LV
Penny’s voice ricocheted down the second-floor hall.
“MADDIE—WHERE’S MY BAG? THE GREEN ONE. NO, THE OTHER GREEN ONE.”
“I’M LOOKING,” I yelled back, half-laughing as I pawed through the cosmetic avalanche on my bed.
Lip gloss. Bobby pins. A curling iron I was sure neither of us knew how to use properly.
No bag.
I grabbed the nearest thing off the bed—Heaton’s hoodie—and dragged it over my head.
It was heavy and dark, smelling of citrus peel and crushed cloves. Familiar enough to calm me before I even questioned it.
I padded downstairs barefoot, tugging the sleeves over my hands as I rounded the corner—
—and nearly walked straight into Ford.
He stood in the hallway with a stack of folded towels against his chest, sleeves rolled to his forearms, hair still damp from the shower.
Clean. Warm.
Alive in a way that made something old and tender pull tight behind my ribs.
His hazel eyes dipped once—sweatpants, oversized hoodie, bare feet—before lifting back to my face.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
Upstairs, Penny yelled, “IF YOU FIND MY BAG AND DON’T brING IT TO ME, I’M GOING TO DIE UGLY.”
Ford’s mouth twitched.
“I’m just taking these out to the guesthouse,” he said, lifting the towels slightly. “Natalie asked if she could get ready over there for the festival tonight.”
Right.
Natalie Hayes.
My stomach dipped.
“You’re going with her?”
“Nat asked me to.” His jaw shifted. “With Sasha missing, her family’s been a wreck. It felt wrong not to show up.”
“No. That makes sense.”
Ford looked down at the hoodie.
When he looked back, something in his expression had sharpened.
“That his?”
I should have lied.
Instead, I looked down too, as if the answer might have changed since I put it on.
“Yeah.”
He nodded once.
“And he drives you to school now.”
I tried for light. “Sometimes.”
“Most mornings.”
I looked back up at him.
Ford shifted the towels to one arm.
“You break curfew three nights a week. At least. You vanish into that car with him, come back looking like death warmed over, and then wear his clothes around the house like it means nothing.”
His mouth flattened.
“So, okay. Maybe I missed the start of it. I didn’t miss the rest.”
Heat climbed my neck.
“It’s not like that.”
Ford let out a quiet breath, as if he had expected that answer and hated it anyway.
“Then tell me what it is.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing clean came out.
Because what was I supposed to say? That Heaton was just a guy at my school, except my nervous system lit up like a Christmas tree every time he got too far away? That I could feel his moods like the weather now? That some days I couldn’t tell where my own feelings ended and the bond began?
The space between us shrank enough for me to catch the scent of clean soap and sun-dried cotton.
Enough to make it impossible to pretend this didn’t matter.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
The question caught me wrong.
“No.”
“Are there feelings?”
I laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
“That’s not exactly a simple question right now.”
“It should be.”
“It’s not.”
His eyes flicked to the hoodie again, to the sleeves swallowing my hands.
“Maddie.”
The way he said my name sounded like the past.
Safe in all the ways my life no longer was.
“I’m trying to ask this without making it uglier than it already feels,” he said quietly. “But I need you to be honest with me. Is this actually him—”
His voice caught for half a second.
Then steadied.
“—or is it whatever came back with you from those woods?”
I looked away first.
“I don’t know.”
The hallway blurred at the edges. Not because I was crying, but because he had pressed his thumb directly against the fracture I had been trying not to touch.
“I know there’s something there,” I said. “I think it’s real. But . . . ”
I pressed a hand flat to my sternum, as if that might make the words come easier.
“Sometimes I can’t tell what’s me and what’s just . . . what wants to be whole. And I don’t know how to separate those feelings yet.”
Ford’s face changed.
Not because I had said I didn’t care.
But because I hadn’t.
“And if you could?” he asked.
I looked back at him.
“If you could separate them,” he said, quieter now, “would it still be him?”
God.
That hurt.
Because there had been a version of my life where the answer would have been simple. Where Ford meant warmth and steadiness and Sunday-morning ordinary, and that would have been enough.
