Mag-log inThere was a sound on the other end that wasn’t quite a sob but wasn’t far off it either, shaky and wet, like she’d been crying before she even fucking called and just hadn’t let it all the way out yet. “Okay,” she mumbled, and then again, softer, like she was trying to convince her own body of it. “Okay.”“He’s still unconscious,” I said gently, because I didn’t want her building something in her head that wasn’t there yet. “But stable’s stable. That’s the part that matters right now.”“I know. I know, I just—” She cut herself off, and I heard her breathe in hard through her nose. “I’ve been so worried.”“I know.”“Nobody was telling me anything and every time I called Mr. James it went to voicemail, and I just—” Her voice wobbled again, and this time she let it, a small shaky laugh coming out somewhere under the tears. “God, sorry, I’m being so embarrassing right now.”“You’re not.”“I’m ugly crying into my phone.”“I can’t see you,” I said. “So as far as I’m concerned you’re doing t
James woke up slowly, and I felt the shift in his breathing before I saw it, then the weight of him going from dead-heavy to something more aware, muscles coming back one by one against my shoulder.He blinked at the garden like he didn’t recognize it.“Did I—” He stopped, lifted his head, and looked at me with confusion. “How long was I out?”“About an hour.”He stared at me like I’d said something absurd. “An hour.”“Yeah.”“You’ve been sitting here for an hour.”“That’s generally how it works when someone falls asleep on you.” I immediately wanted to take it back, because his face instantly turned apologetic.“Sorry,” he muttered, straightening up, rolling his shoulder like he could feel the absence of where he’d been leaning. “I must have been heavy.”He had been. My arm had gone numb somewhere around the forty-minute mark and my neck was going to hate me tomorrow, and there was a damp patch on my shoulder where his mouth had been slightly open against my shirt, which I was absol
It did not take long to realize he had actually fallen asleep because his breathing grew heavy against my collarbone. I sat there listening to it when a stupid curiosity crossed my mind. Before I knew it, I raised my hand—slowly enough that I could have stopped if I had any sense left—and touched his hair.It was… soft.Softer than I expected, finer than a man that hard had any right to have, and the ridiculous softness of it made my throat tight because this was James, the same bastard who had tied me to a chair and chased me through the woods, and here I was sinking my hand into his hair. It was a miracle that didn’t wake him.There wasn’t even a twitch. Just goes to show how fucking exhausted he was that my fingers in his hair meant nothing next to the need to sleep, and a smile found its way onto my lips before I could stop it. Then I noticed a crawl at the back of my neck.I raised my gaze toward the house and found Celeste standing in front of it, framed by the doorway like
I held the glass out and he took it without looking at me at first, his fingers damp from the condensation.“Thank you,” he mumbled as he drank, throat working, eyes still on the garden while I sat down beside him.For a while neither of us said anything. Probably because there’s too much to say than there isn’t anything to say.James held the glass against his knee and let out a short breath that almost counted as a laugh. "If Noah could see the state of this garden," he murmured, his eyes still fixed on the overgrown beds, "he would be absolutely furious."The laugh that followed was rough and tired, and there wasn’t much humor in it. I followed his gaze and looked at the garden too, at the places where the soil had dried and the blooms had started to go messy at the edges, and I could almost see Noah standing there, pissed off at the neglect. “Yeah,” I breathed out. “He would lose his shit.”A faint twitch tugged at James’s mouth as he rotated the glass between his fingers.I gla
RILEY°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・I had barely seen James since the night he drove off after the phone calls; he had become a rumor more than a person, coming and going at hours that never lined up with mine, and before I knew it, I started telling myself I didn’t care where the hell he was. Then he stepped into the hallway while I was still holding a laundry basket against my hip, and the second I recognized the set of his shoulders I forgot the basket, forgot the folding, forgot every silly lie I had been feeding myself about not giving a shit, and I went straight to him.But the sight of him broke my heartHe looked wrecked in a way I had never seen on him before, pale under the jaw, dark under the eyes, clothes that looked slept in if they had been slept in at all.“James… are you alright?” I asked, the words tumbling out before I could make them sound less desperate, because five days of no answers had sanded every bit of pride off me.He opened his mouth to answer, but before he could get a sing
Seraphina slowly turned toward me, as if any sudden movement might make the words rearrange themselves into something less devastating.“What?” she whispered.The single word was barely more than a breath, but it filled the whole room. I forced myself to meet her eyes, even though part of me wanted to look anywhere else, because if I was going to tell her this, I could not do it while hiding from the damage it would do.“Noah was my boyfriend before I was with your father.”Her face did not move, but her eyes were locked on mine with a kind of stunned stillness that made it harder to keep going and impossible to stop.I curled my hand into a fist.“It was not a good relationship,” I continued, sitting back down on the edge of the bed because my legs no longer felt steady enough to hold me. “I was young, and I stayed longer than I should have because I thought love was supposed to feel like waiting. Noah neglected me and kept me close enough to claim me and far enough away that I spen







