched me walk into one setup after another and waited to see if I’d make a fool of myself.”
“No.” The denial came too fast. I forced my hands to unclench in my lap. “No, Brady. I never wanted that.”
“But you did test me.”
“Yes.” The answer sat between us, ugly and unavoidable.
His gaze dropped briefly to my mouth, then away again so quickly I almost wondered if I’d imagined it.
I hadn’t. Heat moved through me, completely inappropriate and impossible to stop.
My body did not understand timing or maybe it understood too much.
Maybe it knew that the man across from me was hurt and furious, and still the only steady thing I wanted to reach for.
“I was scared,” I said. “You walked into my life asking questions about my father, and I didn’t know if you were honest or dangerous or both.”
His jaw flexed.
“As I got to know you,” I continued, my voice softer now, “and we . . . it made it worse.”
His eyes came back to mine. “Worse?” he asked.
“Yes.” I hated how exposed the word sounded. “Because I wanted you to be exactly who you seemed to be.”
For a second, something shifted in his face. Not forgiveness, but something more painful: want. It flashed there and was gone, but it left the air changed. “And now I’m lying to my family for someone who may not give a shit about me.”
I leaned forward before I could stop myself. “That afternoon at Lake Tahoe was real. The senior center was real. The kitchen was real. Asking you to stay with me was real.” My throat tightened. “You have to believe me.”
His hand tightened around the phone. “You weren’t honest with me. Repeatedly.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know what to think about any of this anymore.”
“I understand.” I stared at him, and for once I didn’t have anything clever or technical to hide behind.
I whispered, “I’m not good at full disclosure.
I know how to protect things. I know how to test for weaknesses.
I know how to keep people out.” My voice cracked despite my best effort.
“I don’t know how to love someone without checking every door first.”
The word love changed the cabin. I hadn’t meant to say it. Brady went very still. So did I. The engines kept humming, and the clouds slid past the oval windows, endless and white, but the universe had narrowed to the few feet of space between our seats.
His eyes searched mine. “Don’t use that word now. Not here. Not yet.”
I could have walked it back, clarified, defined, or reframed. I didn’t.
“I don’t know what else to call it,” I said.
His breath left him slowly, like it hurt. “Elise.” My name in his voice almost undid me. It wasn’t warm the way it had been before; it wasn’t easy. It was rough and wounded, dragged up from somewhere deep. “When we finally say it to each other, I need to believe you.”
I stood because sitting still had become impossible.
He tracked the movement but didn’t reach for me, and that restraint hurt more than if he had.
He was angry. He was terrified. His brother was missing.
He had every reason to shut me out. And still, when I stepped closer, his eyes dropped to my hands, then lifted to my face as if he were memorizing the distance I chose to cross.
I stopped between his knees, not touching him, barely breathing. “You can believe me now,” I whispered.
His throat worked, but he didn’t say anything.
The space between us turned electric. Not the bright, easy kind from the diner or his teasing smile in Roy’s garage; this was something darker.
Want pulled tight over grief and fear until every inch of me felt too aware of him.
His hands remained on the armrests; mine hovered uselessly at my sides.
I wanted to touch his hair, his face, the rigid line of his shoulders.
I wanted to crawl into his lap and press my mouth to the place beneath his jaw where his pulse was beating too fast. I wanted to erase the hurt in his eyes, and I knew I couldn’t.
I could kiss him. I could make him want me. I couldn’t make him trust me. And with someone like Brady, trust was everything.
He looked up at me, his expression stripped bare. “Do you have any idea what you do to me?”
My chest tightened. “No.”
A humorless sound left him. “Of course you don’t.”
His hand lifted, then stopped. He stared at it for half a second, like even he didn’t know whether reaching for me was comfort or surrender.
Then his fingers curled gently around my wrist just enough to hold me there.
My pulse kicked beneath his touch, and his gaze dropped to it.
There was a faint hitch in his breathing, the flare of heat in his eyes.
“You’re scared,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Of me?”
“No.”
His thumb moved once over the inside of my wrist, and my knees almost forgot their purpose. “Then of what?” he asked hoarsely.
“That I ruined everything. That you’ll never look at me the same.”
His eyes lifted to mine and his grip softened. “Blindly? Like an idiot willing to believe anything and anyone?”
My breath caught. He tugged once, barely enough to count as a request. I could have stepped back; he would have let me. I knew that with the same certainty I knew my own name. Instead, I moved closer. “If I could go back, I would do it all so differently, but I can’t.”
My knees brushed the inside of his thighs.
His hand slid from my wrist to my hip, stopping there like he was fighting himself.
His other hand came up slowly, so slowly, and touched the side of my face.
The contact was almost nothing, but it destroyed me anyway.
His palm was warm and rough, and I turned into it before I could remember not to.
His thumb grazed my cheekbone. His eyes were on my mouth now, and mine were on his, and the air between us thinned until every breath felt borrowed.
“Elise,” he said again. This time it sounded like a warning. Or a prayer.
I bent toward him, and he rose to meet me halfway.
Our mouths were a breath apart when his phone vibrated beside him.
The sound cracked through the cabin like a gunshot. We both froze. For one suspended second, neither of us moved. Then Brady closed his eyes. The pain that crossed his face brought me back to myself faster than any alarm could have.
Evan. Of course. His brother was missing, and I had nearly let us disappear into each other because wanting him was easier than facing what waited for us on the ground.
Brady’s hand fell from my face, and the loss was immediate and brutal. He reached for his phone, looked at the screen, and his jaw tightened. “Bella.”
I stepped back.
He answered. “What do we know?” His voice was still rough, but everything in him had shifted toward his family. Toward the crisis.
I wrapped my arms around myself and turned toward the window while he listened.
The clouds outside were soft and endless.
Behind me, Brady said, “No. I’m still in the air.
” A pause. I closed my eyes. Whatever Bella said, I couldn’t hear it, but Brady’s answer was quiet.
“I know.” Another pause. “No, but I’ll explain when I see you. ”
That last one was about me. I felt it in the hollow beneath my ribs.
When he ended the call, the silence returned, but it was different now. It was wounded. He set the phone down and leaned back in his seat. For a moment, he looked older than he had in the diner, older than he had in the garage. The boyish openness I’d first noticed was absent.
“I wish . . .” I started, then stopped because I would only be repeating myself.
He looked at me. “Me too.” The mercy of that almost broke me. “But here we are,” he added.
“Here we are.” The words landed low in my body and high in my throat, painful in both places.
He looked toward the window, then back at me. “I don’t know how to want you and not trust you at the same time.”
His honesty, even in the face of all he’d learned, filled me with shame. My eyes burned. It was tempting to blame my father for raising me to see risk everywhere, but I was the one who’d hurt Brady, not him. I was the one who’d had sex with a man I hadn’t been entirely truthful with.
The flight attendant appeared at the front of the cabin, hesitated as if she’d walked into the aftermath of an explosion, then quietly retreated again.
I returned to the seat across from him because I didn’t trust myself to stay standing near his hands, his mouth, the ache of what had almost happened.
The crackers and water still sat untouched beside him.
After a long moment, Brady picked up the bottle.
He twisted off the cap and drank. I waited for him to say something. Anything.
When he set the bottle down, he didn’t look at me, but he didn’t move it away either. We stayed like that, facing each other across the narrow space while the plane carried us east. Too close to ignore each other. Too wary to reach out.
Unknowns were something I’d been taught to prepare for, but I was going into New Hampshire with no idea of what to expect. No plan. No idea how he would introduce me to his family.
All I had was a willingness to hope and try.