18. What The Fuck Just Happened? -Finn
Eighteen
What The Fuck Just Happened? -Finn
Iwoke to empty arms.
My body registered it a full second before my mind caught up, a brief, disorienting reach toward something that wasn’t there.
Irritation followed fast and hard—not at her, not exactly, but at myself. At the tightness in my chest. At noticing, and at how, for just a fraction of a second, it had seemed like something other than a problem.
What the fuck, Ward…
I dragged a hand down my face and sat up in the dim light, my brain replaying every decision that had led me to this moment on this floor.
Twenty-nine years of simplicity. No attachments, no complications—nothing that couldn’t be set aside when needed. Move. Act. Survive. I’d watched emotions get people killed, seen the folded flags. I’d made myself a promise I intended to keep.
And yet here I sat, losing it over a woman I’d known for a matter of days. A middle-aged woman who, by every standard I’d ever held myself to, shouldn’t have ranked anywhere beyond a responsibility—a civilian to protect, a variable to account for.
But she had somehow wiggled her way past responsibility straight into feelings, and if I was honest with myself, it scared the absolute fuck out of me.
Shit!
I pressed my tongue flat against the roof of my mouth and pushed it down. Hard.
No.
I stood, forcing myself into motion. Into the familiar. Into reliable. My body understood how to do this.
That’s what mattered now. That’s the only thing that could matter now.
Life and death waited outside the front door—in the streets, in every decision between here and my home, in the hundreds of small miscalculations that got people killed when the person responsible for preventing them had stopped paying attention.
I carried responsibilities that predated last night—that outweighed it—responsibilities that didn’t negotiate and didn’t make allowances for whatever feelings had decided to crop up now.
Fiona came first. She was, and always would be, the priority. Nothing about last night changed that.
But Libby and Lily were in it now too—I’d made sure of that the moment I walked through the door. Which meant no mistakes. No hesitation. Nothing sitting between me and a clear head, because a clear head was the only thing standing between all of us and the alternative.
Get it together, Ward. Get them home safe.
I moved toward the door and ran through the checklist the way I always did—entry points, exit routes, threat assessment, asset status. The things that had a right answer. Focus. Priorities. Mission parameters. The cold logic that had never once gotten anyone killed through an excess of feeling.
* * *
Lily and Fiona had taken over Fiona’s bedroom.
I paused in the doorway before either one noticed me. Clothes rolled tight. Water bottles lined the bed. A first aid kit splayed open between them—Lily sorting through its contents, Fiona crouched over a backpack with a focus I recognized.
She’d learned that from me.
“Running away?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe with my arms crossed.
Fiona looked up, brushing hair from her face with the back of her wrist. “Escape bags. In case we have to leave fast. Lily and I figured we should each have one ready to grab.”
A smile tugged at the corner of my
mouth. “Bug-out bags, Fiona.”
She blinked. “What?”
“They’re called bug-out bags.” I picked up one of the packed rolls, tested its weight, turned it in my hand, and set it back down. “And smart. Really smart. Both of you.”
Fiona shot Lily a look of pure vindication. Lily shook her head with a quiet laugh, her eyes still on the med kit.
“She’s been bossing me around for the last hour,” Lily said. “I see where she gets it from.”
“One thing,” I said, scanning the remaining pile. “Efficient, not sentimental. If it doesn’t keep you alive, it doesn’t go in the bag. No photos, no keepsakes, no—”
“No favorite hoodie?” Fiona’s hand drifted toward a folded gray sweatshirt near her knee.
I gave her a look that needed no translation.
She pulled her hand back. “Fine.”
“Fast and light. Every extra ounce compounds over distance, and distance is what keeps you alive.” I crouched beside Lily and scanned what she’d sorted: ibuprofen, gauze, antiseptic wipes, a small pair of scissors.
Solid instincts. Better than most trained adults managed under pressure. “You’ve done this before?”
“Pinterest, mostly,” Lily said, completely straight-faced. “And a few dozen Red Cross preparedness PDFs. I went through a weird phase last year.”
I stared at her for a beat.
“Don’t judge me,” she added. “It’s clearly paying off.”
Fair enough.
“Where’s your mom?”
Something subtle and contained moved across Lily’s face.
“She’s on the roof.”
“The roof?”
Lily pressed her lips together. “She doesn’t think I know, but she goes up there to smoke when she’s stressed.” A beat. “The current situation probably qualifies.”
“Didn’t realize she smoked.”
“She doesn’t. Officially.” Lily’s hands resumed their work, her voice dropping into the easy cadence of someone recounting a well-worn family secret.
“Quit six years ago. But she keeps an emergency pack hidden in a coffee tin behind the bread maker. Mom thinks she’s so sneaky.
Meanwhile, the whole house smells like Marlboro Lights every time the mortgage payment is due. ”
Fiona snorted, attempted to cover it, and failed entirely.
I almost smiled.
“How do I get up there?”
“Down the hall, past the bathroom. The door at the very end—the one that looks like a closet—goes up to the roof.” Lily paused, then added, quieter, “She’s been up there a while.”
I nodded once. “Thanks.”
I turned to go, then stopped.
“Lose the hoodie, Fiona.”
“It’s not in the bag!”
