Chapter 20
Hudson had spent the last hour pretending the silence didn’t matter.
He counted steps and measured the rhythm of his breathing. The wilderness unwound through the spruce ahead of them, while the cold burrowed deeper into his lungs with every mile.
It worked until it didn’t.
The quiet had been easy for the first hour. Tired. Silence earned by two people surviving something together. Then Sarah stopped talking entirely, and the quiet felt like something she was deciding whether to break.
She walked a stride ahead of him, hands deep in her jacket pockets, breath fogging steady and even. He counted the minutes without meaning to, hands and brain needing somewhere to put themselves when the rest of him wanted to be doing something else.
The faint path had narrowed until there was nowhere left to look except ahead.
Or at her.
“Back at the diner.” She didn’t turn around. “You said you should have caught him the first time.”
He didn’t speak.
“Then you told me to forget it.”
His stomach dropped, but there was nowhere to grab onto. “I remember.”
She tramped on a few steps, snow compressing beneath her boots.
For three strides neither of them said anything else, and he thought, with relief, that maybe that would suffice.
“Why did you kiss me, Hudson?” She still didn’t turn. “If you were just going to disappear the next morning.”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He’d rehearsed this conversation a thousand times, and every version ended before this question.
“It was a long time ago,” he finally said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Sarah—”
“I’ve waited fifteen years to ask it properly.” Now she turned, walking backward a few steps so she faced him, her expression unreadable in the dark. “You don’t get to say it was a long time ago.”
He came to a halt.
She stopped too, a few feet ahead, watching him with the patience of someone who had genuinely waited fifteen years and decided she’d wait a little longer if that’s what it took.
He looked past her, into the black between the trees, as if the answer might be easier to find out there than inside his own heart. “I told myself I was protecting you.”
“From what?”
He looked away. “From me.” He kicked snow with his boot, unable to meet her eyes. “You weren’t just Wyatt’s little sister anymore.” He swallowed against the thickness in his throat. “You weren’t just the kid hanging around the docks.” His laugh was almost painful.
“I don’t know exactly when. I just knew that night I looked at you and you weren’t her anymore. You were just?—”
Sarah waited, breath fogging, eyes locked on him so it was impossible to look anywhere else.
“You were just Sarah,” he said. “I’d been trying not to kiss you for months.”
He looked at the snow. “I stopped standing too close. Stopped touching you. Started leaving whenever you walked into a room.” He blew out a noisy breath. “None of it helped. And then I kissed you before I let myself think about whether I had any right to.”
She didn’t say anything yet, so he carried on.
“I lay awake all night trying to convince myself it couldn’t happen again.
” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “I was leaving for BUD/S. After that—teams. Deployments. Months I couldn’t explain.
Places I couldn’t talk about.” He looked away.
“I knew what that life did to people waiting at home. And I knew I might come back different. If I came back.”
He ran a hand through his hair.
“I wasn’t going to ask an eighteen-year-old to build her life around that, especially after I saw you cry.”
Sarah blinked. “You saw me crying?”
“After I kissed you.” His voice almost disappeared. “I sat in my truck halfway down the road. I couldn’t drive.”
Sarah’s hands had come out of her pockets. She wasn’t doing anything with them. Just holding them slightly away from her body, as if she needed somewhere for the tension to go.
“So you just—” She stopped. Tried again. “You decided that. For both of us. And then you left, and you never told me any of it, and you let me think—” She sniffed, her eyes bright. “I thought you regretted kissing me. You let me think I wasn’t enough.” Her voice had gone tight and controlled.
Fifteen years. All this time he’d thought he’d taken the hurt with him. He hadn’t. He’d just handed her a different burden to carry.
His body moved before his brain did.
One step.
He stopped himself. She didn’t need comforting from the man who’d caused it.
“Fifteen years, Hudson. I built an entire version of myself around not being enough for you. And the whole time you were what—protecting me from yourself?”
“Yes.”
“And do you know what the worst part is?”
He couldn’t answer. His throat ached too much.
“I might have waited. Maybe not fifteen years.” She gave a sad laugh. “But you never even let me choose.”
She turned away from him, just for a second, looking off into the trees the same way he had a minute ago, as if there might be an answer out there she could borrow.
“I thought I drove you off,” she said, quieter now, mostly to the dark. “I thought I did something wrong, or wasn’t—I don’t know. Pretty enough. Worth staying for. Something.” A breath. “And the whole time you were thinking you were doing me a favor.”
“I thought I was.” He stared at the snow clinging to his boots. “I was wrong. I’m sorry, Sarah. If I’d known what it was going to cost you...” He shook his head. “I thought if one of us had to hurt, it should be me.” His voice was rough. “Turns out I just made sure we both did.”
She turned back to face him fully. “You just decided without me. Same as you’re probably still doing right now, somewhere in that head of yours, about whatever happens next.”
That landed harder than anything else she’d said. There wasn’t a defense for that. She was right.
Sarah studied him for a long moment, the anger in her shoulders not gone exactly, but sinking into something heavier. “You’re an idiot.” Her voice wasn’t loud or angry anymore. Just flat and certain, worn down to the plainest version of the truth.
He let out a breath. “Yeah.”
“Fifteen years,” she said again, as if she was still trying to make the math work. “Fifteen years, and we were both getting it wrong in completely different directions.”
“I know.”
She said nothing for a moment. Just looked at him, breath misting, the hurt laid bare now in the freezing dark.
Then she turned and started walking again.
He followed her. His lungs burned from the cold, the pace, and the pain that had finally found its way out into the open air.
Neither of them spoke. The weight in his chest hadn’t eased.
But it wasn’t his alone anymore.
For the first time in fifteen years, it existed in the space between them.