Chapter 3
Jenna
I surface in pieces.
Not all the way. The pain won’t let me. The dull roar in my head keeps time with my heartbeat like a metronome set to miserable. But somewhere beneath the hurt, there’s warmth. A blanket. The smell of coffee and wood smoke and something baking.
Voices.
I can’t open my eyes. The lids are too heavy, glued shut with exhaustion.
But my ears work. My ears have always been my first line of defense.
In foster care, you learn to read a house by its sounds before you ever open your eyes.
The scrape of a chair means someone’s awake.
A door slamming means trouble. Silence means you’ve been forgotten, or you’re about to be.
This house has steady sounds. The tick of a clock. And two sets of boots, heavy on the wooden floor.
A new voice hits the room like a fist on a table.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Deep. Bigger than the room. Not the voice I’ve been falling asleep to for six months. This one carries authority like a man who’s used to being obeyed and can’t fathom why he wasn't consulted.
“Who the hell is that on our couch?”
“Keep your voice down.” Ethan. Quiet but immovable. I know that tone. He uses it on the phone when he’s telling me something that isn’t a suggestion. “She’s hurt.”
“I can see she’s hurt. That doesn’t answer my question.”
A weighted pause.
“I think it’s Jenna.”
“Who’s Jenna?”
“The woman I’ve been talking to for the last six months.”
“Talking to. From where?”
“Marlie’s Angels.”
A set of boots shifts. As if the name of the agency Marlie runs is a reassurance.
“Six months.” The big voice is quieter now but no less sharp. “Why didn’t we know about this?”
“Because it was private.”
“Ethan—”
“Daniel.” A woman’s voice. Warm but firm, the tone of someone who’s learned exactly how to handle big men with bigger reactions. “Not now.”
Footsteps. Lighter than the men’s. Coming closer.
The blanket shifts. Not pulled away but adjusted. Tucked more securely around my shoulders and smoothed down with a careful hand. Then fingers near my face, feather-light, checking the edge of a small bandage above my eye without disturbing it.
I know this touch. I’ve been on the receiving end of it exactly twice in my life: once from Mrs. Reeves, who cut my toast into triangles and sang to me when my skin flared.
And once from a caseworker named Linda, who held my hand in the back of a sedan and said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. This one didn’t work out either.”
Through my lashes, I catch a sliver: dark hair pulled back. Brown eyes, velvet and warm, scanning my face with focused attention. She’s young—not much older than me, if at all—but she carries herself like a woman who’s been responsible for other people since long before anyone asked her to be.
“She’s hot,” the woman murmurs over her shoulder to the room. “Has anyone checked her temperature since the doctor left?”
“I’ve been monitoring her.” Ethan’s voice is closer now, strained in a way I haven’t heard before, like my high temperature is his fault.
“I know you have.” Her voice softens for half a second before the edge returns. “But monitoring is not the same as doing something about it. I’ll get a cool cloth and some water. Daniel, go start the coffee. Give your brother some room before the two of you turn this into a testosterone summit.”
“We’re talking about this later.” Then the sound of boots already moving toward the kitchen.
“Later,” Ethan agrees, his voice edged with impatience.
The woman pauses by the couch. I feel her gaze on me the way you feel sunlight through a window.
“She drove a long way to get here,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.” Ethan’s voice, rough. “She did.”
“Good. She’s where she’s supposed to be.”
The words are spoken so softly that I almost miss them.
Her footsteps move toward the kitchen. A drawer opens. Water runs.
My groggy brain files her in the place I keep important data. The woman with brown eyes and careful hands, who tucked the blanket around me as if she’d done it a thousand times. She recognized that I needed tending, and she tended.
Burrowing deeper into the cushions, I let the fog take me under.
I wake again, more aware. Tucked into the corner of a couch with cushions propped on both sides like a deliberate fortress, built by someone who understood that waking up in a strange place is its own kind of violence.
My shoes are off, neatly lined up where I can see them. My clothes are intact, every button fastened, every zipper closed.
The flash drive.
I instinctively reach for the pocket of my jacket, which is bunched up beneath me. My head screams, and the room tilts. I need that flash drive. Without it, I’m just a woman who stole nothing and ran nowhere, and every risk I took is—
Boots scrape against the wooden floor.
“Easy.”
My chest tightens. I’ve heard this voice every night for six months through a phone speaker.
