“He needs to know we love him.”
“He does.”
“How do you know?”
Nash waved his phone. “The wonders of modern technology.”
“You called him?”
“Nope.”
“Texts?”
“Yup.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“What didyousay?”
Nash tossed me the phone. “What I needed to.”
The handset landed on the bed. I abandoned the window to flop down beside it and swiped into the app Nash used for personal messages.
The thread with Locke was right there, sitting above the meme-laden nonsense he shared with Rubi, the wacky group chats, and the daily emojis from Willow.
My thumb hovered over it, desperate curiosity burning my soul, but the selfishness of that feeling was too barbed to ignore.
No.
I didn’t get to invade their relationship because I hadn’t managed to fix my own. I just—God,I just needed to lay eyes on him. To touch him. To melt into that potent sea-green gaze and know that everything was going to be okay. “And you haven’t seen him?”
“I’ve seen him.”
“When?”
“This morning. He was with Folk.”
“You didn’t speak to him?”
“They were in the car.”
A heavy sigh breached my lips.
Nash got up and came to the bed, towering over me, a slight bruise on his temple making itself known. “Okay down there, O’Brian?”
I grazed my fingers over the mark—the straight upwelthe’d given himself a few days ago when he’d sleepwalked across the landing and I hadn’t been quick enough to catch him before he’d crashed into the door to Locke’s empty room. “How’s the weatherup there, McGovern?”
“Cloudy.” Nash gave me a tired smile. “But you know what they say about clouds.”
“What’s that?”
“They float on by eventually.”
“Or a storm eviscerates them.”
“That how the weather works?”