(Sanya's POV)
I count the stars because counting keeps my hands from shaking. He is late. Aaron is never late.
Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen stars in the gap between the branches where the eastern trail splits toward the river. I've been staring at the same patch of sky long enough that the stars have started to blur, and I blink hard and start over. One. Two. Three. The bag sits between my feet with the coconut inside it, wrapped exactly the way he wrapped it, because I couldn't bring myself to rearrange anything he packed.
The crossroads smells like wet earth and pine needles and the faintest trace of something rotting in the undergrowth. A normal smell. A forest smell. Nothing wrong with it except that I'm standing in it alone and Aaron should have been here two hours ago.
One hour, I told myself he was being careful. Taking a longer route. Doubling back to throw off any trail. Smart. Patient. The kind of thing Aaron would do because Aaron thinks before he moves, always has, always —
Two hours, and my hands won't stop.
I press them flat against my thighs. I press them together. I shove them into my pockets and grip the lining until my knuckles ache. Nothing works. They shake like his mother's hands on the tea tray, and the comparison makes my stomach turn because I don't want to think about his mother right now. I don't want to think about her sitting on that porch alone tomorrow morning with no son and no explanation.
"Aaron," I whisper. Not loud enough for anyone to hear. Just his name pushed into the dark like maybe the dark will carry it to him. "Aaron. Please."
The sky is changing. Not sunrise yet, but the threat of it — that grey softening at the edges where the black is losing its nerve. Dawn doesn't come all at once. It creeps. It gives you time to understand that the night is ending and whatever you were waiting for in it is not coming.
I count the stars again. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Some of them have already faded.
Something is wrong.
I know it the way I know the board on his mother's porch that groans when you step on it. Not because anyone told me. Because my body has learned the weight of this particular feeling and it recognises it before my mind catches up.
I should leave. The plan was clear — if one of us doesn't show by the time the sky starts to turn, the other goes alone. We agreed on this. Aaron insisted on it, actually, with that steady voice he uses when he's already thought something through six different ways and landed on the one that hurts the most. "If I'm not there," he said, "you go. Don't wait. Don't come looking."
I said yes because saying yes was easier than arguing. I had no intention of keeping that promise. None. Not even a little.
The trees are quiet in the wrong way. The kind of quiet that happens when something has moved through recently and the birds haven't decided yet whether it's safe to start up again.
Then I hear footsteps.
My heart slams into my ribs so hard I feel it in my teeth. I take a step forward before I can stop myself, my whole body leaning toward the sound, toward the shape of him coming through the trees because it has to be him, it has to —
The shapes are wrong.
Two figures. Not one. Too broad in the shoulders and moving with the kind of purpose that doesn't belong to a man sneaking away from his pack before dawn. They move like men who own the ground they walk on. Like men who have been looking for something and have found it exactly where they expected.
Derek steps out of the tree line first. Garrett is half a step behind.
For one stupid, useless second, my brain tries to make this something other than what it is. They came to help. They changed their minds. They're here to say goodbye or give their blessing or —
Derek's hand clamps around my wrist and the bone creaks.
"No — "
His fingers dig into the soft part below my palm, right where the tendons run, and the pain is bright and specific and it shoots up my arm into my shoulder. I twist. I pull. I try to wrench free and his grip only tightens, the way you'd hold a dog's collar when it's trying to bolt.
Garrett grabs the other arm. His hands are cold. He doesn't squeeze as hard as Derek but he doesn't need to — his grip is precise, two fingers locked around my wrist like a cuff. They've done this before. Not to me, but the coordination is too smooth, too practised. They've rehearsed this.
"Let go of me — "
I thrash between them and my bag falls and the coconut spills out onto the ground and something about watching it roll into the mud makes my throat close. That idiotic wrapped coconut lying in the dirt at the crossroads where he was supposed to meet me, and my brothers are dragging me backward and —
I see the smoke.
Through the gap in the trees, past the ridge where the trail dips toward Aaron's pack, a column of black pushes into the grey sky. Not a cooking fire. Not a brush burn. This smoke is thick and dark and furious, the kind that comes from something that isn't supposed to be burning.
The sound that comes out of me isn't a word. It starts as his name and breaks apart somewhere in my chest and what reaches the air is just noise. Raw and shredded and so loud that Derek flinches.
"Aaron — AARON — "
Derek's palm slaps over my mouth. It tastes like dirt. Like the iron tang of a man who's been gripping something too hard for too long. I bite down and feel his skin give between my teeth and he hisses but doesn't let go. He presses harder. His hand is big enough to cover my mouth and half my nose and I can barely breathe and I can't scream and the smoke is climbing higher behind the trees and I can't — I can't —
My heels drag grooves in the mud as they pull me. I plant my feet and they lift me. I go limp and they haul me by both arms like a sack of grain. The ground passes under me in streaks of brown and dark. Branches catch at my clothes. Something scratches my ankle and the small pain is so distant it barely registers against everything else.
"Stop fighting," Derek says above me. His voice is winded. Good. I hope I've exhausted him. I hope I've made every step difficult. "You're only making this harder."
I am making this harder. That is exactly the point.
Garrett says nothing for a long time. He drags me with the focused efficiency of a man completing a task, and his silence is worse than Derek's grunting because silence from Garrett always means he's already decided how this goes and nothing I do will change the script.
When he finally speaks, his voice is calm. Rehearsed. The words land with the flat precision of something practised in front of a mirror.
"He never planned to come, Sanya. Men like him use women like you to pass time."
The sentence hits me in a place I didn't know was exposed. Not because I believe it. Not entirely. But because there is a version of this night — a horrible, logical version — where those words make sense. Aaron is not here. He was supposed to be here and he is not. And the smoke is rising from the direction of his home and I don't know what that means and I don't know and I don't —
"You're lying."
