XV
Morning came without light—only the dull ache behind my eyes, the kind that came from watching the dark too long and waiting for it to blink first.
On the floor beside the couch, Ford was still out. He lay stretched on his pallet, one arm slung over his face, breathing with a deep, even rhythm that looked like surrender.
I envied him.
Every groan of the rafters had kept me upright, my mind looping back to Harvey’s voice splintering through static.
They’re not who they say they are.
Before Ford even stirred, I had already decided.
I couldn’t sit there waiting for a call that might never come.
I needed answers.
And there was only one person who might have them.
Heaton Dashwood.
The porch air hit colder than I expected. The trees beyond the drive were still drowning in shadow, motionless and watchful. Harvey’s truck was missing from its usual place, leaving a giant question mark in the gravel.
Don’t come.
I crossed the drive and rested my hand against the hood of my car—the last thing Harvey had given me.
The metal bit cold into my palm.
I had never thanked him enough for it.
The engine caught on the second try. My headlights swept over the busted front door before I turned toward the road.
By the time school came into view, dawn was still more bruise than light.
I parked, killed the engine, and sat there while silence closed over me.
The lot was nearly empty. A janitor’s truck idled near the side entrance, headlights carving pale tunnels through the fog. My breath clouded the windshield in slow, uneven blooms.
I rehearsed the words. The accusations. The questions.
But the version of myself that sounded brave kept slipping out of my hands.
I dragged my thumb through the condensation on the glass, clearing a small circle.
And saw him in the rearview mirror.
Heaton stood several yards behind my car, half-swallowed by the fog.
He wasn’t approaching or retreating.
He was simply there, a dark silhouette against the gray.
Perfectly still.
My pulse dropped hard.
He hadn’t come up the gravel. I would have heard the crunch of boots, the shift of stone. But staring at him through the silvered glass of the mirror, it didn’t feel like I had set a trap anymore.
It felt like I had parked right in the middle of his.
I grabbed my bag and shoved the door open.
The morning air knifed up my sleeves as I turned to face him.
“You,” I said. “I’m done with this. We’re talking. Now.”
He tilted his head, silver eyes moving over me with cool, unsettling precision.
“Is that what we’re doing?”
His voice was quiet.
Too quiet for the size of the parking lot.
Too calm for mine.
“Waiting for me?” I snapped. “Or making sure the job was finished?”
One dark brow lifted.
“That depends,” he said, “which job you think I had.”
“No more riddles.” I took a step toward him. “My dad is missing. Someone tore through our house looking for his work. And you—”
My throat tightened, but I pushed through it.
“You’ve been orbiting me since the day I got here. You know what happened.”
He took one step closer.
“Lower your voice.”
His gaze cut once through the fog beyond me.
“If you keep shouting about this in the open, you won’t have to wait for answers. They’ll come and give them to you.”
My eyes followed his.
“Who?”
I looked back.
“And why shouldn’t I think you’re one of them?”
“You do think that.”
“Well, you hated him,” I argued. “You made that clear.”
“Maybe.” His jaw shifted once. “That still doesn’t make me guilty of kidnapping.”
“Then tell me the truth!”
A strand of dark hair slipped loose at his temple. He didn’t move to fix it.
“Careful, October,” he whispered. “The truth is a sharp thing. You might cut yourself on it.”
A reckless smile tugged at my lips.
“I’ll take my chances. Give me a name or get the hell out of my way.”
His eyes locked on mine—storm-dark and unflinching.
“Why him?” I asked. “Why would anyone come after my dad?”
“You really don’t know,” he said, voice dangerously quiet.
His gaze moved over my face, measuring.
“Know what?”
He looked past me once, scanning the lot, then back to me.
“Your father survived by convincing the wrong people he wasn’t holding anything worth taking.”
The fog seemed to press closer.
“For years, that worked.”
He moved then—not enough to touch me, but enough for the cold radiating from his coat to bleed into my space.
“Then they found out he lied.”
My fingers tightened on my bag strap. “About what?”
His eyes held mine for one long second.
“Something they want back.”
A chill moved through me.
“Are you saying my dad stole something?”
“You’d be amazed,” he said quietly, “what grief makes people justify.”
