Page 75 of In the Dark of the Past

Aligning.

Because for the first time since I came home, I wasn’t reacting. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t the one being hunted.

I was hunting back.

The Watchers were about to learn who they were up against. Some people look quiet until you take everything from them.

Then they burn the world down.

Despite having been here recently, I couldn’t help but notice that Finn’s house was the same as I remembered it and yet entirely different, like something in your memory that’s been there for years yet the real thing kept moving without you.

He’d said I wasn’t walking into a dark house alone. He’d said it like a fact, not a question, and I’d been too shaken by the paint still drying on my floorboards to argue with him the way I might have otherwise. Now, we were here, and the adrenaline had metabolized into something else entirely, and the argument I’d been planning to have never quite arrived.

He set the things I’d gathered from my car down by the door, turned on the kitchen light, then filled a glass of water and put it on the counter without making it into anything, the way he did most things. Quietly, practically, and without drama.

“You should sleep,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

Neither of us moved.

The thing about Finn Callahan was that he’d always known when not to speak. It was one of the things I’d loved about him when I was younger and didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet, and one of the things I’d missed without admitting that I was missing it in all the years of our careful distance. He stood in his kitchen and watched me and didn’t try to make any of this smaller than it was.

I’d been carrying nine years of leaving like a stone in my chest.

I stepped forward and put my hand against his jaw.

He went very still.

“River.” My name in his mouth sounded like it meant something specific to him. Like it had always meant something important.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said.

He turned his face into my hand, barely. It was the smallest movement. Then his eyes found mine in the kitchen light and he looked at me the way he’d been looking at me since our stakeout, directly and without managing it, the full weight of everything he wasn’t saying right there on the surface.

“You’re sure?” It wasn’t a question. It was like he just needed to hear it said plainly.

“Yes.”

He kissed me like he’d been craving it for nine years. Slowly. Deliberately. His hands found my face first, then my waist, anchoring rather than pulling, giving me the space to stop, even now. I didn’t.

There was grief in the actions. I wanted to be honest about acknowledging that. Nine years wasn’t nothing, what we’d been through certainly wasn’t nothing, and being close to him again after all that distance was not simply joy, it was also the weight of everything the distance had cost both of us. The versions of us that hadn’t happened. The years we’d spent on separate sides of a silence neither of us had known how to break.

But there was something else, too. Something that had always been under the grief, patient and certain, waiting.

He knew where I was. He always had. I’d spent nine years outrunning it and arrived back here anyway. Ended up in this kitchen, in these hands, in this moment of being known by someone who had been paying attention since I was barely out of high school.

We didn’t hurry. There was nothing to hurry toward. Outside, the town was full of people who wanted things from us. Things like answers and evidence. The case made clean and the guilty named. But in here, there was only this. The careful, unhurried fact of us choosing each other after a long time of not.

He said my name once more, quietly, his breath a hush against my hair.

I didn’t answer. I just held on.

We moved to the bedroom and relearned each other. Every dip and curve, every sigh and moan. We remembered who we were but also grasped who we’d become.

Later, when it was very late and the house was entirely quiet, I lay with my back to him and listened to him breathe as I thought, I came back for this. Not only this, of course. But this, too. I just hadn’t let myself admit it until now.

I didn’t say it out loud.