Chapter Four #2
Ethan followed his look. Wooldridge’s people—Bible-clutching, voices thick with hallelujah and judgment. Evangelical right, money sunk deep in land, roots tangled with politics. They looked untouchable. But Ethan had seen men like that fall, and he planned on making sure they did.
“You got anything else?” Ethan asked, low.
Houston didn’t answer right away. He just tugged at his collar, sighed like a man caught between oath and conscience. “Found with a pistol in his lap and scripture open beside him. Does that sound self-inflicted?”
“Sounds pretty cut and dry to me.”
“Sure does.”
“But you don’t buy it.”
Houston’s eyes snapped to his, steady. “No. And neither do you.”
Ethan let the silence stretch, cicadas filling it with a buzz that felt like static in his blood. “Too many dead, Will. Too many good men on pills that were supposed to help, too many suicides with the same neat bow. Somebody’s profiting.”
“This town’s rot goes higher than folks want to believe.”
Ethan smirked, humorless. “Good thing I don’t give a damn what folks wanna believe.”
Houston studied him for a long moment, the same look he’d given back when they were boys, when Ethan would storm into fights he couldn’t win. Finally, the ADA nodded. “Then maybe it’s time we go after this harder.”
“Hell yes.” Ethan crushed the cigarette under his boot, jaw set.
They stood in silence, watching the crowd dissipate.
Finally, Houston nodded. “I’ll be in touch.” He marched away.
Ethan cut around the side of Belonging Southern Baptist Church and let the heat fall off his shoulders.
Behind the sanctuary, a tulip poplar threw cathedral shade over the back lot, its roots heaving the ground the way old bones lift a sheet.
He stopped beneath it without meaning to.
There were memories in that tree he had no interest in unpacking—names cut into bark, a fight he started and lost, a kiss he’d never earned.
He put his palm flat to the trunk, then took it away like it burned.
Voices drifted from the corner of the church—low, rough, familiar.
He glanced back and caught them sliding out of the sun as a little knot of grief, Brock with his shoulders set, Koe and Warren flanking like brothers would, Lainey quick and bright beside them, their talk small and broken around the edges.
Thick as thieves, all of them. They paused at the path where the grass gave to gravel, murmured, split. The others peeled off toward the lot.
Amara turned.
She saw him under the poplar and everything in her face flared—shock, then something hotter.
She marched straight for him.
“Absolutely not,” she said, jabbing a finger into his chest before he could move. “You don’t get to haunt my churchyard too.”
He let the line land, hands easy at his sides. “It’s a funeral.”
“Not yours,” she snapped. “And not your stage.”
He watched her like he watched a storm line, calm, because panic never helped. The cicadas did the shouting for both of them. Ten feet away, the corner of the churchyard held the rest of the town like a breath. If someone rounded it, they’d be in the open.
“You always this mad I exist?” he asked. “Or just when I’m where you can see me?”
Her eyes cut. “You don’t get to exist in my life. Not anymore.”
He should’ve stepped back. He didn’t. He shifted until the poplar’s shadow took both of them, cool and close. “You ever wonder why I unsettle you?”
That set the fuse. She came another half step, finger still on his chest, heat rolling off her like the road at noon. “You don’t get to ask me questions. You don’t get to—”
He leaned in, not touching her, just there—breath sharing space, her perfume and hay and soap cracking his ribs from the inside. The shade held them. The church’s corner was a single misstep away. He felt the moment tilt, the fight, the want, the math of who could see.
“Amara,” he said.
It wasn’t a plea. It was a warning for both of them.
Her gaze flicked to his mouth, traitor-quick, then back to his eyes. The air went thin. The old tree whispered. Far side of the church, someone laughed too loud, and Lainey’s voice carried, calling a name that wasn’t Amara’s.
“Don’t,” she whispered, but the word didn’t sound like refusal so much as prayer.
He didn’t close the distance. He could have. He let her own momentum bring her near enough that the brim of his hat brushed her hair. One breath and they’d be kissing in a graveyard with half the county ten steps away.
“Look at me,” he said, and it came out rougher than he liked.
She did. And for a heartbeat—the mean, beautiful kind—she swayed toward him.
Then she remembered the corner. Remembered the eyes.
Anger snapped back into place like a blade finding its sheath. She lifted her hand and slapped him, clean and ringing, not a scene—just a mark. The poplar leaves shivered. His head didn’t turn, but heat bloomed along his jaw where her palm had landed.