The parking lot suddenly felt too open.
Too exposed.
“Stole?” The word came out thin. “My dad is a lot of things—obsessive, reckless, completely lost in his own head—but he’s not a thief. You don’t get to stand there and rewrite him into one.”
“You want answers?”
His gaze held mine hostage, flicking briefly to my mouth before locking back onto my eyes.
“Fine. But answers come with a price, October. You don’t get them for free.”
His voice dipped into a low caress.
“The rest,” he said, “you’ll have to earn.”
The squeal of tires and the metallic slam of a car door ripped through the morning air.
The spell shattered.
Heaton’s shoulders squared, and the raw, intimate edge in his eyes vanished as the parking lot filled with the morning rush.
He glanced down at the space between our boots, then back to my face.
“Second period,” he said. “You’ll get your answers. But I’m going to want something in return.”
“Like what?”
A dark, knowing flicker crossed his face.
“You’ll find out.”
Then he turned and moved through the fog as if it parted for him, swallowed by the noise of the school day as if he had never stood there at all. I stayed where I was, one hand braced against the car door, fingers trembling against the metal.
The world looked perfectly intact, yet something inside me had shifted—a subtle, irreversible tilt, like a compass needle knocked off its true north.
All I could hear was his voice.
Second period.
Those two words hooked into my skin and stayed there.
My reflection blinked back from the car window—pale, unsteady. I was caught between two versions of the same morning: the girl who had arrived, and the one about to walk inside.
“Madeline!”
The sound of my name cracked across the lot.
I flinched.
Penny jogged toward me, backpack bouncing, smile bright with the ease that belonged to someone who hadn’t woken up to shattered glass and a kicked-in front door.
She skidded to a stop, squinting at me.
Her grin faltered.
“You look like you didn’t sleep a wink after that disaster of a dinner.”
Last night.
In Penny’s world, the disaster had been last night’s seating chart—not a ransacked house or my dad’s voice breaking through static. Just social shrapnel around the McCrae family table.
“I mean, seriously,” she whispered, falling into step beside me. “Who invites their son’s ex to Sunday dinner? My mom has officially lost her mind. I thought Ford was going to stab his potatoes into a paste.”
The memory flickered.
Ford’s white-knuckled grip on his fork.
Natalie’s syrupy laugh.
The air thick with everything unsaid.
“Yeah,” I managed. “It was . . . awkward.”
“Awkward? Maddie, it was catastrophic. I wanted to crawl under the table.”
I forced a laugh, thin and brittle as dry glass.
Penny didn’t notice.
It was easier to let her chatter fill the space than explain the pressure crushing my ribs.
Up ahead, Sasha and her pack clustered near the walkway like vultures on a carcass. As we passed, one of them let out a short, ugly bark of laughter.
I kept my eyes fixed on the door.
Penny’s arm locked through mine, her grip a steel band.
“Let them squawk,” she muttered, just loud enough for them to hear. “They should worry less about you and more about passing Mr. Lin’s midterm.”
The warmth of it—mundane, fierce loyalty—felt surreal after the fog, the threats, and the lethal calm in Heaton’s voice.
We reached the doors as another car rattled past, bass thudding through its trunk.
“I mean, really,” Penny continued, yanking open the heavy school door. “Natalie Hayes. In our kitchen. My mom basically offered her the family silver. I wanted to gag.”
Then she slowed.
Her sneakers squeaked on the tile as she turned to face me fully.
“Hey . . . you’d tell me if something was happening, right? With Ford?”
I nearly missed a step, my shoulder clipping a passing student.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve lived on the same property all summer, Maddie.”
“Different roofs,” I cut in, heat pricking my ears. “He’s basically married to the guesthouse. I don’t see him unless something’s leaking.”
Penny studied me, brown eyes softening before she gave a sharp nod.
“Okay. Good. I just don’t want to be the last to know. I finally got my best friend back. I’m not trying to share her with my brother.”
I forced a smile, the muscles in my face tight.
“You won’t.”
“Good.” She wrinkled her nose. “Because—ew.”
Her laugh bounced off the lockers, bright and easy, as she steered me toward the humanities wing. She was already onto another story, her words a mumbled rush of names and gossip that I couldn’t quite decipher.
