Page 68 of Carry on Wayward Son

Dead by an altercation, in a medium security prison, just nine months into a sentence he’d accepted rather than say a single word that might have reduced it. An altercation that nobody in this room believed was random.

I breathed in and breathed out and held the ornament and thought about a twenty-year-old boy—because he had been a boy back then—standing in front of a camera saying no and believing that was a thing he had the power to do. Then spent the rest of his life living with the cost of being right about his refusal and still being wrong about what would happen.

I made myself stop there.

“The timing,” Jace murmured.

“Yeah,” Rios said. “The timing.”

Neither of them finished the sentence. Neither needed to.

Willa looked up from where she sat with Sawyer’s hand still under hers. “We keep going,” she said. The steadiness in her voice had been earned. “We owe it to her. And now to him.”

Rios nodded. “I wanted to tell you in person. I’ll keep you updated if more comes through.”

“Thanks,” Sawyer said.

“There is one piece of good news,” Rios added.

“We’ll take any at this point,” I muttered.

“Diane Crowell got moved out of intensive care. She’s gonna make it. Staties didn’t find any evidence of foul play with her car.”

I blew out a breath. Not a guarantee it wasn’t connected, but at least she’d survived the accident. “Thanks for that.”

“Knew you’d want to know.” Rios looked at each of us in turn. “Be careful.”

After he left, nobody moved for a moment.

Then Koa was on his feet and pressed against my leg before I’d registered that my hands were shaking. The ceramic cat with the tangled lights hit the carpet—I hadn’t even felt it leave my fingers—and Koa pushed his whole weight into me the way he did, head up, watching my face.

Jace crossed the room.

He didn’t say anything immediately. He only put himself in front of me, close, and looked at me the way he had outside the police station the day Diane was airlifted off the island, his steady presence asking nothing and offering everything. Slowly, his hands came up and closed over mine where they’d gone still at my sides. The warmth of the contact did things to me I was too undone to manage properly.

“It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. “We didn’t do this. These people did.”

That wasn’t where my brain was. My brain was somewhere else entirely, somewhere I couldn’t let him follow. But I let Jace think he was meeting me where I was. Because it was easier, and because the alternative was explaining something I couldn’t explain. And because his hands were warm around mine and the shaking was slowing down.

I leaned into him. Just slightly. Enough to be steadied by the solid warmth of him.

That was the part that got me, honestly. Not the comfort itself, but how instinctive it was. How my body had simply turned toward him the way Koa turned toward me, without deliberation, without weighing the implications. I had spent years being careful about exactly this kind of thing, years keeping people at a distance where they couldn’t see anything I didn’t want them to see. Yet somewhere between the ferry and this moment I had apparently stopped doing that, at least where Jace Hollingsworth was concerned.

Who even was I anymore?

Willa appeared at my other side and put her hand briefly on my arm, and the three of us stood there for a moment in the quiet of the room with the half-decorated tree and the firelight and all of it, and I breathed in and breathed out and let the shaking finish.

Then I bent down and picked up the ceramic cat with the tangled lights. “I think this one goes near the disco ball.”

Willa looked at the cat, and at me, and something in her face softened. “Obviously. They’re clearly meant for each other.”

Jace’s hand found the small of my back briefly as he moved back toward the ladder, and the warmth of his touch lingered even after he’d taken it away.

We kept going.

Thirty-Five

JACE