Page 100 of Carry on Wayward Son

Boots sounded down the corridor. I placed the rhythm before I lifted my head.

Jace stopped a few feet off. At some point, he’d shed the vest. His eyes moved over me and stayed.

I stood from the bench, and my legs held, and he crossed the last of the floor and gathered me in. I turned my face into his chest and pulled him into my lungs, and neither of us went hunting for words, because no sentence I owned opened wide enough for the night.

My father stood when I drew back. He looked at the two of us and took his time with that, too.

I twisted a fist in Jace’s shirt and turned. “Dad, this is Jace Hollingsworth. Jace, my father.”

Dad offered his hand. Jace closed it in his own and held on past the expected length of a handshake.

“They told me who went after her.” My father pitched it for the three of us. “What it cost you. What you were ready to spend. A man doesn’t hear that about the man his daughter picked more than once in a lifetime.”

“I’d spend it again tonight. And every night that comes after.”

“I believe you.” He clapped Jace’s shoulder and left his hand resting there. “So you get the handshake instead of the other conversation.”

One corner of his mouth twitching, Jace wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “Appreciate that, sir.”

My father collected his jacket off the bench. I pointed the three of us at the doors before the corridor cinched around me any tighter. I’d come to Hatterwick weeks ago with a dead girl folded up like a secret inside my chest. Tonight, I walked out of this station with her name spoken into a federal recorder, my father at one shoulder, Jace’s palm warm at my spine.

The corkboard in the entryway held the island’s grief in layers. Curled flyers. Yellowed notices from summers gone by. Low in the corner, soft under years of some deputy’s thumb, a missing poster. Not the updated one with the most recent age progression rendering. This was older.

GWEN BUSBY. I recognized the school photo from my freshman year, my chin tipped, my lips slightly parted on the verge of a laugh, captured in a life I couldn’t touch from where I stood.

I stopped in front of her.

That girl knew nothing of what would come for her. To this island she stayed a question with no answer. A bonfire and a squall and a girl the night swallowed whole. Most of them would go into the ground never learning the rest. The case would grind on for years, and the woman who bought conchas from Marisol and worked her way through their cold files would answer to Layla Murphy the whole time. No unveiling waited at the end. No homecoming where the island got its girl returned. The poster would yellow another decade on this board, and I’d walk past it, and no one would set the face against mine and see the truth. I’d worked hard to make sure of it.

I’d stepped onto this island with one thing burning under my ribs, and now I’d passed that fire to men with warrants and a mandate. The hollow left behind surprised me. I’d worn the mission so long that the line between it and me had blurred to nothing.

Jace’s fingers laced through mine. “Wherever you went, take me along.”

“I don’t know what I am without this. I came to end it. It’s ending. And I don’t know who’s left standing in the wreckage when the fighting stops.”

He tugged me to face him, both my hands caught in his. “Then we find her together. Not tonight. Not this month. On no one’s schedule but yours. Whoever’s standing here when the smoke lifts, I want to know her. Wherever she goes from here. I’m not leaving while you work out the answer.”

The floor firmed under my feet.

I looked at the poster once more. The girl who’d remain forever fifteen. The life she never got to finish. Then I left her on the board where she belonged. Not hidden anymore. Seen. Just not by them, and not yet.

“Okay.” Some weight lifted with the word. Because I trusted that this man I loved meant it. With him by my side, I could handle anything.

Tucked against Jace’s side, with my father at my other flank, I pushed through the doors into the night and whatever future lay beyond.

Epilogue

JACE

Ford turned from the mirror and held his arms out. “Peyton did the ties. Fourteen years old and she’s already got opinions on my wardrobe. Verdict?”

“You’ll do.” Rios reached over and freed the knot a quarter inch. “There. Now you can breathe when Bree says her vows.”

“If I can find the air at all.” Ford dropped his hands and paced to the window and back again. The old church radiator ticked in the corner and lost its fight with January. “Bree walks through that door, and I forget how lungs work. Watch.”

“You’ve had twenty-five years to practice breathing around her.” Sawyer leaned against the sill, arms crossed with a married man’s ease.

“You’ve been throwing hands for that woman since before you could spell her name,” I pointed out.