“It’s six inches from the bag.”
A groan. I left them to it and headed down the hall.
* * *
The door was exactly where Lily said it would be. I pulled it open, revealing a tight wooden staircase that wound upward into bright light, each step creaking under my weight.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. Probably that I was sorry, that this was a mistake we couldn’t repeat. The words felt empty before I’d even formed them, but they were the right ones—the only ones that kept everyone safe.
I reached the top and pushed through the access door into the open air.
I found her on the far side of the old chimney stack.
Libby sat tucked against its base in a rusted folding chair, knees drawn up, a cigarette burning between her fingers. The smoke curled upward into the gray morning air and dissolved, unhurried, like it had nowhere particular to be.
She hadn’t heard me yet.
I stood there, watching her stare out over the rooftops, still.
The odor reached me, pulling me somewhere I hadn’t meant to go.
I never really smoked, but I remembered a corporal named Deets who kept a pack of Marlboro Reds in his breast pocket like a talisman.
After anything bad happened, he’d pass them around without a word, and we’d stand there smoking in the dark.
It was something to do with our hands while we waited to feel normal again.
They never tasted good, but they gave me something to focus on besides fear, taking the edge off just enough to keep me functional for the next few hours. I understood the impulse completely.
“Mind if I join you?”
She jumped and looked up at me with wide eyes. For a fraction of a second, everything was there on her face, unguarded.
A flash of warmth that she killed almost instantly, replacing it with something neutral and composed.
Almost convincing.
I shifted my gaze away. I hadn’t come up here to read her; I’d come up here to close a door.
She didn’t speak, just extended the pack and a cheap plastic lighter. I shook one loose and lit it. The first drag burned, and I exhaled slowly through my nose, fighting back the cough.
I lowered myself into the only other chair on the roof and leaned forward, the cigarette smoldering between my fingers.
“Libby, listen.” I turned the lighter over in my hand. “I want to apologize.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t look at me.
“I think things went too far last night, and—”
I stopped.
She had turned just enough for me to catch it—the sadness. Not dramatic, just there, a quiet resignation in her posture. It was the look of someone who had braced for an impact they knew was coming and was determined to walk away from it on her own two feet.
That look stopped me cold.
“Hey.” My voice dropped, losing the measured, even tone I’d walked up here with. “Hey—this isn’t anything against you. I need you to hear that.”
A long moment passed before she brought the cigarette back to her lips, holding it a beat too long.
When she spoke, her voice was steady, but the effort was visible.
“You’re absolutely right, Finn.”
She tapped ash from her cigarette, the filter bending slightly where her fingers had tightened around it.
“Definitely the situation. Adrenaline, fear, close quarters—” A short, self-deprecating laugh, devoid of humor. “Believe me, I haven’t lost all sense of reality.”
She turned to face me, and the Libby from the first day was back: reserved, a stranger.
“I mean, Jesus, Finn—you’re, what, twenty-seven?”
“Thirty,” I said. “Next month.”
“Well, either way.” She gestured vaguely between us with the cigarette, smoke tracing the motion in the still air.
“I’m almost forty. I have a teenage daughter and enough history to fill a damn encyclopedia.
” Another laugh, tighter this time. “It’s laughable, really. The idea that you’d—that anyone would—”
She stopped herself, taking a drag instead. The exhale did the work of whatever she’d been about to say.
“Look. I absolutely understand. I do.” She met my eyes, and for one unguarded second the mask slipped.
Then she looked away, out over the rooftops, and when she came back, she’d put it all somewhere I couldn’t reach.
“I appreciate you getting us home yesterday. I appreciate everything you’ve done.
” A pause. She turned the cigarette over in her fingers once, slowly, before remembering it was already out.
“And I promise to forgive you for the—” She gestured, searching for the word but not finding it. “Whatever that was.”
She stood before I could respond. The chair scraped back against the rooftop as she pushed to her feet.
“Libby—”
“I should check on Lily. Make sure they’re packing those bags right.”
She moved past me toward the stairs.
The door opened.
Closed softly.
And I sat there, the cigarette burning down between my fingers, the ash growing long.
What the hell just happened?
I replayed it, every word. The way she’d taken my apology and turned it into confirmation of something she’d probably been deciding about herself for years.
She hadn’t let me finish a single sentence—hadn’t given me the space to explain that the problem was mine, not hers.
Nothing to do with her age, or the baggage she’d weaponized against herself in thirty seconds flat.
That part I believed completely. The rest of it, I was less sure about.
She’d simply decided. For both of us. Wrapped the whole thing in self-hatred and walked away before I could dismantle a single word of it.
I took one last drag. Coughed this time—didn’t bother hiding it from the empty rooftop. Crushed the cigarette beneath my boot.
Shit.
I stared at the door she’d disappeared through.
The walls I’d rebuilt on the way up here stood solid. Intact. Every reason I’d identified walking down that hallway still held. I knew that.
I knew the look on her face when she stopped mid-sentence, the way her fingers tightened around the filter.
I turned the lighter over in my hand, then closed my fist around it.
The reasons hadn’t changed; that was the problem. They were just as true as they had been ten minutes ago. But they weren’t enough, and I didn’t know what to do with that.