Darkness Had Crept In -Libby #2
“I’m okay,” she said, the words tumbling over each other, crashing together in a pile. “I’m okay, I made it, I’m here—”
They talked over each other, voices overlapping, interrupting, and circling back.
Relief poured out in a rush too fast and too tangled for me to follow from where I stood on the boat’s deck.
It sounded like a dam breaking, like pressure that had been building for weeks finally finding a crack wide enough to escape.
And it made the hollow space in my chest yawn wider.
Because he should have been here. He should have been standing on this dock, walking into this reunion, hearing his name called by the people who loved him.
This island belonged to him. This plan had come from his mind.
Every mile we’d traveled, every obstacle we’d survived, every decision that had kept us alive and moving—all of it traced back to him.
He should have been here to see it through, and he wasn’t.
His absence at this moment of reunion carved a hole in the air so obvious that I could almost see the shape of where he should have stood.
The bigger one pulled back just enough to look at Fiona properly, his hands gripping her shoulders, his eyes moving over her face with the desperate thoroughness of someone checking for damage. Then his gaze shifted: past her, down the dock, to us.
To me, standing on the boat’s deck with my hand on Lily’s shoulder.
To the empty space behind us where no one else waited to step off.
“Who are they?” he asked, his voice dropping, caution edging in around the relief.
Then, quieter—the way you ask something when you already suspect the answer will ruin you—
“Where’s Finn?”
The name landed between us like a blade driven into the dock planks, and everything inside me twisted so violently I nearly doubled over.
Fiona went still. Just for a second—a single, visible hitch in her breathing, a tightening across her shoulders that pulled them up toward her ears before she forced them back down.
I watched her mouth open and close. I watched her search for words and come up empty.
Then her hand lifted, and she pointed down the dock.
At me.
My stomach dropped through the floor of the boat and kept going.
No, I didn’t want to be the one. I didn’t want to carry these words across this dock and put them into the air where they’d become real, permanent, and impossible to take back.
I didn’t want to stand in front of this man who shared Finn’s blood and tell him what I’d watched happen in that parking lot.
But I didn’t have a choice. The words lived inside me now, whether I wanted them or not, and someone had to let them out.
I took Lily’s hand. Her fingers—small and freezing—closed around mine instantly.
“Come on,” I whispered.
We stepped off the boat, the dock creaking and shifting under our weight. With each step, my legs felt heavier, the air thickening as we approached them. The men watched us, as did the red-haired woman.
I stopped a few feet away, my throat so tight that the muscles ached from holding everything in.
Fiona looked at me, her eyes already glistening, already spilling over, already grieving again despite the reunion still warm on her skin.
“He—” I started, my voice breaking, just as Fiona’s had on the boat. The two pieces fell away, leaving nothing but a raw, empty space where sound should have been.
I swallowed hard, pressed my nails into my palms, and tried again.
“He didn’t make it.”
Silence.
Not the quiet kind, but the crushing kind—the kind with weight and texture that presses down on your shoulders and fills your lungs with something heavier than air.
The wind still moved through the trees, the water still lapped against the pilings, but every human sound on that dock stopped dead, as if the world itself had flinched.
Callan went completely still. Every part of him—his hands, his chest, his face—froze in place, the way a body does when the mind behind it refuses to process what it’s just been told.
“What?” he said, the word small and bewildered, so unlike the size of the man speaking it that something in my chest cracked further.
“We made it to the marina,” I forced out, each word tearing its way free from somewhere deep, raw, and reluctant.
“There were too many of them—they came from everywhere, from between the cars, from the treeline, dozens of them all at once. Finn got Lily back to the boat first, and then he—” My throat seized, but I pushed through it.
“Lily’s cat—the carrier had been left in the car.
He went back for it. He wouldn’t let her lose it. He wouldn’t—”
The words disintegrated. I tried to catch them, to force them back into order, but my mouth just opened and closed around air that tasted like salt and copper.
“He went back,” I finished, barely a whisper. “And they surrounded him. And we couldn’t—we couldn’t get to him. We couldn’t see—”
Lily broke beside me, a sob ripping out of her so hard it bent her body at the waist. Her face buried into my side, her tears soaking through my shirt in seconds.
“I’m sorry,” she cried, her words muffled, fractured, and drenched in a guilt no child should ever have to carry. “I didn’t mean to drop it—I didn’t mean to—if I hadn’t—he wouldn’t have—”