26. Az #3
“I love you, Azalea Moore Jackson, even when you weaponize antique headboards and traumatize your best friend for sport.”
I snort into his shoulder. “Romantic.”
“Accurate. Accurate is my love language tonight.” He tucks the quilt around my shoulder and kisses the tip of my nose.
“And you’re still the dramatic one.”
“I’m the lucky one.” He noses into my hair, inhales like he’s stocking up. “Sleep if you can. Or don’t. I’ll be right here either way.”
We breathe. We drift. My body hums in pleasant overused waves.
His heartbeat under my palm keeps time with the slow rock of moonlight across the ceiling boards Grandma June whitewashed herself.
For the first time in months, the quiet between us isn’t a battlefield or a negotiation.
It’s a bed. It’s a lock clicking. It’s love said out loud on a porch and then proven with volume and reverence and the kind of shameless noise that makes single friends invent seventeen-cat contingency plans.
Later, much later, I’m lying in Grandma June’s bed, watching the moonlight move across the ceiling, when I hear Wren’s voice from the other room.
“Oh my God, are they… is that… I can hear laughing. I’m surrounded by happy couples and I’m going to die alone with seventeen cats.”
I snort, pressing my face into Eli’s shoulder to muffle it.
“She’s going to murder us,” Eli says.
“Worth it.”
“Completely worth it.”
We lie there in comfortable silence for a while. His hand is on my belly, feeling the baby move. She’s active tonight, kicking up a storm like she knows her parents found their way back to each other tonight.
“The ring,” Eli says quietly.
I tense. “What about it?”
“I still have it. I’ve been carrying it since-” He stops. “Since you left. It’s in my pocket right now. It’s always in my pocket.”
I think about what that means. Fourteen weeks of carrying a ring I put in his hand. Fourteen weeks of hoping.
“Not tonight,” I say.
“Okay.”
“But soon.”
His breath catches. “Yeah?”
“Soon.”
“Soon’s enough.” He kisses my forehead. “Soon’s enough.”
The guests leave before dawn. Abbie and Grayson carry their bags to the car while their baby, Eleanor, fusses in her car seat. Wren hugs me twice, promises to text from the road. By five-thirty, they’re gone, taillights disappearing down the drive.
Lupe said goodbye earlier, headed to her cousin’s place with Mateo for the night. The farmhouse feels bigger without them.
Outside, the last truck collecting borrowed harvest tables rattles down the service lane. Dez radios that the cleanup crew is leaving.
“You could still get an hour,” Eli says. He’s watching me from Grandma June’s doorway.
“So could you.”
Neither of us moves.
The sky is beginning to pale when someone pounds on the front door.
Eli goes still beside me. The knock comes again, three hard raps, then silence.
He reaches for the radio on the nightstand. “Dez. Front entrance. Someone at the door.”
Static. Then Dez’s voice, tense: “Copy. We’ve got a situation at the east service gate. Vehicle fire. Santiago and Torres are already there. I’m en route. Can you hold?”
Vehicle fire. My stomach drops.
“Negative,” Eli says. “Possible threat at the main house. Get someone back here now.”
“Trying. Radio’s cutting in and out. Coming back now.”
Eli’s already moving, pulling on jeans and a shirt, grabbing his phone. “We stay together. Lock the front, don’t open it for anyone. We’re going to the study.”
The study has a reinforced door. We practiced this.
I follow him down the hall, down the stairs. The pounding has stopped. Eli checks the peephole and goes rigid.
“Box on the mat. No one visible.”
The lid is off, the photographs fanned faceup across the shallow box. Through the narrow pane beside the door, in the porch light, I can make out the greenhouse, weeks ago. The fair. A distant view of this porch. My stomach turns. Someone has been watching us since before the new security.
He doesn’t open the door. Instead, he bolts it and we move toward the back of the house, toward the study. I’m two steps behind him, hand on my pendant, when I hear it.
Wood splinters at the service entrance off the utility room.
The east service lane. The last cleanup truck used it minutes ago. Over the radio, a broken scrap of Dez’s voice: “Gate chain’s off. The fire was a diversion. Get inside and lock-”
“Eli-”
He’s already turning, putting himself between me and the sound, one hand reaching back to push me toward the study. He looks over his shoulder at me just as a shape comes fast out of the utility passage.
The baseball bat catches Eli across the back of the head.
He drops. Just drops, and I’m screaming his name, falling to my knees beside him. Blood. There’s blood spreading on the tile and his eyes are closed and I can’t breathe.
Pulse. Find a pulse.
My fingers shake against his throat. There. Weak, but there.
The pendant. I grab it, press the button, hold for three seconds. The light blinks green. Alert sent. This alert tells dispatch where I am now. It cannot tell them what happens next.
I reach for Eli again, trying to keep my shaking fingers against his pulse. Footsteps scrape the tile behind me.