Until The Storm (Honey Creek #7)

PROLOGUE

Piper Lane sat on the edge of an unfamiliar bed, a half-packed bag open beside her, and did not cry, though her whole chest had gone tight enough that not crying felt like its own kind of physical work.

The ring sat on the nightstand, not on her hand.

She kept looking at it like it might explain itself. It didn't. It just sat there, gold and small and terrifyingly permanent, catching the one lamp still on in a room that smelled nothing like cedar or woodsmoke, and everything like a life she hadn't planned on needing a backup for.

Down the hall, a door opened and closed. Footsteps. A voice she knew better than her own, pitched low, careful, the way you'd approach something that might startle.

"Hey." A pause in the doorway. "You okay?"

She looked up. Didn't trust her voice yet, so she didn't use it.

"You've been in here a long time."

"I know."

"Piper." Softer now, closer. "Talk to me."

She looked at the ring again, then at the bag, half-full of things she couldn't, in this moment, remember choosing.

"I don't know how to do this," she admitted, and her voice finally broke on it, six words carrying eight years of somebody else's ghosts and one lifetime of her own.

A hand found hers in the dark — steady, sure, the same hand that had once pulled a scared dog out of a collapsing barn roof and a stranded reporter out of a ditch and, eventually, without either of them quite noticing the exact day it happened, a version of herself she'd stopped believing she was allowed to want.

"Yes, you do," he said. "You've been doing it for a year already."

She let out something that was half a laugh and half the thing right before crying, and picked the ring up off the nightstand, and did not, in fact, put it in the bag.

Whatever this was — an ending, a beginning, both, neither — it had started three hundred and some days ago, on a road that shouldn't have washed out, in a town that had no earthly reason to change either of their lives.

It seemed only fair to start there.