Page 51 of If You Go
Once we get to the top, we peel off in pairs. Josh and Juniper disappear into a guest room, doors closing with a hush only old houses know. Alisha ghosts down another hallway—probably hunting for Sam’s last location via instinct and sheer stubbornness. Richie and Hazel vanish behind two more doors with matching tired smiles.
Soon it’s just me and Surry left in the hall.
“This one’s mine,” she says, stopping in front of a door. Then, with a teasing tilt of her head, “You staying with me or do you need a babysitter?”
I smirk. “I was thinking Josh—”
She elbows me in the ribs, and I laugh, following her inside.
Her room is everything I expected—soft sage walls, one black accent wall covered in art, and a bed big enough for three people, dressed in emerald green and shadow. A glass door opens to a balcony where you can hear the sea argue with the shore. There’s a stack of old books on the nightstand with a sprig of dried heather tucked between them. It smells like lavender and salt. Like her.
Surry toes off her shoes and pulls the elastic from her braid; her hair falls like a flag dropping to half-mast. We change quietly—her removing everything, while I slip off all my clothes minus my boxers since we didn’t have time to grab anything. We crawl under the covers preparing for a well-deserved nap, and for the first time in days, my body remembers what rest feels like. I pull her close, her head under my chin, her breath warm against my chest.
“Sleep good,” I whisper into the darkness.
“You too,” she answers me also in a hushed tone, as if we spoke any louder, we would be found out by the evil we’re running from.
“Mo chroí,” I add without thinking—my heart. I’ve been looking into Gaelic so I could talk more with her dad, but also for more ways to tell her how I feel about her. It earns me a sleepy squeeze to the ribs.
That’s the last thing I remember before sleep takes me.
The dream starts softly. Then it turns.
I’m back in the compound. Smoke everywhere. The sound of gunfire echoing down hallways that shouldn’t exist. I can’t find her. Surry’s voice calls my name, sharp and panicked, but every time I turn toward it, she’s farther away. Gavin’s there—always just ahead, dragging her by the arm, his grin carved out of cruelty. I run, but my legs feel heavy, like the air’s turned to tar. I reach for her, fingertips brushing hers just as he pulls her through a doorway that slams shut like a vault.
“Not again,” I choke out, pounding my fists against steel. “Not again.”
I hear my mother’s scream behind it—the same sound I heard when I was eight, hiding in a closet while a man beat her nearly to death. The same helpless, suffocating silence when I was twenty-five, when another man accomplished the job.
I can’t save her either.
When I wake, I’m gasping. The room’s dark, quiet except for the sound of Surry breathing beside me, her hand still resting on my chest like an anchor. I stare at the ceiling until my pulseslows. It’s just a dream. Just a dream. But my body doesn’t believe it.
The clock on her desk glows 9:00 a.m. Wind scrapes across the balcony rail, smelling of kelp and cold sunlight. Somewhere lower in the house, a kettle clicks off and someone laughs—Bridget, by the music of it.
I slide out of bed carefully, grab my phone, and slip into the adjoined bathroom en suite. The rug covering tile is soft under my feet. A painting of a storm at sea watches me pass like it has opinions. I make my way toward the sink to wash my face when I’m stopped dead in my tracks—the message waiting on my screen from Corver is equally good news and danger rolled into one.
I stare at it for a long moment. The words are simple. The implications aren’t. It’s a choice wrapped in a threat, a time stamped demand pretending to be mercy. The kind of thing a coward sends when he wants to sound like God.
I look back at the closed bedroom door, at the woman sleeping inside.
“Not yet,” I whisper.
I shoot Corver a reply telling him to wait until I talk to Stefan, then I tuck the phone into my palm like a blade and head for the balcony. The door slides open on oiled rails; the morning hits my face clean and cold. Pine sap, wet stone, the promise of rain. Out past the cove, a ferry carves a neat white wake through pewter water, ordinary people crossing from one piece of their lives to another like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
I make a silent vow to the horizon: I will build her ordinary. I will carve it out of days if I have to, out of my bones if that’s the cost. Let him bring the storm. We’ve learned how to fly through worse.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WAKING UP INmy parents’ house feels like slipping into a memory that doesn’t quite fit anymore. Everything smells the same–cedar floors, salt from the sea, that faint trace of chamomile that lives in my mother’s hair–but it feels smaller somehow. Maybe it’s because there are more people here than ever before. Maybe it’s because I’m not alone this time.
The giant man beside me changes the whole gravity of this place.
Brenden looks completely out of place in my childhood bed, yet he belongs here more than anyone ever has. He’s in nothing but his boxers since he has no clothes here, and he’s bigger than my dad or Sam. The morning light turns his skin gold, his hair sticking up in ten different directions. He’s propped up against the headboard, phone in his hands, that furrow between his brows deep enough to drown in.
He doesn’t even notice me watching him.
“What time is it?” My voice is scratchy, still heavy with sleep.
