“Your friends are here.”
“They’re your friends too.”
“I—”
“No.” He closed the narrow distance between us. “Stop acting like what you think I need is more important than you. Cos it’s fucking not.”
He was talking about something else, surely. But I was too fractured to comprehend what. Lida whined, sensing what Ranger couldn’t see, and it was all I could do to keep my face neutral.
Ranger made an impatient sound, one that usually meant he might throw something. But with nothing to hand, there was only me, and he gripped my face with gentle hands. “Wait here. I’m gonna nick a car.”
He ducked back inside without waiting for me to answer.
Lida nudged my leg and I realised I’d forgotten to ask Saint if she had exercised while I’d been gone. When she had last had a drink, though I knew Saint would have cared for her well. As ever,Iwas the problem, a state of mind that had not plagued me in some time, but today was as heavy as it had ever been.
It feels like Christmas. At least until Jake had come and stayed with us for twenty-four hours before he’d gone home to Katya and Ivan. To Yuri and Polina. To the sunshine I was beginning to crave more than air.
The chapel door opened. Ranger emerged with a set of keys and something in his pocket that had not been there when he’d gone inside. He jerked his head at Decoy’s car. “Let’s go.”
“Why are we taking Decoy’s car?”
“Why not?”
“Lida likes to walk.”
“She’s been walked. By Saint. She’s probably going to sleep for a week when we get home.”
He brushed past me and strode across the yard to the waiting car.
Lida followed him and hopped in the back.
Being without either of them was hard. Without both, impossible. It left me little option but to slide into the passenger seat of Decoy’s sensible SUV and let Ranger drive us home.
It had grown dark while we had wrestled with whatever hung over us. Ranger entered the house first, but he left the lights off, drifting instead to the sound system and queuing up the mellow beats that had become the soundtrack to the life we shared.
Then he moved to the kitchen and opened a fridge that contained nothing but bacon, milk, and butter. “We still have Rubi’s bread, right?”
“Why?”
“Cos we’re having breakfast for dinner.”
He did not cook much. And there was good reason for that. But as entertaining as it was to watch him navigate the stove without breaking it, I could not stand still.
Our bed remained a mattress in the middle of the floor. I bypassed it and stepped into the bathroom—a space that functioned much better since Nash had done something to the pipes. The shower was hot, and it stayed hot, pummelling my skin until my head swam.
I found clean sweatpants and tugged them on as Ranger appeared in the doorway.
“Come and eat.”
“I am not hungry.”
“Not what I asked.”
He held out his hand.
Despite my mood, I was powerless to resist, and I let him tow me back to the kitchen and coax me into eating some of the bacon and buttered bread he’d slapped on a plate while he hovered over me, the same man who’d come to the island to save me from myself.
This was not that.