Chapter 30 Finneas
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Finneas
Luca found her in three hours. Whitebrook, her grandmother’s house.
I booked the first flight out and didn’t sleep, my wolf pacing inside me for the entire night, frantic, restless, throwing himself against my ribs with every minute that passed.
Weeks of dead silence and now he wouldn’t shut up, pushing me forward like a compass needle locked on one direction.
I landed before nine, rented a car at the airport, drove with the windows down because the confined space was suffocating.
Whitebrook was small, quiet, streets empty before ten, every third house with a garden.
The address belonged to a house with a flower-covered porch, a weathered fence that needed painting, and more color in the yard than I’d seen in months.
I walked to the front door with my jaw clenched, fury and desperation tangled so tight I couldn’t separate them, and knocked.
The door opened and a woman looked up at me. Small, white-haired, sharp eyes behind reading glasses. She was maybe five foot four and she filled the doorway like a barricade.
She knew who I was. I could see it in her face, the way her jaw set and her spine straightened, the way she looked at me like she’d been expecting this the way you expect a storm you saw coming days ago.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” she said.
“Please. I just need five minutes.”
“No.” She stepped into the doorway, arms crossed. “You broke my girl. She came home in pieces. You don’t get five minutes.”
“I made a mistake. A terrible one. I love her.”
“Funny way of showing it.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Please, just let me...”
“She doesn’t want to hear it.” She pointed past me, toward the street. “Off my porch. Now. Before I get my neighbor’s dogs involved.”
She meant it. I could see it in her face, the same immovable stubbornness I recognized from Andrea, the same set jaw, the same level stare that said I have made my decision and you can fight it or accept it but you cannot change it.
I understood now where Andrea got it from.
This woman raised her. This woman put that spine in her.
I stepped back off the porch, onto the lawn, but I didn’t leave.
“I’m not leaving,” I said.
“Then you’ll be standing on my lawn for a very long time.”
“I’ll stand here as long as it takes.”
She looked at me for a few more seconds, measuring, then closed the door. The lock clicked.
I stood on the lawn. The morning was cool and gray, clouds low over the mountains, and it started to rain about an hour in.
Light at first, barely there, then heavier, soaking through my shirt in minutes.
Water ran down my face, into my collar, through the fabric until my shoes squelched in the grass.
I stood there. My wolf was pressing against my chest, shoving me toward the house, toward the door, every instinct screaming at me to go in, to find her, to make her listen.
I stayed on the grass. She told me to leave and I wasn’t leaving, but I wasn’t going to force my way in either.
I was done making decisions for other people.
She came home mid-morning. The rain was still falling, lighter now but persistent.
I saw her before she saw me, walking up the sidewalk from the direction of the park in a light jacket and sneakers, her hair darkened with rain, the jacket soaked through at the shoulders.
She looked different from the last time I saw her.
More color in her face, something in the way she carried herself that had changed.
She saw me and stopped on the sidewalk maybe twenty feet from the porch.
“Finneas?”
I pulled off my jacket without thinking and crossed the distance between us. “You’re soaking wet, put this on.”
She stepped back. “Don’t touch me.”
“Andrea, you’re drenched, just take the jacket.”
“I said don’t touch me.” Her voice was ice. “What are you doing here?”
I held the jacket out between us, helpless. She was shivering slightly, rain on her face, and I wanted to wrap her in it so badly my arms ached. She didn’t take it.
“I came to see you. I need to talk to you.”
“I don’t want anything to do with a married man.”
“I’m not married. The wedding is off. My mother lied, Andrea. She faked the illness, the hospital, all of it. She did it to separate us.”
She stared at me. Rain running down her temples into her collar. I waited for the shock, the questions.
She slapped me across the face.
My head snapped to the side. The sting bloomed across my cheek, sharp and immediate. I didn’t lift my hand to touch it.