I push my smudged glasses up my nose. The familiar habit buys me a moment as my mind struggles to catch up.
He has a face. Of course, he does. But I didn’t expect it to be this one—lean, a bit tired, a jaw covered in stubble that’s grown beyond mere scruff, and striking blue eyes.
Phone calls don’t tell you about eyes the color of a wide-open sky on a clear day.
“Ethan.” My voice is a rasp; his name both a confirmation and a question.
“Hey, Jen.” The corner of his mouth lifts, not quite a smile, but something more private.
He’s the only person who has ever called me Jen.
“I made it,” I manage.
His face softens. “You made it. You’re at Stoneridge.” His drawl is more pronounced than on the phone, with flatter vowels and softer consonants. “The ranch. You found it.”
“I found—I crashed—My car is—”
“In the ditch. I know.” He doesn’t move closer or crowd me. He stays exactly where he is, with three feet of charged air between us. It might as well be three inches from the reaction of my oversensitive nervous system.
“It’s where I found you this morning. Brought you back here. You’ve been out ever since.”
His hands are wrapped around a coffee mug. I’ve imagined those hands. The calluses from fence work, the steady grip he described when telling me about pulling a calf in a storm. The right one is scarred across his knuckles, far more vivid than anything I created in my mind.
He sets the mug on the side table as if he forgot he was holding it, as if my presence made him forget.
I glance at the blanket on his chair and the dent in the cushion. “Have you been sitting here this whole time?”
“Yeah.” He says it casually, as if sleeping upright in an armchair beside an unconscious stranger is a regular activity.
But I’m not a stranger. That’s the part my brain struggles to understand.
I was driving to find him, and he found me first. The odds of that—the sheer impossible math of crashing within reach of the only person I was running toward—hit me like a wave.
I grip the cushion because the room is tilting again, but this time it has nothing to do with my head injury.
Something warm presses against my hip. A small, scruffy gray kitten has curled into my side as if it belongs there. It opens one eye, assesses me, then closes it again.
“Yours?”
“One of several.” Ethan moves through the room like he’s trying not to take up too much space. I recognize that instinct; I’ve been doing it my whole life.
My stomach growls.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.” I have no idea if that’s true.
Ethan guides me down a short hallway, maintaining a careful distance, close enough to catch me if my legs give out, but far enough that I don’t feel herded.
His hand briefly touches the small of my back at the kitchen threshold, guiding me through the doorway.
His palm rests there for two seconds, maybe less, warm through my shirt before it’s gone.
The kitchen is full of people.
I stop in the doorway, one hand braced on the frame. Four foster placements taught me to count heads before entering a room. Seven taught me to locate the exits.
The woman at the stove has silver hair pulled back and a flannel shirt unbuttoned over something sequined. Her tanned face splits into a smile that says she’s earned every line and is proud of all of them. “I’m Miss Maggie. Coffee’s on the table.”
“I—thank you—”
The big voice from this morning belongs to a big man.
Daniel. I recognize him from Ethan’s descriptions.
He’s sitting at the table, his arms crossed over a chest that takes up its own zip code.
His eyes are gray instead of Ethan's blue, and his jaw is broader. He has the kind of shoulders that suggest he’s personally carried most of the problems on this ranch and resents the ones he couldn’t.
Beside him is the woman with the careful hands. Dark hair, sharp cheekbones, brown eyes that are already looking toward the hallway when I appear, as if she were listening for me.
And at the head of the table, an older man. His hair is silver at the temples, deep lines bracket his mouth, his blue eyes sharp with intelligence in his weathered face.
The woman stands first. She crosses the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who doesn’t waste movement and touches my elbow. It’s light and brief, exactly enough to steer me toward a chair without making me feel steered. She sets a glass of water in front of me before I’ve finished sitting down.
“I’m Delaney,” she says. “We didn’t get to meet properly this morning.”
“You tucked my blanket,” I say because my brain-to-mouth filter is apparently still in the ditch with my car.
Surprise flickers across her face, followed by a half-smile with a sharp edge. “Old habit. I spent half my life making sure my little sister didn’t freeze, starve, or make catastrophically bad decisions.” The half-smile turns wry. “Two out of three isn’t bad.”
She delivers it the way I deliver facts about foster care: plainly, with the edges filed down, because the unedited version would make people uncomfortable.