18. Fran
— ? —
Fran
I wake to sunlight and the smell of tea, he’s been up for a while, clearly, and when I shuffle into the kitchen wearing yoga pants and a sweater that doesn’t quite hide my growing bump, Logan is standing at the stove looking like a man who’s been rehearsing casual body language and failing at it.
“Morning,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes.
“Morning.” I slide into my usual chair. “You made tea again.”
“Two sugars, splash of milk, stronger than normal.” He sets my blue mug in front of me. “I’m getting good at this.”
“You are.” I take a sip. Perfect, again. “Thank you.”
We’re quiet for a moment, the unspoken memory of yesterday hanging between us, the cooler, the flowers, everything that happened after the sorting was done.
He’s at the stove, his back to me, doing something with eggs that involves a lot of unnecessary stirring.
I watch the movement of his shoulders under his long-sleeved henley, dark blue today, the same style he’s worn every day since he arrived, and think about the way those shoulders felt under my hands.
“About yesterday,” he starts.
“We don’t have to make it weird.”
“I just wanted to say-” He turns, spatula in hand. “I don’t have any expectations. Because of what happened. We still go at your pace, whatever you’re comfortable with.”
“I know.” And I do know, which is maybe the strangest part of all this. “You’ve been pretty consistent about that.”
“Okay.” He turns back to the eggs. “Good.”
“Good.”
The awkwardness stretches for another beat, and then his elbow catches the edge of the pan and hot grease splatters across his shirt.
“Shit-” He jumps back, hissing, and I’m on my feet before I can think about it.
“Are you okay? Did it burn you?”
“Just the shirt.” He’s pulling at the fabric, which is now spotted with dark grease stains. “Damn. This was my last clean one.”
“Take it off. I’ll put it in the wash with the others.”
He hesitates, and I see something flicker across his face, not embarrassment, exactly. Something closer to fear.
“Logan. It’s just a shirt.”
“Right.” He takes a breath. “Right, yeah.”
He reaches for the hem and pulls the henley over his head in one motion, and I see his left arm for the first time since he showed up at Bree’s house.
The scars run from his shoulder to his wrist, raised, twisted tissue in shades of red and white, covering almost every inch of skin. Some areas are smooth and shiny; others are rough and ridged. The damage is extensive, unmistakable, the kind of burns that must have required months of treatment.
I can’t stop staring.
“Fran?” His voice is careful, watching my reaction.
“Logan.” My throat is tight. “What happened to your arm?”
He’s very still, the ruined shirt bunched in his hands. “The fire.”
“I knew you were hurt.” I shake my head, trying to process what I’m seeing. “The doctors mentioned your injuries were more serious than mine. But I didn’t realize - I didn’t know it was this bad.”
“The ceiling came down when I was getting you through the hallway.” He sets the shirt on the counter, his scarred arm exposed and vulnerable in the morning light.
“Burning beams. I got you out, but my arm took most of the impact. I didn’t realize how bad it was until later - adrenaline, shock, whatever. ”
I’m trying to breathe. Trying to reconcile what I’m seeing with what I thought I knew. I knew he saved me. I remember his arms around me, his voice in my ear telling me to hold on. But I never knew the price.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. “When you showed up here - why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I didn’t want you to feel guilty.” His voice is quiet. “I didn’t want you to think you owed me something because of this. That’s not why I came.”
“So you’ve just been hiding it? Under long sleeves in summer?”
“I’m not ready for people to see.” He looks down at his arm, at the ruined landscape of skin. “It’s not - I’m not ashamed, exactly. But it’s a lot to explain. And with you, I didn’t want it to be the thing that defined us. I didn’t want you to stay because you felt obligated.”
“That’s not how obligation works.”
“I know. I just-” He runs his good hand through his hair. “I wanted you to choose me because you wanted to. Not because I got hurt.”
I sink back into my chair, my legs unsteady. The scars are still visible across the table from me, a map of damage I didn’t know existed until five minutes ago. Evidence of what it cost him to pull me out of that fire.
“Tell me what happened,” I say. “That night. From your side.”
He sits down across from me, his scarred arm resting on the table between us like something he’s stopped trying to hide.
“I was at the warehouse when our neighbor called - said she saw smoke coming from the house. So I drove home early.” He pauses. “When I pulled up, the house was already smoking. And Sloane was on the lawn.”
“I saw you with her.” The memory surfaces, watching through the bedroom window, pounding on glass he couldn’t hear. “I saw you run to her.”
“She was crying. Hysterical. I asked her what happened, and she said there was a fire, that she’d barely gotten out.” His jaw tightens. “I asked where you were.”
“What did she say?”
“That you weren’t inside. That you’d left earlier - gone to the farm or something. She said you weren’t there.”
The confirmation hits me like a blow, even though I already suspected. “And you believed her.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” The question is genuine, anguished. “I’d known her my whole life. She was crying, she seemed terrified. Why would she lie about something like that?”
“So you stayed with her on the lawn.”
