"That's not?—"
"You walked into a stranger's house in the dark, and you sized him up. You decided in about forty-five seconds whether I was safe." He said it evenly, no heat to it. "You were right, by the way."
I looked at him then.
"You knew Dane wasn't real," Hayes said. "You knew it for a long time. The only thing you got wrong was thinking you had to be the one to end it." He held my gaze. "That's not broken, Pandora. That's just someone who never had a good enough reason to blow it up herself. Until now."
My eyes burned. I didn't cry.
"I don't know what I'm doing," I said.
"You don't have to." He reached over and took the phone out of my hand without making anything of it and set it on the nightstand face-down again. "You know what you want. That's enough to start with."
He wasn't wrong.
I knew what I wanted. I'd known since the porch. I'd known since he'd looked at me on that railing and said not even a little, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
"I'm staying," I said. Not a question.
Hayes nodded once. "I know."
"The whole week."
"Good."
Outside, the river ran on below the tree line, the same as it had been all morning, the same as it would be all week. The mountains held still around the cabin and the light through the curtains was warm. I reached over and picked up the phone one more time.
I texted my mother,I'm safe. I'll call soon. I promise.
Then I set it back down and left it there. The notifications would keep. The explanations and the logistics and the long conversations—all of it would keep. Right now, there was just the river and the light and the quiet, and somewhere on the other side of the bedroom door, a man who had given me room to fall apart without making it mean anything except that I was human.
That felt like enough. More than enough.
That felt like a beginning.
EPILOGUE
PANDORA: 5 YEARS LATER
My parents had taken the twins for the weekend.
That had been my mother's idea—a grandmother's prerogative, she'd said. It was her way of telling me she knew Hayes and I needed forty-eight hours alone without anyone demanding to be carried or shrieking about mud.
She'd become good at reading what I needed. It had taken us a little time to find our way back to each other after everything—some difficult conversations and one very long phone call from the cabin five years ago. But we were better now than we'd been before. Closer. The kind of close that came from having said the hard things and stayed.
The friends I had now were mine—actually mine, people I'd chosen in this life, who knew Hayes and Wildwood Valley and the twins and showed up the way real people showed up. Enough of them that the loneliness I'd carried in Charlotte felt like something from a different lifetime. It was.
Dane had surfaced eventually. Not to me—to law enforcement, briefly, when a pattern of behavior caught up with him two states over. I'd read about it in three sentences and felt nothing except a clean, distant relief that it hadn't been personal.It had never been personal. I'd just been convenient, and then I hadn't been, and he'd moved on. The story had already closed by the time I read it.
The river was low this time of year, running slow and clear over the rocks, and Hayes had his boots off and his jeans rolled to the knee like he planned to stay until dark.
I dropped down beside him on the bank and he handed me what was left of his drink without looking up. That was one of my favorite things about him — the way he made room for me without making a production of it. Five years and he still did it like breathing.
"Kids get off okay?" he asked.
"My mother handed over the snacks before they even pulled out of the parking lot."
He smiled at the river. His friend Bishop had been here earlier. But now it was just us and the water and the late afternoon light going gold through the trees.