Darkness Had Crept In -Libby
Forty Four
Darkness had crept in by the time the island came into view.
The sky had bled out to a washed-out gray-blue that swallowed color, flattening everything into the same dull, exhausted tone.
Water, air, and horizon all blurred together until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
The boat cut through long, slow swells in a rhythm that should have been soothing, but instead, it filled the silence between us with a sound none of us wanted to hear.
Because listening meant not talking, and not talking meant sitting with what had happened, and none of us could do that yet.
Fiona had done exactly what she said she would.
Of course, she had. She stood at the helm, her hands firm on the tiller, her movements precise and mechanical, her eyes fixed on the water ahead with the same hollow focus she’d carried since the marina.
She hadn’t spoken except to give instructions.
Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t sat down. As if stopping meant cracking, and cracking meant collapsing, and collapsing meant admitting that the thing we’d left behind in that parking lot had actually happened.
I sat where she’d left me, my back pressed against the side of the boat, Lily’s weight warm and limp against my shoulder where she’d finally cried herself into something that resembled sleep but probably wasn’t.
My hands lay open in my lap, palms up, and I stared at them without seeing them.
My mind had gone somewhere unreachable—not thinking, not processing, just existing in a gray, muffled space where nothing could touch me because I wouldn’t let it.
The island rose out of the dark slowly—the treeline first, a jagged black edge separating water from sky, then the rocky shore taking shape beneath it, then the thin line of a small dock stretching out toward us like an arm extended in the dark.
She adjusted our approach, guiding the boat in with small, confident corrections.
The hull slowed, the sail luffing as the wind shifted, and the island grew larger and more real with every second until I could make out individual trees, individual rocks, the grain of the dock planks in the last gray light.
And then I saw it.
Another boat. Tied off at the far end of the dock. Not a derelict, not something washed in by current and neglect—the lines secured properly, the hull sitting even in the water, a tarp pulled tight over the bow. Used. Recently. By someone who intended to come back to it.
My stomach dropped so hard it pulled the numbness right out of me.
“Fiona,” I said, and my voice came back sharp, cutting through the fog in my head like glass breaking on tile.
She’d already seen it. I could tell by the tightening of her hands on the tiller, the half-inch rise of her shoulders, and the familiar way her chin lifted as she shifted from existing into assessing. Not fear—not exactly—but something coiled and cautious that lived in the same neighborhood.
Finn had said this place stood isolated, safe. His family’s. Alone. No neighbors, no through-traffic, no reason for anyone to come here unless they knew it existed.
And now someone else’s boat sat tied to the dock like it belonged.
“Stay back,” Fiona said, her voice low and controlled again, though I could see the tension running through her shoulders like current through a wire.
Lily stirred against me, blinking awake with the disoriented, swollen-eyed confusion of someone who’d surfaced from grief-sleep into a world that still hadn’t improved.
She looked at the island, then at me, then at the boat tied to the dock, and I watched understanding arrive on her face—the way her brow creased, her mouth opened slightly, and her hand drifted back down to the carrier and rested there.
We stood on the deck in that awful in-between—too close to turn back, too exposed to stay on the water, too uncertain to move forward. The silence stretched tight enough to hum.
My heart kicked back to life in my chest, hammering so hard I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.
“What if—” Lily started.
“I don’t know,” I said. Because I didn’t. None of us did.
Then—movement on the shore.
A shape broke from the treeline, small and fast, scrambling down the rocky slope toward the dock with the kind of reckless, sure-footed speed that only belonged to someone who’d run that path a hundred times before.
A kid. About Lily’s age, maybe a little older, all lanky limbs and wild hair, skidding to a stop at the end of the dock so abruptly that gravel sprayed out from under his shoes.
He stared at us. We stared at him. For three full seconds nobody moved, nobody breathed. The only sound was the water lapping against the hull and the distant rustle of wind through the trees.
Then his face changed to fear.
Not at us.
Past us.
“CALLAN!”
The name hit the air like a shockwave, rolling across the water and slamming into me so hard my knees nearly buckled.
