31. Ember
Ember
“The storm had already passed by the time
the warning sirens activated.”
— Valley Weather Service
I stiffen against him, my hands coming up to plant flat against his chest—not as an embrace, but as a barrier.
I don’t push him away, but I don’t hold onto him, either. I remain rigid, a statue of nerves and resentment.
A single, hot drop of moisture leaks out of my left eye. Then my right.
My face doesn’t scrunch up in the way one does when grief is a sudden, shocking blow. I don’t make that terrible, wet choking sound people make in the movies when they’re caught off guard by their own heartbreak.
I just stand there, anchored in his arms, and let the water run down my cheeks. My expression remains uncomfortably flat, my lips slightly parted as I watch the confidence slowly leak out of his eyes.
The dark, desperate hunger that had been written across his face when he burst through my door begins to curdle into confusion.
His fingers slacken against my hip, his grip losing that possessive, grounding strength it held just seconds ago. He’s realizing, in real-time, that the apology he rehearsed isn’t going to work like a key in a lock.
“Ember?” he whispers, his voice thick with a mixture of hope and dawning dread. “Hey. Look at me. Don’t do that. Don’t cry. I’m here.”
I blink, the tears blurring the sharp, handsome lines of his face. “I know,” I say. “That’s the problem, Brooks. You’re just… back.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, the words tumbling out of him with a rare, clumsy haste that tells me he’s been practicing them the entire drive from the bakery.
He reaches his hand up, his thumb dry against my skin as he tries to wipe away one of the tracks on my cheek.
It’s an intimate gesture, one that usually makes my heart stutter, but today, it feels like a slight. You don’t get to comfort the wound you made and call yourself gentle for it.
I lift my head just enough to avoid the contact, turning my face toward the wall.
“Ember. Don’t do that. Don’t look at the wall. Look at me.” His hand hovers in the air between us, large and useless.
“I’m so sorry, Emmy. I was scared. I shut you out because I thought I was keeping Sophie safe.
I thought I was keeping you safe from the kind of life I have to live.
But I was wrong. The ladies at the bakery—they told me what an absolute ass I’ve been, and they’re right.
I love you. I know I’ve never said it, and I know I’ve been a wall, but I do. I love you, Ember. Please.”
The word love is supposed to be the key.
In every book I’ve ever read, in every script where the big, stoic man finally breaks, that word is the magic bullet.
It’s the celestial alignment, the grand revelation that justifies the suffering.
But as he says it, all I can think about is the kitchen trash can behind me. Sitting at the bottom of that bin is a block of goat cheese that turned to liquid because I spent three hours staring at the wall, firmly believing I was a nuisance to a man’s survival.
I think about the oppressive silence of my house, how loud the clock ticked against the wood, and how I had to force myself to breathe because the air felt too heavy to inhale.
Movies have trained us to believe that love is a climax. A dramatic confession in an airport terminal. A kiss in the pouring rain. A man running through a city because suddenly, finally, he understands what he almost lost.
The credits roll right after.
Nobody writes about the aftermath.
Nobody writes about the person standing there wondering why it took so long to be chosen.
I take a slow, deep breath through my nose, the scent of him—cedar, ozone, and something uniquely Brooks—still filling my head, and I step back.
This time, I put my weight into it. I move out of his grip, my shoes making a dry thwack against the clean linoleum until there are four feet of open, cold air between us.
“No,” I say.
Brooks’s brow furrows, his head tilting slightly as if he didn’t quite register the syllable. “No? Ember, I just told you—”
“I heard what you said, Brooks.” I wipe the back of my hand across my cheek, smearing the salt into my skin. “You love me. You’re sorry. You had a big realization because three grandmas told you that you were being mean to the city girl.”
“That’s not fair. I was at the bakery,” he says, his voice rising in defense. “I saw you with Marge. I saw how you looked when you thought nobody was watching.”
I let out a short, mocking laugh. “Oh, so you saw me looking pathetic and decided to throw me a bone? Is that what this is? The great Chief Lawson taking pity on the girl who doesn’t know how to handle a little country heartbreak?”
“You know that’s not what this is,” he says, stepping closer. “I’ve been dying inside since Friday. You think I wanted to lock myself in that house? You think I liked seeing you look at me like that?”