More than enough.
But that girl was getting harder to find.
“When we came back this summer,” I said, “I knew you’d been through a lot. With your dad. I knew you weren’t in a place for . . . any of it.”
I gave a small, humorless smile.
“You made that pretty clear.”
Regret flickered across his face.
“I was a mess.”
“I know. Me too.”
He adjusted the towels against his chest, eyes dropping for a second before coming back to mine.
“At first, I told myself it didn’t matter anyway. You and your dad weren’t staying. There was no point in making things more complicated than they already were.”
He exhaled through his nose.
“Then you stayed. And I . . . hesitated. I didn’t want to rush things and scare you off.”
His jaw tightened.
“But somewhere in the middle of trying to be decent, I let too much time pass.”
I looked down at the sleeves swallowing my hands.
“When you disappeared that night,” he said, quieter now, “I tore those cliffs apart looking for you.”
He swallowed.
“And when I saw you with him the next morning, I knew I was too late.”
I closed my eyes.
“When I came back,” I said, “part of me thought maybe there was still something there for us.”
My voice dipped.
“Maybe part of me still thinks that.”
Hope flashed across his face so fast it almost hurt to look at.
The tether gave a low, warning thrum.
“But it’s not simple anymore,” I said quickly, before that hope could settle into something steadier. My fingers curled deeper into Heaton’s sleeves. “It’s not untouched. None of this is.”
Ford took one step closer.
Not enough to crowd me. Just enough for the hallway to feel smaller.
“Was I really too late?”
I looked up at him instantly, and my heart ached for him.
For me.
For the version of us that had almost happened and now stood between us in the narrow hallway like something unfinished.
“I think . . . ”
I stopped.
Because I didn’t want to lie.
And I didn’t want to tell the whole truth either.
Ford’s mouth flattened.
“He looks at you like he’s already decided, like he knows something about you I don’t.”
The irony of it nearly made me burst.
Heaton didn’t just know things about me. He was a ghost in my machine. He knew the frequency of my heartbeat. The way my lungs expanded a microsecond before I took a breath. Every nerve ending that we were currently now sharing together.
“I’m not trying to make tonight harder,” Ford said. “I just couldn’t keep pretending I didn’t see what was right in front of me.”
He glanced down at the hoodie again, and his expression soured.
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re alive. And I’m glad someone was there when I wasn’t.”
His jaw worked as he fought the words.
“I just hate that it had to be him.”
A sad smile touched my mouth.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I think that part was out of both our hands.”
He dragged his lower lip between his teeth, then let it go.
Upstairs, Penny shouted, “MADDIE! MY SILVER EYELINER IS MISSING. DID YOU BORROW IT?”
Ford looked toward the ceiling, then back at me.
“I should go.”
He took one step backward.
Then stopped.
“I’m still here,” he said. “If you figure it out. If you need more time. If this thing with him turns out to be . . . something you don’t want.”
There it was. The opening.
And God help me, I didn’t close it.
“I know,” I whispered. “Thank you, Ford.”
Hope and grief moved across his face so quickly that they almost canceled each other out.
He nodded once, clean and final on the surface, if not underneath. Then he turned and walked out of the hallway with the towels tucked against his chest like they weighed more than they should have.
The second he disappeared, the bond didn’t just thrum.
It flared.
Warm and sour.
No words. No thoughts.
Just the unmistakable aftershock of a ghost too far away to hear, but close enough to feel the shape of another man’s hope.
Heaton had felt Ford here—a soft, sunny static trying to jam the dark signal we’d built together. He’d felt the door left open where he wanted one slammed shut.
I braced one hand against the wall and breathed through the aftershock like it was a physical cramp that might pass if I gave it time.
It didn’t.
The flare just settled deeper—hot in my ribs, cold in my throat, a vicious ache with nowhere to go.
He was furious.
I could feel that much.
Heaton had already given me the choice once. If I wanted Ford—if I wanted anything human and ordinary—then Heaton and I had to be severed first.
Until then, this wasn’t harmless.
It was contact across an open wire.
And somewhere out there in the dark, he had sent the only message he could without words.
Back off.