I turned so fast that the deck tilted under my feet. “Callan?” The word came out as barely more than breath, barely more than air shaped around a hope I didn’t dare hold yet.
Fiona went still beside me, her hands frozen on the tiller, her body rigid, her face caught in that terrible, suspended moment between hearing something and allowing herself to believe it.
I watched the steel she’d built around herself over the last six hours—the control, the precision, the locked-room composure that had kept us alive and moving—shudder visibly, like a wall taking its first hit.
Then it cracked.
Relief flooded her face so fast and completely that she was barely recognizable. Her eyes went wide, her mouth opened, and her chest heaved with a single, sharp inhale that sounded like someone breaking the surface after being held underwater for too long.
“Our brother,” she breathed, and her voice broke clean in half on the last word, the two pieces falling away from each other with a sound that carried everything she hadn’t allowed herself to express since the marina—the grief, the terror, the guilt, and the impossible, crushing weight of keeping two people alive while losing a third.
Lily grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and a sound came out of her that lived somewhere between a sob and a laugh, raw and confused and so full of desperate, fragile need that it made my chest ache.
It had nothing to do with Finn and everything to do with the fact that this girl—this kid who’d lost too much in too few hours—still had enough left inside her to hope.
Because if Callan stood on that island—alive, breathing, real—then maybe the world hadn’t taken everything yet. Maybe the math of loss had a limit. Maybe we’d paid enough.
The boat hadn’t even settled fully against the dock before more movement came from the treeline.
Three figures this time, emerging from the shadows between the pines in quick succession—drawn by the boy’s shouting, by the sound of the hull scraping against the dock pilings, by the impossible sight of a sailboat drifting in from a world that had stopped making sense weeks ago.
The first man stepped into view—tall, broad-shouldered, older, with silver threading through dark hair and a weathered steadiness in the way he moved that reminded me of someone who’d spent a lifetime solving problems with his hands.
He carried himself as if gravity pulled harder on him than on everyone else, and he’d simply learned to walk under the weight of it.
Behind him—
My breath caught so hard it hurt.
The second man stood, bigger, taller, built as if carved from the same mold as Finn.
He had the same stance, the same wide shoulders carrying tension like an immutable burden, and the same way of holding his head—slightly forward, slightly tilted, scanning everything before committing to a single step.
For one split, delirious second, my brain refused to process what my eyes already knew: it couldn’t be him.
The proportions differed slightly; the jaw sat squarer, the hair grew darker, and the gait carried a heaviness Finn had never possessed.
In that fraction of a heartbeat, before reality caught up, something inside my chest detonated with a hope so sharp and cruel that when it collapsed, grief rushed back in twice as strong.
Not him.
But close enough to shatter me all over again.
Tears burned instantly, blurring the dock, the figures, the treeline—everything dissolving into smears of color and shadow as I pressed my hand over my mouth to stifle any sound.
“Oh God,” I whispered through my fingers.
Trailing behind them came a woman—small, compact, with red hair pulled back in a knot. Her stride was quick and purposeful as she worked to keep pace with the two men ahead. Her eyes found us immediately.
Fiona didn’t wait.
She jumped from the boat the second the hull kissed the dock, her boots hitting the planks hard, and she ran. Not the controlled, measured movement I’d watched her maintain for the last six hours—this was loose, unraveled, desperate, her arms pumping and her composure falling away.
“Callan!” she cried, the name broken, raw, and so full of relief it barely sounded like language.
Both men met her halfway down the dock, neither slowing.
The bigger one reached her first, pulling her into his chest so hard that her feet left the ground.
The older man wrapped around them both a second later, his arms long enough to hold them together, his face pressing into the top of Fiona’s head as all three stood locked in something too fierce and desperate to call a simple embrace.
She laughed—actually laughed—a sound I hadn’t heard from her once in the weeks I’d known her, bright, cracked, and soaked through with tears, her voice breaking apart and reassembling between gasps as they held her.
“You’re alive—” the bigger one said, his voice so thick the words barely made it out. “We thought—Jesus Christ, we thought—”