The compound is still dark when I ease out of Oren's bed. Ash lifts his head from the porch boards as I slip through the door, amber eyes tracking me with the steady knowing of a creature who has never confused a walk of shame with a walk.
Fifty yards of open ground between his cabin and mine. I cross it carrying two heartbeats that aren't my own, both alive under my ribs, neither willing to make room for the other.
The shower runs hot enough to redden my skin. I stand under it until the water strips the scent of pine and cold lake air from my body, and my hands tremble through dressing, through pulling Ash's shirt over his protesting head, through slicing bread with a knife that jumps in my grip.
"Green or blue?" Sable appears at my kitchen door with two mugs and a grin wide enough to light a stadium. "I've been going back and forth all night—green is more him, right? But the blue matches that coat he wears to the lake."
"Green." I take the mug and the ceramic is warm against my traitorous fingers. "Definitely green."
"I knew it." She drops into the chair and pulls the knitting from her bag—dark green wool, the same shade I watched her wind three nights ago while my lungs forgot how to work. "I'm adding the doubled cable border you showed me—do you think I should add his initials?"
"Skip the initials." I smile, and the muscles in my face perform the shape with the practiced ease of a woman who spent three years smiling through dinner parties while her ribs knit under silk. "Let the work speak for itself."
"You're right, you're always right about this stuff." She bumps my knee under the table and the warmth in it is so recklessly given that my molars press together until my jaw aches. "I don't know what I'd do without you, Nell."
Be happy, in love and back home. I wrap both palms around the mug and hold on until the ceramic bites my skin.
She leaves with her wool and her plans and her whole open heart tucked under one arm. I stand at the sink washing a mug that's already clean because stopping means thinking, and thinking means the copper at the back of my throat wins.
Across the compound, Rhys leans against the guest quarters post with his coffee. Those dark eyes find mine through the kitchen window—three seconds, no nod, no wave—and whatever shifted inside me overnight is apparently visible from fifty yards.
The day builds itself around me—boys, dishes, yarn, the choreography of staying busy with hands that haven't steadied since dawn. Maren crosses to the main hall, someone hammers near the border posts, and the compound keeps turning while I perform the role of a woman whose life makes sense.
Evening drops the temperature ten degrees and paints everything in amber. The boys are inside—Rowan building something methodical with blocks, Ash dismantling it with fraternal devotion—when boots settle on my porch step.
I open the door. Rhys sits with his elbows on his knees, a folded letter visible in his jacket pocket—heavy stock, Harlan's stationery.
"Another one came." He doesn't look up, his thumb working the crease of the envelope through the fabric of his jacket. "The tone is different."
"Different how?" I sit beside him, two feet of cold air between us, and through the door Ash squeals while Rowan makes the low patient sound of a toddler whose tower is under siege.
"Less impatient. More suspicious." His thumb traces the edge of his knee the way it traces wood before a blade bites. "He's questioning the dead ends—why months of searching turn up nothing."
"What did you write back?" My thumbnail finds the grain of the porch step and presses hard enough to leave a mark.
"Eastern territory—false sighting near the Calloway border." He turns the letter without opening it. "But the fiction is thinning. He's not stupid, Nell—impatient, arrogant, but not stupid."
"How many more letters before it falls apart?" The question tastes like what it is—a woman counting down to the end of a borrowed life.
"One." He exhales through his nose. "Maybe two. Every letter is a lie, and he's started reading the spaces between them."
"And when it collapses?" The evening air bites my arms and I don't go inside for a jacket because moving means breaking whatever holds this conversation upright. "What happens then?"
"He sends someone who isn't conflicted." The words settle between us like a sentence already handed down. "Someone with clear orders and no reason to disobey."
Inside, Ash launches a block across the room with the joyful violence of a child who has discovered gravity. Beyond the mess hall, Oren's porch lamp casts its warm circle—his silhouette bent over the table, hands working at something small.
Fishing flies. The steady movements of a man who ties knots for pleasure, fifty yards from the step where a different man holds a letter that could burn this compound to ash.
The pull between Rhys and me sits in the charged air—bruised, complicated, refusing to die. And behind all of it, the man I left before dawn, whose heartbeat I counted against my cheek, whose name lives in Sable's mouth every time she lifts dark green wool.
"What do you want, Rhys?" I aim the question at the tree line because looking at his face would cost me something I can't afford tonight.
He's quiet long enough for the first stars to sharpen above the pines. His hands go still on his knees and the stillness has a weight to it.
"I don't know anymore." The honesty in it turns almost brutal—not toward me, toward the version of himself who arrived with a mission and a folded letter and a scarf he claimed was for tracking. "I came here knowing exactly what I wanted. Now I can't find a single piece of it."
"That makes two of us." My voice comes out flat, stripped to wire, and I don't soften it because softening things is what got me here.
His mouth shifts—not a smile, the ghost of something that in another life might have been worth trusting. I watch it form and don't return it, and the space between us fills with everything we've said tonight and the hundred things we haven't.
Rowan's tower crashes inside with a clatter of scattered wood. On the porch fifty yards east, the lamp flickers and Oren's hands pause, and the pull beneath my ribs hasn't stopped since his heartbeat under my palm, since every rule I built broke and rearranged into a shape I don't recognize.
Rhys stands, folds the letter back into his jacket, and steps off the porch. He stops half-turned, shoulders drawn tight against a sky that's lost its last colour.
"Lock the door tonight, Nell." His voice carries just far enough, stripped of everything except the warning living underneath it. "Both locks."
He walks toward the guest quarters—two steps in, and I stop him. “Rhys,” not a question, not a call out. Just stating his name, like breathing air. He stops. Doesn't turn back.
“I’ll need help with the kids,” a lie, but utterly realistic. “And I've made dinner for two, but Sable's busy.” I offer, as an outstretched hand, without waiting for an agreement.
But then he turns back, and the look in his eyes is not warmth, but pain.
“Sure,” he concedes easily. I don't smile, but the outline of one pulls on my lips.