"Am I?" Garrett's voice doesn't change. It never changes. Derek shouts and breaks things and his emotions are written across his face in bold letters, but Garrett — Garrett files his cruelty into neat sentences and delivers them without inflection, like he's reading the weather. "Think about it. Really think. Did he ever once put himself at risk for you? Or did he sit on his mother's porch and let you do the planning and the hoping and the dreaming while he fixed fences and waited for something better to come along?"
My throat burns. Not because he's right. Because some tiny, poisoned part of my brain is whispering but what if — and the smoke is still climbing and Aaron is not here and I was standing at that crossroads for two hours counting stars while my hands shook.
"He was coming," I say, and my voice cracks on the last word like a door with a bad hinge.
"He wasn't."
The house appears through the trees. My house. The house I was supposed to leave behind tonight and never see again. It looks the same way it always looks — dark windows, sagging gutters, the broken step Derek has been saying he'll fix for three months. A house that is not a home. A house that is a sentence I've been serving since my parents died and my brothers decided that their sister was a possession to be managed rather than a person to be loved.
They pull me through the front door. Garrett lets go of my wrist and I feel the blood rush back into my fingers, hot and prickling. Derek shoves me forward and I stumble into the hallway and catch myself against the wall.
The door closes behind me.
The bolt slides home.
That sound. The heavy, deliberate click of metal finding metal. It fills the hallway the way water fills a glass. Completely. Without hurry. Without doubt.
I kick the door. Hard. The impact shoots up through my ankle and I kick it again, harder, and again, and the sound is flat and useless and the wood doesn't give and my heel is screaming and I don't care, I kick it until the pain in my foot is louder than the sound in my chest and then I slam both fists against it, open-palmed, the crack of my hands against the wood echoing down the empty hall.
"Let me out — open the — LET ME OUT —"
My voice tears. The screaming doesn't sound like me. It sounds like an animal in a box, which is what I am, and the screaming fills the hallway and bounces off the walls and comes back to me and nobody answers because nobody is going to answer and the screaming is for no one and the kicking is for nothing and I know this, I know it even while I'm doing it, and I can't stop.
I stop.
My hands are shaking against the wood. My ankle is throbbing. My throat is raw. The hallway is quiet again, the kind of quiet that sounds louder after noise.
I press my forehead against the door. The wood is cold. The grain of it presses patterns into my skin.
The smoke.
What was the smoke?
My mind keeps circling back to it the way a dog circles a wound it can't reach. That column of black climbing into the grey sky from the direction of Aaron's pack. Not thin. Not the wispy smoke of a fireplace or a cooking pit. Thick. Angry. The kind of smoke that means something has gone very wrong.
He didn't come.
And there was smoke.
These two facts sit inside my chest like stones, pressing against each other. Either he didn't come because he chose not to — because Garrett is right, because I was a fool, because the man who packed coconut for our sweet start was performing tenderness for a woman too stupid to see through it — or he didn't come because he couldn't. Because something happened. Because that smoke —
I can't finish the thought. I physically cannot make my brain complete the sentence. It starts to form and something in me slams a door on it, locks it, throws the key into a part of my chest I don't have access to. Not yet. Not now. If I think that thought all the way to the end, I will come apart in this hallway and there will be nothing left of me to put back together.
So I hold both versions at the same time. He didn't come because he lied. He didn't come because he couldn't. I am furious at him. I am terrified for him. Both things occupy the same space in my chest and neither one will yield to the other and the pressure of holding them together is the kind of pain that doesn't have a location. It's everywhere. It's the air in my lungs and the blood in my hands and the cold wood against my forehead and the dripping tap in the kitchen and the sound of that bolt sliding home.
I want to scream at him. I want to scream his name until he appears at the crossroads with that grin and some stupid, perfect explanation — sorry, I took the long way, I was being careful, I brought the coconut, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.
I want to run toward that smoke and claw through whatever is burning until I find him.
I cannot do either of these things. I am standing behind a locked door in a dark hallway with mud drying on my skin and the worst part — the absolute worst part — is that even now, even standing here with Garrett's words still ringing in my skull like a bell that won't stop, even with the possibility that Aaron used me and left me and never intended to show —
I pray for him.
It rises up before I can stop it. Not words, exactly. Not anything I could write down or repeat. Just a feeling that shapes itself into something aimed upward and outward, toward whatever is listening, toward the Creator or the sky or the dark or whatever holds this world together when everything in it seems determined to come apart.
Creator. If you're listening. Wherever he is. Whatever happened. Please.
Protect him.
Even if he left me. Even if he lied. Even if every word Garrett said is true and I'm a fool who counted stars for two hours waiting for a man who was never coming.
Keep him safe.
Please.
I hate how easily the prayer comes. I hate that it's the first thing I reach for. Not anger. Not self-pity. Not the cold, practical voice that should be telling me to assess my situation and make a plan and figure out how to get out of this house. No. My first instinct — my deepest, stupidest, most stubborn instinct — is to pray for the man who didn't show up.
Anger doesn't erase concern. I know this now. I know it the way I know the creak of the third board on his mother's porch. Instinctively. Without question. Without choice.
I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the floor with my knees drawn up and my back against the wood. The hallway is dark. The tap drips. Somewhere outside, beyond the walls I can't see past, the smoke is still rising.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars. The kind that come from pressure and grief and exhaustion.
Aaron must be out there somewhere, looking for me. He must be worried, anxious, thinking of a way to get to me.
I’m sure of it.
I fold my arms around my knees and I hold on.
The night doesn't end. It just goes thin and grey at the edges, leaking light through the gap under the door, and behind the locked bolt the world keeps turning whether I want it to or not.