“I don’t care about your reasons.” Her voice was shaking but her eyes were dry and furious. “You looked me in the face and said none of it was real. Whatever your reason was, you still chose it over me.”
“I know.”
“Go home.”
“Andrea, please, you’re freezing. At least go inside and get warm.”
“Don’t pretend you care about whether I’m cold.”
“I do care. I’ve never stopped caring. Please just take the damn jacket.”
“Go home, Finneas.”
“My home is with you.”
“No.” Her face twisted and I saw the hurt underneath the fury, raw, still fresh. “Don’t you dare say that to me right now.”
She turned and walked up the porch steps. Her grandmother was standing at the screen door, arms crossed, watching the whole thing. Andrea pushed past her into the house without a word. The grandmother looked at me for a long second, then followed Andrea inside. The door closed. The lock turned.
I stood on the lawn holding my jacket with the rain soaking through my shirt, watching the closed door, the image of her shivering past me burned into my brain.
She was cold, wet, shivering, and she wouldn’t take the jacket because taking anything from me meant accepting that I was here, that I existed in her space. She wasn’t ready for that.
I put the jacket back on even though it was soaked and useless.
I deserved this. The slap, the locked door, the refusal to let me explain.
My mother manipulated me and Lorraine schemed behind my back but I was the one who said the goddamn words.
I chose them. Standing on this lawn in the rain was the least I owed her.
I went to my car after a while. Not giving up, just soaked through and shivering, my shirt plastered to my skin.
I sat in the driver’s seat with the heat on and watched the house.
The curtains were drawn. Warm light glowed behind them and I pictured her in there with her grandmother, drinking tea, not thinking about me.
Or thinking about me and hating me, which was worse.
An hour passed, then two. My phone had been buzzing nonstop since the morning, the screen lighting up every few minutes with names I didn’t want to see.
Luca I answered, texted back: she’s here.
she won’t see me. I’m staying. His reply was just eat something.
I’d texted Lorraine on the drive to the airport: the wedding’s off.
Twelve missed calls from her since. Eight from my mother.
Three from Conrad Ashtor. I turned the phone face down on the passenger seat.
Around noon the front curtain moved. Barely, a gap of an inch, someone looking out at my car across the street. It closed again.
The afternoon dragged. The rain stopped around two, clouds thinning, weak sunlight breaking through.
I got out once to walk up and down the block because my legs were cramping, then came back.
My phone lit up again, a voicemail notification from Lorraine.
I could see the preview of her latest text underneath it: you can’t do this to me Finneas I swear to god if you think you can just.. .
I deleted everything without reading the rest.
Around five the front door opened. The grandmother came out onto the porch with a mug in her hand. She walked to the edge of the steps and looked at my car.
“Are you still here?” she called across the street.
I rolled down the window. “Yes ma’am.”
“Have you eaten?”
“No.”
She looked at me. I couldn’t read her expression from this distance but she stood there, studying the car, before she went back inside.
Five minutes later she came out again, crossed the street, and set a sandwich and a glass of water on the roof of my car without a word.
Peanut butter and jelly on white bread, cut diagonal.
Then she walked back to the house and closed the door.
I ate the sandwich slowly, drank the water, put my hands back on the steering wheel. Peanut butter and jelly from a woman who told me to get off her porch twelve hours ago. I didn’t know what to make of that.
The sun set behind the clouds. The street lights came on. The porch light turned on too, warm yellow against the darkening sky, and I watched it burn and thought about all the nights I’d sat outside Andrea’s Atlanta house watching a different porch light.
The curtain twitched again around nine. That same inch of warm light through the gap. I watched it and waited.
I wasn’t leaving. If that meant sleeping in this car in front of her grandmother’s house in a town I’d never been to, that’s what I’d do.
I’d sit here every day until she talked to me.
If she never talked to me I’d sit here anyway, because the old Finneas would have left, would have told himself he’d tried, would have driven back to Atlanta and buried himself in work.
I was done being that man. That man lost her. This one was going to fight.