Page 107 of Before the Bond
"As opposed to the scotch you put away earlier?"
"That was celebratory." She looked at him steadily. "This is medicinal."
"The job being done doesn't mean?—"
"Donovan."
He stopped.
Stella looked at him with the expression I'd seen her use exactly once before, in the bar my first week in Greyhollow, when a man had made a comment she decided wasn't worth her full attention but couldn't quite let go — patient and a little tired. Like she was deciding whether the thing she wanted to say was worth the energy.
"Maybe," Donovan said, quieter now, "you could stop running out the door every time the work is finished."
Something shifted in Stella's face. She held very still for just a moment — long enough for me to clock it, long enough for Donovan to see it, too. Then she stepped past him.
"Goodnight, Donovan," she said.
The front door opened, then closed.
Donovan stood where she'd left him for a second longer than was comfortable, then turned and walked back down the hall without looking at me. I folded the dish towel in my hands and decided that question was going to keep until the next time I had Stella alone with a drink in front of her.
There was a story there. I didn't have all of it yet.
The back porch was cold in the way Greyhollow was always cold. I had come to welcome it, especially with a warm drink in hand. The fog was still heavy but quieter than it had been all week, lying low against the ground instead of rolling, like it had finally decided to rest.
I stared at the tree line.
Part of me was waiting. A shape at the edge of the dark. A movement. Seven weeks of living in this house had trained me to read the forest the way I read a patient's chart — looking for the thing that didn't belong, the detail that meant something was wrong. Old habits.
But the trees were still. And the dark between them was just dark.
I was still looking at them when I heard the door behind me.
Caleb came to stand beside me at the railing. He didn't say anything. He just settled into the space next to mine like he’d done it a hundred times, forearms on the wood, shoulder warm against mine, and looked out at the same tree line I was looking at.
For a while neither of us said anything.
The wood felt the same under my feet as it had the night of Jake's shift, when we'd stood out here and something between us had finally stopped pretending it wasn't there. Everything felt different. But the porch was the same, and Caleb was the same, and the particular quality of the quiet between us was something I had been collecting for weeks without realizing I was keeping it.
"I still can't—" Caleb started, then stopped. He shook his head slightly. "I can't believe you came back."
Not a question. More like a fact he was still getting used to holding.
I looked at the fog.
"Can I tell you something?" I said. "And I need you to hear it."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He almost smiled. "Of course."
"I spent seven years telling myself I liked moving," I said. "That staying meant getting attached. That getting attached meant losing things, and I already knew what losing things felt like and I wasn't going to do it again." I paused. The cold railing was steady under my hands. "That was a lie. I wanted a home. I've wanted one since the night my parents died and I just — stopped letting myself want it, because wanting it meant it was possible to lose it."
He was very still beside me.
"Greyhollow is that," I said. "This house is that. Jake and Donovan and Stella, all of it." I turned to look at him. His eyes were already on me. "You are that. Not the bond. Not guilt. Not the fact that being away from you was physically hurting you — I didn't know that when I turned the car around. I knew it before I knew any of that."
I held his gaze. “I love you. I need you to hear it said plainly so there's no version of tonight where you rewrite this.”
Caleb didn't say anything.
