Chapter 2 Parker
PARKER
The patio is quieter.
Not silent—the party hums behind me through the open doors, laughter and glassware chiming—but the night air softens everything. Humidity presses close. The harbor smells like brine and diesel and old wood, the kind of coastal quiet that lets me breathe without performing.
I check my phone for the hundredth time.
Still nothing.
No email from Sandra. No missed call. No, Congratulations, we’re thrilled to bring you on—or Thanks for your time. Just another social media push I don’t care about, and a text from my roommate asking if I watered her plants before I left.
I didn’t.
I hover over Sandra’s contact. I could call. Rip the bandage, hear yes or no, find out if the last two years meant anything. It’s Saturday. She said Tuesday. Calling now would read as desperate.
Even if I am.
The sun has slipped below the horizon, smearing pink-gold across the water. Masts tick in their slips. Boats rock, gentle as breathing. It should be peaceful. My brain won’t shut up.
What if the presentation wasn’t enough? What if Marcus gets it? What if I came back to Black Harbor to stand in a courtyard that looks like a life I don’t belong to anymore?
My phone buzzes. I snatch it so fast I nearly launch it into the harbor.
Another social media post.
“Perfect,” I mutter, sharper than I mean to.
A warm breath ghosts my ear. “Easy, firefly.”
I spin—a heel skids on the flagstone, the railing tilts, the harbor surges up—
—and a hand closes hard around my elbow, steadying me with unyielding heat.
Silas Vale.
He’s broader than memory, a dark wall in an open doorway: black shirt, sleeves pushed to his forearms, ink ghosting the edges of thick veins.
Hair cropped close, jaw cut from stone, eyes the color of a storm rolling in off the water.
He doesn’t smile. Not really. But something like it tugs at the corner of his mouth for a heartbeat, gone before I can name it.
“Silas.” My voice is breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
“Parker.” He says my name like it’s been sealed under glass. His thumb rests against the inside of my arm where my pulse stutters. He feels it. He lets me know he feels it with the smallest press, then releases me. “You okay?”
“I’m—fine.” I am not fine. My heart is sprinting. He smells like cedar and smoke and night.
“Six years,” he says. His gaze doesn’t move. “Welcome home.”
“Six years,” I echo, and hear how it lands. “You look…”
He waits.
“…different.” Broader. Harder. Like someone who’s carried things he can’t speak about and didn’t set them down.
“Yeah.” His attention flicks to my heels, then back to my eyes. “So do you.”
The party lifts behind us—cheers, a champagne cork, a burst of music—and fades again. He leans one hip against the rail. Doesn’t invade. Doesn’t retreat. It’s the same stillness I remember from him when everyone else was noise.
“How’s California?” His voice is low, unhurried.
“Busy.” I try to shape the conversation normally. “I had a pitch this week. Waiting to hear how it went on Tuesday.”
He nods once, like he files the information under important. “You always land what you aim at.”
It shouldn’t warm me the way it does. “That’s optimistic.”
“True.” A beat. “You always hated being underestimated.”
I huff a breath that isn’t a laugh. “I hated being handled.”
His jaw works. “I know.”
It’s too easy to fall into the old orbit, the gravity that made me seventeen and furious and…seen. I swallow. Shake it off. “You, Jace, and Cal own the hotel.”
“Among other things.”
Of course. “Generous of you. Running Charlie’s whole week.”
“Family,” he says, like it’s a vow, not a word.
The old kettle boils in my chest. “Family,” I repeat, too light.
His eyes sharpen—storm to steel. “Say what you’re thinking.”
“You want the short version?” Heat climbs my throat.
Fine. “All four of you—Charlie included—spent my entire senior year treating me like a bomb. At every party, someone shadowed me. Every time I breathed wrong, someone took my drink, threw a towel over me, drove me home like a problem to be contained. I wasn’t your best friend's sister. I was your responsibility.”
Silas absorbs it without flinching. “We kept you safe.”
“I didn’t ask to be kept.”
“No,” he says quietly. “You asked to be seen.”
The words punch lower than anger. “You didn’t see me. You caged me.”
“We were boys with orders and guns we hadn’t earned yet.
” His mouth flattens. “You think I liked being your shadow? Liked telling Jace when you slipped out? Liked watching Cal drive you home while you cried and beat the dashboard with your fists?” A slow inhale.
“You think any of that felt like winning?”
Silence opens between us. Cicadas buzz. A boat coughs to life somewhere beyond the slips.
I look away first. “I left because staying felt like prison.”
“I know.” He doesn’t push closer. He doesn’t soothe. “You were right to go.”
That…is not the fight I braced for. “What?”
“You wanted your life to be yours.” He tips his chin to the harbor. “You took it.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re standing on our patio with a heartbeat I can hear from here.” A flick of heat in his eyes, there and gone. “So maybe it isn’t all theirs anymore.”
The door swings; laughter spills out. He straightens.
“Jace has been watching the courtyard for fifteen minutes,” he says, like he's talking about the weather. “Cal’s pretending he isn’t.”
“Of course they are.”
He turns to go, then pauses. “Parker.”
I meet the storm in his gaze.
His voice is roughened velvet. “Don’t run if you don’t want to. And don’t stay if it isn’t your choice.”
My breath catches. “Silas—”
He’s already gone, the door falling shut behind his shoulders like the end of a sentence.
My phone buzzes in my clutch.
I don’t check it.