“Well, congratulations,” I snap. “You were miserable. I was devastated. Great teamwork.”
I close my eyes for a second and exhale a shaky breath. “On Friday, I came to your porch. I saw Sophie’s backpack. I saw her shoes. And do you know what I did?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I didn’t yell,” I continue, the tears still coming, steady and quiet. “I didn’t push you or start a scene, because I knew your five-year-old daughter was inside that house, and her peace is more important to me than my pride.”
A shadow of genuine, gut-wrenching shame crosses his face. He looks down, his eyes dropping to the floorboards between us, as if the wood grain holds the answers he can’t find in my expression.
“You don’t even realize how cruel you were.”
His face tightens, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “Ember—”
“No, listen to me,” I say. “You looked me in the face and decided for both of us that I was too much risk for your life. You didn’t ask me what I wanted. You didn’t trust me to make my own choices.”
“I was scared.”
“I know you were scared.” My voice cracks. “Do you think I wasn’t?”
He opens his mouth to respond, then closes it again, silenced by the truth of it.
“I knew what your job was when I fell in love with you, Brooks.” The words come out rough, scraped raw from my throat.
“I knew there’d be nights where the radio went off and I wouldn’t hear from you for hours.
I knew there was a chance Sophie could get attached to me and I could still lose both of you someday anyway. I knew all of that.”
His eyes are locked on mine now. Completely wrecked.
“And I still stayed,” I finish.
“Emmy, I know—”
“No, you don’t.” I shake my head, the motion making me feel lightheaded. “Because if you understood that, you would’ve talked to me instead of shutting me out like I was a mistake.”
His shoulders drop another inch, his posture slumping as if the very air in the room is pushing down on him.
“That’s not how I see you,” he insists.
“Then why did you treat me like that?”
“I treated you like something important,” he says immediately. “Too important. That was the whole damn problem.”
I laugh, a sound devoid of humor. “That doesn’t make this romantic, Brooks. It makes it controlling.”
“I know that.” His voice finally rises, not with anger, but with a raw, jagged desperation. “Jesus Christ, Ember, I know I handled this wrong. I know I hurt you. I’ve been sick over it.”
“You don’t get it.” I point at my chest, right over my heart. “You made me feel stupid.”
That lands. It hits him hard, a physical impact that makes him flinch.
His entire expression changes, the desperation replaced by a fleeting, shattered realization.
“What?” he breathes.
“I felt stupid,” I repeat, tears burning hotter now, blurring the edges of the room. “I was over here building this whole life in my head. You and Sophie and breakfasts and holidays and stupid town festivals. I let myself believe you wanted me here as more than just a passing distraction.”
“I do want you here,” he says, his voice a low, urgent plea. “God, I do.”
“Then why did you make me feel like you don’t?”
“Because I panicked!”
The words crack out of him so fast they almost echo against the cabinets. He drags both hands through his hair, pacing once across my kitchen—a caged animal confined by his own mistakes—before turning back to me, eyes wide and searching.
“I panicked because I love you,” he says, his voice hoarse.
“Because one second it was just flirting across the grass and the next second you were everywhere. In my house. In Sophie’s routines.
In my head every five damn minutes. And I realized if something happened to me—if I didn’t come home—you’d be left with the wreckage.
I couldn’t stand the thought of you being hurt. ”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!”
“I know that now!” he bellows, his chest heaving with the effort.
Silence slams into the room, heavy and suffocating.
His chest is rising and falling in rapid, uneven intervals. Mine is too.
“I have never loved anybody the way I love you,” he says, his voice dropping back to a quiet sincerity. “And instead of handling that like a sane person, I tried to control it. I tried to manage the risk.”
I stare at him, absorbing the weight of the confession.
That honesty is what almost ruins me. Because I know he means it. Every word.
“You hurt me anyway,” I whisper.
His eyes close, his chin dropping toward his chest. I watch the pain move across his face, like he physically can’t stop himself from feeling every inch of it.
“I know,” he says, his voice barely a sound. “I know, Emmy.”
“I loved you on Friday, Brooks,” I whisper.
The admission doesn’t feel good. It feels like pulling a jagged stitch out of a wound that hasn’t healed yet.