Page 53 of The Shield
“I saw our wedding,” I said. “White Point Garden. Granddaddy was there, pretending not to cry while he let my dad do the walking. I saw a yard that runs to water and a porch swing and Flapjack thundering and two kids who feel real already. Amelia and James,” I said, and it sounded like a confession more than a report. “Maybe it was just my starved brain stitching together a want. But it was—” I searched for the word. “True. In the way a clean line on a map is true even when the ground underneath is messy.”
He didn’t blink. It was a trick I had already fallen in love with—how he could look at a thing that should scare him and simply … take it in. “I want that,” he said, and the want was a low note that steadied my bones. “The wedding. The yard. The kids who will ruin every sofa we buy.” His thumb stroked the back of my hand. The bear claw flashed. “I love you, too. I’ll do anything to protect you. And them. Anything.”
He meant it too big, too absolutely, and I felt the edges of that promise. “Even if that means not doing it alone,” I said.
His mouth tugged. He had bitten his lip at some point and not noticed. “Even then.”
Silence pressed soft around us, like a blanket someone had warmed in a dryer. On a muted TV above the sink, a chyron scrolled with flood updates. In the corner, a local station replayed my rescue in a loop so shameless it almost became art—Ethan’s forearm across my chest, Owen yelling like an uncle at a Little League game. #CharlestonLoveStory kept skittering across the bottom.
“I have to go,” he said, quiet now, because we’d already said the soft parts.
“So, you said.” My voice didn’t wobble. That felt like a win. “A day or three.”
“Maybe more,” he admitted. “I don’t like leaving you. I hate leaving you. But whoever sent that note knows too much. If I stay, I’m a signal fire. If I move, I can hunt him without people I care about at my back as a target.” He lifted my hand to his mouth. Heat broke through my skin at the touch. “You’ll be safe. My brothers will see to that. I’ll misdirect. I’ll be smoke where he expects a blade.”
“Or a shield,” I said.
“Or that,” he agreed, eyes going even softer.
“I don’t need a savior,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I need a mission. Those aren’t the same thing, Natalie.” He said my name like a man who intended to wear it into his old age.
He stood, slow because he knows about concussions in a way that suggests a long relationship with bad days. He adjusted the blanket over my legs, and the domesticity of it made my chest ache with a lust I didn’t have a category for.
“You’re coming back to me,” I said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I’m coming back to you,” he said, and it was a vow.
He bent to kiss me, careful of the cannula, careful of the bruises he’d memorized with his eyes. The kiss wasn’t hospital-appropriate. It wasn’t filthy either. It was the thing that sat exactly between those—respect and heat sharing a table, knees touching under the cloth. I let it brand me. He let it anchor him.
When he pulled away, it felt like the version of leaving where a porch light stays on.
He took two steps toward the door, then pivoted back and pressed something cool into my palm—his bear claw. The weight surprised me. “Borrow it,” he said. “It’s the thing I reach for when I need to remember what matters.”
“You’re bare without it,” I said, thumb running over the old scar on the claw where time had bitten it.
He grinned. “I’ve got other teeth.” His hand grazed the inside of my wrist—a brush that had far too many consequences for a woman in a hospital gown—and then he was at the door for real, broad in the frame, the air beyond him busy with nurses and purpose.
Ethan looked at me one last time. He didn’t raise a hand. He didn’t mouth anything. He just held my eyes and nodded once, the smallest bow a man can make to a woman he’s not done worshipping. Then he was gone into the hum, and the door eased shut.
I lay there and stared at the ceiling tile where a maintenance man had left the faintest fingerprint. I listened to the rain try to sing to me through glass. I pressed the bear claw to the hollow at my throat, where it settled with the inevitability of a key finding the right lock. The monitor slowed its tattling.
The flood was still worsening. The muted TV said the tide had peaked and would do it again in six hours and again. My hands itched to be back in the square, in a slicker with hair pinned and voice steady, bossing people into loving themselves enough to move their sedans. I could feel the storm map in my fingertips like a Braille I’d taught myself to read.
“Don’t,” a voice said at the door.
The nurse who slipped in had gray hair in a bun, a name badge that saidPearl, and the carriage of a woman who had professionally witnessed more beginnings and endings than anyone had a right to. She held two cups—water and something electric blue.
“Hi, Ms. Kennedy,” she said, like I hadn’t been on her television since breakfast. “I’m Pearl. If you try to go handle the flood yourself, I’ll have to call security, and that would embarrass us both.”
“I could help from a chair,” I said, because my talent for arguing petty points had been honed in zoning meetings.
“You could,” she agreed, strapping a blood pressure cuff around my arm with quick, competent affection. “You can call your people, if you feel up to it. But what you cannot do,” she said, tightening the cuff until the world pulsed under my skin, “is treat that body like a borrowed car.”
I opened my mouth. She raised a hand and I shut it again, which Kimmy would have paid good money to see.
Pearl watched the numbers with a frown that wasn’t worried, just invested. “I’ve had so many of you,” she said, almost to herself. “The ones who can’t help but run toward the smoke.Firemen. Teachers. Mama bears. Mayors.” Her eyes flicked to mine over the cuff. “Eventually, anyway.”
