Three seventeen in the morning. I know because I've been watching the digital clock on the nightstand tick through every excruciating minute since midnight.
My skin feels too tight, stretched over bones that ache with exhaustion my body refuses to surrender to.
I flip onto my back.
The pillow is damp where my neck has been sweating despite the chill seeping through the window frame.
My stomach churns—morning sickness that doesn't care about the actual morning, mixing with anxiety until I can't tell which sensation belongs to which cause.
I press my palm flat against my abdomen, feeling the slight firmness there that no one can see yet.
Eight weeks. A collection of cells that might become a person, growing inside a body that can't even figure out how to exist in a room with three men without self-destructing.
The ceiling has seventeen knots in its wooden beams. I've counted them four times.
My throat is dry, but getting water means walking past the living room, and I can still feel the weight of their stares from hours ago.
The disappointment. The confusion. The cold dismissal that felt worse than anger because at least anger means someone still cares enough to feel.
It's simpler to disappear.
I ease out of bed, moving silently. Drawer open, clothes folded, suitcase packed.
I avoid the creaking floorboard by the door—I memorized its location days ago, cataloging escape routes without admitting that's what I was doing.
The cabin breathes around me, all settling wood and sleeping men and unfinished conversations I don't have the courage to complete.
No goodbyes. No explanations. No messy confrontations where I have to watch their faces while I try to articulate why I self-destruct every time someone gets too close.
Clean break.
My car starts on the first try—Jake fixed it perfectly, of course, because Jake does everything with that infuriating competence that makes me want to scream and kiss him simultaneously—and I pull onto the dark road feeling equal parts relief and devastation.
The relief wins for approximately three miles. Then five. Then ten.
The forest thins as I drive, giving way to stretches of swampland that gleam silver in the predawn light.
I pass a gas station with its lights flickering, a bait shop with a hand-painted sign, a crossroads where I have to choose between heading north toward the interstate or east toward the coast.
I choose north.
The highway stretches empty ahead of me, and I let myself breathe for the first time in hours. My hands loosen on the steering wheel. The tension in my shoulders begins to unknot.
I'm doing the right thing. I'm protecting myself.
Headlights flood my rearview mirror.
I squint against the glare, my foot hovering over the gas pedal, adrenaline spiking through my exhausted system. The truck behind me is gaining fast—too fast for casual highway driving at this hour.
My heart rate climbs as I watch it close the distance, and for one wild moment I think it might be Jake, chasing me down like he did in the rain.
But when the truck pulls alongside me, gesturing for me to stop, and then accelerates past to position itself across the road at the next pullout, I recognize the shape of it.
It's Konnor.
The disappointment cuts deeper than I expected, which is ridiculous, which is pathetic, which is exactly the kind of emotional mess I was trying to avoid by leaving.
I don't roll down my window. He doesn't seem to care.
"Turn around." His voice carries through the glass, flat and commanding. "Now."
"You can't keep me here." My own voice sounds foreign—too thin, too defensive. "I have every right to leave whenever I want, and blocking public roads is probably illegal, so if you could move your truck—"
"I'm not keeping you anywhere." Konnor steps closer, and the headlights carve shadows beneath his cheekbones. "I'm asking you to stop running. You've been running since you crashed into our lives, Kelly. At some point, you have to stop."
"That's rich coming from a man who dismissed me like a patient he didn't want to treat." I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles ache. "You made it very clear last night that I'm nothing more than an inconvenient co-tenant, so forgive me for accepting the terms you set."
"I was angry." The admission costs him something—I can see it in the tension along his jaw. "You invoked legal rights instead of telling us you wanted to stay. Do you have any idea how that landed?"
"I told you the truth about who I am, and your response was to treat me like a liability to be managed." My voice rises despite my best efforts. "So yes, I defaulted to the one thing I know can't be taken from me—my contractual claim to the space."
Konnor goes still.
The silence stretches between us, broken only by the idle rumble of two engines and the first birdsong of predawn.
"Turn around," he says again, but softer this time. "Come back to the cabin. We'll figure the rest out when everyone's slept and eaten and stopped making decisions out of fear."
"And if I don't want to figure it out?" My throat aches. "What if I'm not built for this?"
"Then you drive away and spend the rest of your life wondering what would have happened if you'd stayed." His dark eyes hold mine through the windshield. "Your choice, Kelly. It always has been."
I stare at him—this impossible man with his refusal to let me disappear without a fight—and I hate that he's right.
I hate that part of me wants to floor the gas and never look back.
I hate that a larger part wants to reverse this car and find out what staying actually feels like.
Slowly, I put the car in reverse.
The drive back takes forty minutes. It feels like forty hours.
Jake's truck is gone when I pull into the gravel clearing beside the cabin, and my chest tightens with sorrow.
Oscar stands on the porch, coffee mug in hand, watching my approach with guarded eyes that hold none of their usual warmth. The morning light catches the sharp angles of his face, turning him into a stranger I've somehow hurt.
"Business in town," he says before I can ask, his voice carefully neutral. "He left about an hour ago. Didn't say when he'd be back."
I nod, swallowing the ache that blooms behind my sternum.
"You tried to leave." It's not a question. Oscar's gaze flicks to my suitcase visible through the car window, then back to my face. "In the middle of the night. Without saying goodbye. Classic Kelly Goodwin exit strategy."
"I didn't want to wake anyone."
"You didn't want to face us." He takes a sip of coffee, the motion deliberate. "There's a difference, though I'm sure your Stanford education taught you how to conflate the two when convenient."
"Oscar—"
He turns and walks inside, leaving the door open behind him.
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