“Stay away from me,” she said, voice steady now, eyes glass-bright with everything she wasn’t about to let him see. “Stay away from my family.”
She stepped back out of the shade before he could answer, before he could decide whether to earn another slap.
The sun caught her, turned the blue jacket to river water, and she walked hard for the path where the others waited.
Brock looked up, read something in her face, and moved to flank her without a word.
Lainey slid in on the other side like she’d been born knowing how to block for a friend.
Ethan stayed under the tree, jaw humming, pulse stupid. He tucked his hands into his pockets and faced the light long enough to squint at the headstones, as if he could stitch the moment back together. The hymn had fallen out of the rafters by now. The day hadn’t.
He told himself it was good she’d walked. Better she was mad than soft. Safer for both of them with the whole town around the corner.
It didn’t change the fact that for one feral second in the poplar shade, they’d both nearly let the world watch them burn.
Ethan moved through Belonging Church’s cemetery like a man walking shallow water—slow, careful, boots finding the soft places between graves. Names and dates blinked up in the heat-haze, flags ticked at their poles, cicadas sawed the afternoon thin. He counted markers like breaths. Too many.
Halfway down, a kid sat on the iron bench under the hackberry—shoulders rounded, elbows on knees, pill bottle rolling lazy between his palms. Kolt Kelly.
Twenty-something with a haircut grown out wrong, boots too new and too cheap.
He looked up when Ethan’s shadow crossed him, eyes rimmed red, skin gone that gray you don’t get from whiskey.
“Kane,” he said, voice sanded down. “Didn’t think you’d come back.”
Ethan drew on his cigarette and let the smoke go slow. “Didn’t think I’d find you planted in a boneyard on a weekday.”
Kolt’s mouth hit a shape that wasn’t quite a smile. “Me neither, but fucking Wooldridge had to go and off himself.”
“Yeah, damn inconsiderate of him.” Ethan eased down on the far end of the bench, leaving space. The iron was hot through denim. Across the rows a breeze pressed the grass flat, then let it stand again.
“You still chasing Nashville?” Ethan asked.
Kolt flicked the bottle with his thumb, a dry rattle. “Went a spell. Too loud. Too empty. You know.”
Ethan did. He watched a black ant work the seam between flagstone and dirt. “Crowd can make a man lonelier than desert.”
“Desert don’t talk back.” Kolt tipped the bottle once more. “This don’t either.” He didn’t look at the label. He didn’t have to. “Makes it quiet. Quiet helps. Ever try it?”
Ethan tasted ash. Quiet had its teeth. He saw a slice of memory with the clarity of a photograph left too long in sun—a cheap plate, cornbread steam, a woman’s hand setting a fork where an empty place had been, a girl on the far side of the table grinning like the world had let her in on something worth keeping. One night that said sit, eat, stay.
“You got people?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the stones.
Kolt shrugged, the kind that goes all the way through. “Just me.”
The answer settled between them, heavy as a folded flag. Ethan ground the cigarette out on the underside of the bench, metal pinging.
“Stick around the living a little longer,” he said, not looking at the kid. “Heat’ll pass. Find someone to keep an eye on you.”
Kolt huffed, softer this time. “You volunteering?”
Ethan let the question drip off the edge of the day. “Now? Can’t,” he said, which wasn’t an answer and wasn’t a lie. “But, you know my number.”
Silence came and stayed. The church bell gave one half-hearted throat-clear two blocks over.
A grasshopper landed on Kolt’s knee, thought better of it, sprang away.
For a second, with his head tipped back and his eyes shut against the sun, the kid looked younger—like the war hadn’t figured out his address yet.
Ethan stood. “Stay outta the dark,” he said, which was all the mercy he knew how to spend without breaking something he couldn’t fix. “Stay in the light.”
Kolt didn’t open his eyes. “Yeah.”
Ethan’s hand hovered—shoulder, back, some decent place to leave a wordless thing—and fell. He wasn’t a chaplain. He wasn’t a savior. He’d gotten a door once—come have dinner—and walked through it. You can’t hand a man a door that isn’t there.
He started down the row again, counting names to steady his feet. Behind him the bottle clicked once against Kolt’s ring, then went quiet. Ahead, heat wobbled the grass, and the work waited where the shade thinned.
And Ethan Kane knew one hard truth in that moment. Amara James might hate him, might spit fire at him every time they crossed paths, but she’d already branded herself into his mind.
And nothing good was gonna come of it.