“Fifteen.”
Sloane reached over slowly and rested her hand on mine. She didn’t squeeze. Didn’t say anything hollow. Just let her hand sit there, warm and steady.
“I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
“Yeah.”
I swallowed against the tightness in my throat.
“After that, Lock kind of disappeared. Divorced the ice queen. Then just… vanished. Stopped coming to family events. Stopped answering calls. Barely talked to anyone—not me, not Finn, not our parents.”
The cabin door creaked faintly somewhere inside as Lock moved around.
“Mom said he’d been living on the road almost full-time,” I added. “Moving from place to place. No fixed address.”
“Alone?”
“Mostly.”
Sloane’s thumb brushed across my hand once.
“That kind of loss changes a person down to the foundation,” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
We sat there for a moment. The sun had nearly gone now, only a thin band of orange clinging to the horizon beyond the trees. Somewhere down at the dock, Jeff’s voice and Ethan’s laugh—faint, ordinary, almost startling in how normal it sounded.
The door behind us opened.
Lock stepped out onto the porch holding a battered metal medical kit, the kind the military issued—olive drab, dented at the corners, probably older than both of us.
He stopped when he saw us sitting there. His eyes moved to Sloane’s hand on mine, to my face. Something flickered behind his expression—recognition, maybe, or memory—the ghost of someone who used to sit beside him like that, once.
He held my gaze a moment longer than necessary.
“Alright,” he said gruffly.
“Let’s see how badly you screwed up that leg.”
* * *
Sloane stood up from the porch rail and stretched, glancing toward the cabin door.
“So,” she said, brushing salt-stiff hair out of her face, “this fancy apocalypse cabin got a bathroom, or are we back to the boat method?”
Lock chuckled—rough but genuine.
“Yeah. Down the hall on the right is a half-bathroom.”
“Bless you,” she muttered, already heading inside.
The screen door creaked shut behind her, leaving me and Lock on the porch.
For a minute, neither of us spoke.
Lock set the metal medical kit on the porch beside my leg but didn’t open it yet. Instead, he leaned back against the railing and studied me, those sharp eyes doing what they’d always done—reading, calculating, filing things away.