I followed her on autopilot, my mind still in the parking lot. Still in the fog.
By the time we slid into class, chalk shrieked across the board in aggressive white loops.
GOTHIC LITERATURE — RED FLAGS ON THE MOORS
I dropped into my seat. Penny collapsed beside me with a sigh.
Up front, Ms. Dobson swept to a halt, her scarf settling around her shoulders like a general’s cape.
“The Gothic hero—if we can even call him that—is not a hero at all,” she declared. “He’s the storm on the horizon. Dark hair, darker secrets. The danger you see coming and still walk toward.”
A wave of laughter moved through the room.
“And yet,” Ms. Dobson continued, “every heroine believes she is the exception. She thinks she can fix him.”
I didn’t laugh.
My eyes stayed locked on the word STORM, chalk dust drifting through the air like mist in the parking lot. A voice—low and dangerous—threaded through my memory, drowning out the lecture.
Ms. Dobson snapped her chalk into the tray.
“Heathcliff. Brooding. Possessive. Cruel. And yet—magnetic. Why do we keep forgiving these men?”
My knee bounced under the desk, an anxious, silent rhythm. I tried to take notes, but my pen only carved meaningless grooves into the paper. The clock’s second hand dragged forward with punishing slowness.
“Remember,” Ms. Dobson said, voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush. “Red flags are still flags. Ignoring them never ends well.”
Penny snapped her notebook shut as the bell chimed.
“You look like you’re about to pass out. Relax—it’s only first period.”
Only.
Second period waited like a held breath.
We split at the stairwell. Penny peeled off humming, no doubt rehearsing some accidental meet-cute at the pottery wheels.
I headed for State History.
The blinds were half-drawn, striping the floor with pale light. At the front, Coach Baker held a textbook as if it had personally wronged him.
My gaze went straight to the back corner.
Empty.
No cold weight of his stare.
No storm-gray eyes watching from the periphery.
A sharp prickle of something unwelcome burned through my chest.
Disappointment.
Every few seconds, my eyes slid to the doorway, waiting for Heaton to appear—late, unapologetic, acting as if the rules of time and space didn’t apply to him.
But the doorway remained empty.
Baker’s voice droned on, scraping across the room.
“Read chapters three through five for Thursday. Yes, it’s boring. No, I don’t care. Life’s a disappointment.”
My pen dug a worried, erratic groove into my notebook.
He wasn’t here.
And the longer that chair by the window stayed vacant, the heavier his words became.
Second period.
It no longer sounded like a promise. It sounded like a lie.
I stared at the chair until my vision blurred, trying to drag him into existence by sheer force of will. But there was only the scratch of pens and the occasional bored yawn. I sat rigid, a storm with nowhere to break, while the clock crept forward in merciless ticks.
Anger.
Disappointment.
Whatever it was, it burned the same.
When the bell finally cut through the air, I didn’t wait for the room to clear. I let the tide of students carry me into the hall, feeling smaller than I had when I walked in.
By the time I reached the corner for third period, Penny was already bouncing on her toes, as if plugged into a light socket.
“There you are!” She fell into step beside me, beaming. “Best ceramics class of my life. Guess who got the wheel next to the serotonin dispenser himself?”
Red clay streaked her wrists. Her cheeks glowed pink from the kiln.
“Pretty sure the clay wasn’t the only thing spinning.”
I offered something that might have passed for a laugh.
Penny squinted at me, her smile faltering.
“Wow. Contain your excitement, why don’t you?”
She bumped my shoulder as we crossed the threshold.
Inside the classroom, equations crawled across the whiteboard—angles and formulas tangled together like hieroglyphics.
“Math,” Penny groaned, dropping into the seat beside mine. “The anti-ceramics.”
I stared at the board, eyes skimming the symbols without absorbing a single one.
My pulse was still knotted back in second period, sitting in the silence of that empty chair.
It wasn’t the math I couldn’t solve.
It was him.
No matter how I rearranged the variables, the equation never balanced.
I had braced for a storm.
A collision.
The price of a bargain I barely understood.
Instead, he had given me the one thing I hadn’t prepared for:
Nothing.