“For maybe a minute. Maybe less. I was trying to make sure she was okay, trying to figure out what to do - and then I heard something. This sound, like breaking glass.” He meets my eyes. “I looked up and saw you in the window.”
I remember that moment. The stool in my hands, the glass shattering, the desperate hope that someone would see me.
“Your face,” he says quietly. “The look on your face when you saw me. Like you’d already given up and then-” He stops, swallows hard. “I didn’t think about anything after that. I just ran.”
“The door was locked.”
“I know. I had to kick it down - three, four times before it gave. And by then the hallway was-” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. I got to you. That’s what mattered.”
“It matters to me.” I reach across the table, my fingers hovering over his scarred arm. “Can I?”
He nods, and I touch the damaged skin for the first time. It’s rough under my fingers, ridged and uneven, nothing like the smooth warmth I remember from before. A landscape of pain that leads directly back to me.
“Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes. When the weather changes, or if I’ve been working too hard. The nerve damage makes some parts numb, others too sensitive.” He watches my hand move over his arm. “The doctors say it’ll keep improving, but it won’t ever look normal.”
“I don’t care what it looks like.” My voice catches. “I care that you went through this and I didn’t know. I care that you’ve been carrying this around under long sleeves for months.”
“I wasn’t trying to deceive you. I just-” He takes a breath. “When I woke up in the hospital, you were gone. You’d left your ring and walked away without saying anything, and I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong that night.” The truth of it settles into me. “That night, you saved my life.”
“But before that.” His voice is rough. “Before that, I did everything wrong. For months. And I think - I think that’s why you left. Not because of the fire. Because of everything I did before it.”
“It wasn’t just you.” I pull my hand back, wrapping it around my teacup. “There were other reasons. Things I wasn’t ready to tell you.”
“Will you tell me now?”
I think about it. About the key scraping in the lock from the wrong side. About lying rigid in a hospital bed while she told me I was supposed to be dead.
“Yes,” I say. “But not this second. I need to - I need to organize my thoughts.”
“Take whatever time you need.”
We sit in silence for a moment, the weight of the morning settling around us. The eggs are cold and forgotten on the stove. The tea is getting lukewarm. But neither of us moves.
“Were you ever going to leave me in there?” It comes out before I can stop it, the question that’s been living under my ribs for three months. “You had Sloane out on the lawn. Safe. What made you go back?”
“I didn’t know there was a back to go to.” His jaw works. “The second I saw you in that window, there was no version where I stayed on the grass. There was never going to be one.”
“I’m sorry.” I look at the ruined map of his arm. “That you got hurt reaching me.”
“Don’t be.” He meets my eyes, and there’s nothing careful left in them. “I’d do it again tomorrow. I’d die for you, Fran. It’s not a line. It’s just the truest thing I’ve got.”
My heart slams so hard I’m certain he can see it moving in my throat, and the feeling that comes with it is not tender and not appropriate and has no business showing up in the middle of a conversation about second-degree burns.
I clear my throat. I get up and take his ruined shirt off the counter, because I need my hands doing something that isn’t reaching for him.
“This needs cold water,” I tell the shirt, with great authority. “Grease sets.”
“Fran.” Just my name, and he knows exactly what he’s done. He lets me have the retreat anyway.
“I’m not staying because I feel guilty,” I say finally. “About your arm. I want you to know that.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. If I stay - when I stay - it’s because I want to. Not because you got hurt saving me.”
“I know that too.” He almost smiles. “You’re not the type to stick around out of obligation. You’d have left again already if that’s what this was.”
“Damn right I would.”
The almost-smile becomes a real one, small and tentative but there. “So what is this, then? If it’s not obligation?”
“I don’t know yet.” I’m being honest, and it feels strange after so many months of hiding. “Something I’m still figuring out.”
“That’s fair.”
His phone buzzes on the counter, and we both look at it. The screen shows an incoming call from an unfamiliar number, but the voicemail preview displays a name that makes my stomach clench: Sloane V - “Logan, please, I need to talk-”
Logan’s expression goes flat. He picks up the phone, looks at the screen for a long moment, and then declines the call without answering.
“She’s been trying different numbers,” he says. “Since I blocked her. She keeps finding ways around it.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Weeks. Since right after I cut her off.” He silences the phone and sets it face-down on the counter. “I don’t know what she wants. I don’t care what she wants.”
I look at him, at his scarred arm, at his tired face, at the man who ran into a burning building for me and didn’t know why I was really trapped inside.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I say. “About Sloane. About what really happened that night.”
He goes still. “What do you mean, what really happened?”
“You asked why I left the hospital without seeing you. Why I disappeared for three months.” I take a breath. “It’s because of her. Because of what she did.”
“What she did?”
The words are right there, ready to spill out. Three months of carrying this alone, and now I finally have someone who might believe me, who might understand.
But I need to do this right. I need to be calm, coherent, able to answer his questions without falling apart.
“Can we sit somewhere more comfortable?” I ask. “This is going to take a while.”