Page 119 of At First Spark
Beckett places a hand over his heart. “You ask the impossible of me, Captain.”
“Five,” Mac says, already turning back toward his office phone. “I’ll settle for five.”
That’s how it happens. One minute, I’m at a table trying to convince myself patterns can wait until daylight. The next, I’m moving fast enough that the world has narrowed to keys, truck, road, and the image of Lark standing outside the inn with somebody else’s footprints too close to what she’s trying to rebuild.
Beckett slides into the passenger seat while I back out hard enough to make him grab the dashboard.
“You know,” he says as I take the turn out of the lot, “I was about to say something supportive and noble, but the way you just almost launched us into county property killed the mood.”
I don’t answer.
The road opens in front of us, late afternoon light flattening under a bank of gray clouds that have been building all day. The weather feels wrong. Heavy. As if the sky can’t decide whether it wants to storm or just sit there and threaten it.
Beckett glances over at me once, then decides, wisely, to leave the running commentary alone. For almost a full minute.
Then, “You love her.”
I don’t answer. Not because I don’t know, but because saying it out loud would make it real in a way I’m not ready to survive if this goes wrong.
The words sting as if he’d reached over and landed a fist in the center of my chest.
I keep my eyes on the road. “Now’s not the time.”
“That’s not a no.”
I grip the wheel tighter. There are a dozen responses available to me. Most of them rude. At least three of them satisfying. None of them useful.
The silence stretches.
Then Beckett, quieter now, says, “That’s not a joke, man.”
No, it isn’t. I know exactly when it stopped being one. Not the kiss in the hallway. Not the second in the barn. Not even when she looked at me in my own kitchen and admitted I scared her because that truth had already started growing roots before either of us knew what to call it.
It happened somewhere smaller than that.
At the inn. At the farm. In a hundred tiny moments, she kept stepping into the center of my attention and refusing to leave it. In the way she makes the ordinary parts of a day feel more immediate just by being inside them. In the way she braces for impact even when nobody’s swinging. In the way I’ve started thinking about safety like it has her face.
The answer sits in my throat. By the time the inn comes into view, I still haven’t said it out loud.
The Carrington House stands with that same stubborn dignity it always has, all weathered trim and old money gone to rot and bones too proud to admit what’s been taken from them. Lila’s car is in the driveway. Bailey’s SUV too. Ivy’s smaller sedan was tucked in at an angle, which tells me Hadley was almost definitely trying to direct where everyone parked and got ignored by everyone involved.
I’m out of the truck before the engine fully dies, Beckett right behind me. Lark meets me halfway up the walk. That alone tells me how rattled she is.
And everything in me settles—just enough to breathe again.
She never comes running. Not for anything. But here she is, moving fast enough that the gravel slips under her shoes, hair loose around her shoulders from whatever had held it back earlier, eyes too bright in a face gone paler than I like.
“You took too long,” she says, her relief at my arrival evident in the sharpness of her voice.
I don’t slow down until I’m right in front of her.
“Show me.”
She opens her mouth like she wants to say something else. Maybe ask whether I’m okay. Maybe tell me I’moverreacting. Maybe admit she’s scared and hates that fact as much as I hate seeing it.
What she does instead is turn and lead me around the side of the house. The side gate stands open exactly the way I hate seeing it—unlatched, shifted off-center in the soft earth, one hinge sticking enough that whoever used it either didn’t care about noise or knew there’d be nobody close enough to hear. The stack of materials against the west wall has been disturbed. Tarp peeled back. Nails still in place, but somebody definitely looked underneath.
The footprints are there too. Fresh enough that the edges haven’t softened. Not one set. Two, maybe. Hard to tell where the gravel gives way to the softer dirt near the burned remains of the carriage house.
