His Brother's Ex, His Unborn Child

Chapter 6

ELENA

Isla answered on the third ring, and I had never been so grateful for anything in my life.

"Elena?" Her voice was still sleep-rough but sharpened immediately, the way hers always did when something was wrong. "It's six in the morning."

"I know." I turned away from the counter boy, who had resumed his shelf work with great dedication. "I need you to come get me."

Isla never hesitated. "Where are you?"

"A gas station off Route 9. There's a Millhaven sign at the turnoff."

"Are you hurt?"

I looked at my bandaged hand. "I'm fine. I just need a ride."

"Forty minutes."

"Okay."

"Elena." Her voice dropped. "Don't move."

She hung up before I could answer.

**

I tried Liam twice while I waited.

The first call rang out. The second went to voicemail — his recorded voice, smooth and pleasant, asking me to leave a message. I didn't. I sat back down on the curb with the mylar blanket around my shoulders and the untouched coffee going cold beside me, and I watched the sky change color above the tree line and tried not to think.

Thinking required something I didn't have yet. A before and after I could hold in a straight line.

What I had instead were fragments.

The wine. The particular warmth that had spread too fast, too evenly. The first man stepping out of the trees without hurrying, the way someone moves when they already know how a thing ends. The metal spike in my palm. Running barefoot on gravel without caring.

And then, further back, behind all of it — a car in the dark. A voice. Get in.

I pressed my bandaged hand flat against my knee and looked at the white cloth.

Someone had wrapped this. The knot at the wrist was even, deliberate — the work of two hands with full use of their fingers. I had not wrapped this. I had been in no condition to do something as neatly as this.

I turned the thought over once, then put it away.

The sun had committed to the day by the time Isla's car turned into the forecourt. She was out before the engine fully stopped, crossing the asphalt in a coat thrown over what were clearly pajamas, her hair pulled back in something approximate. She looked at me. Alarmed and completely still, taking inventory before she moved.

Then she crouched in front of me and took my face in both hands.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," she said. She was looking at my eyes, my hands, the ruin of the champagne dress. Her expression didn't change but something in her jaw tightened. "Can you walk?"

"I've been walking since midnight."

She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. She pulled me to my feet, kept one hand at my elbow, and guided me toward the car without asking anything else.

That was the thing about Isla. She knew when questions would keep.

**

I slept for most of the drive.

It was more like a stone skipping across the surface of something. I came up twice: once when Isla took a long curve and the motion tilted me sideways, once when my phone buzzed on my lap. I looked at the screen.

Liam.

I let it ring. Then I stared at the ceiling of the car and listened to it stop.

"Do you want me to answer it?" Isla asked. Her eyes stayed on the road.

"No."

She nodded. She didn't ask why.

**

The apartment was lit when we arrived.

I noticed it from the street — the living room windows warm and yellow against the early grey of the morning. I stood on the pavement for a moment, looking up, and felt something I couldn't name settle in my chest. Something between relief and its opposite.

Isla put her hand at my back. "Ready?"

I wasn't. "Yes," I said.

The door was unlocked. It swung open before I reached for the handle.

Liam stood in the doorway.

He looked terrible — and I say that not with satisfaction but with something more complicated. His shirt was untucked, collar open, the kind of disorder that comes from hours of distress rather than minutes of preparation. There was a dried smear of something dark at his left temple, half-hidden by his hair, and a rawness around his eyes that I associated with a night of no sleep.

He looked at me.

Whatever he said — I couldn't hear it. The word was just my name, or the shape of it, soundless.

Then he crossed the threshold and wrapped both arms around me and held on with a force that was either genuine or the best performance of genuine I had ever witnessed, and I stood in it with my arms at my sides for a moment before something in me gave and I held him back.

"I looked everywhere," he said, into my hair. His voice was rough. "I drove every road I could find. I thought—" He stopped. His grip tightened. "I didn't know what to think."

"I'm okay," I said.

He pulled back and looked at my face, my hand, the dress. His eyes found the bandage and stayed there. "What happened to your hand?"

"I cut it. It's not deep."

"Elena—"

"What happened to your head?" I reached up without thinking and touched the dried mark at his temple, lightly. He winced.

"I went to get the bags from the car." His voice was even, careful. "Something hit me from behind. I don't know what — I didn't see anyone. I went down hard." He exhaled. "When I came to, you were gone. The porch was empty. There was blood." Something moved across his face. "I've never been so scared in my life."

I looked at the mark on his temple. The skin around it was tender, beginning to bruise faintly at the edges. It looked real — and it was. Liam was many things but he was not careless.

"The men," I said. "Did you see them?"

"No. Just — darkness, and then the ground." He shook his head. "I should never have taken you somewhere so isolated. I wasn't thinking about—" He stopped. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Elena."

I should have said something. I had the words ready — it's okay, it wasn't your fault, we're both here — the small phrases that kept the peace.

Instead I looked past his shoulder into the living room.

Isla was standing just inside the door.

She was watching Liam with an expression I had never quite seen on her face before. Something quieter and more deliberate. It's the expression of a woman listening to a story and noting mentally what it leaves out.

She caught me looking and her face shifted immediately into something neutral.

But I had seen it.

"Come inside," Liam said, his hand warm at my back. "Sit down. Let me get you something."

I let him guide me in. I sat on the sofa and accepted the blanket he brought from the bedroom and the glass of water pressed into my good hand, and I watched him move through the apartment with the focused competence of a man taking care of his wife.

Isla sat in the armchair across from me. She said very little. She drank the coffee Liam made without being asked, and she watched him with those quiet, careful eyes.

At some point he disappeared into the kitchen, and the room went still.

Isla looked at me.

I looked at her.

Neither of us said anything.

After a moment she reached over and squeezed my knee once — firm and brief — and sat back, and picked up her coffee, and that was all.

**

He insisted I rest. I didn't argue.

I lay in the darkened bedroom and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of the apartment — Liam's voice, low and measured, on a phone call in the study. The soft clink of Isla rinsing mugs in the kitchen. The ordinary morning sounds of a life continuing around me.

I turned my bandaged hand over in the dim light.

Who wrapped it.

I had told Liam I did it myself. He had accepted that without question.

I thought about that for a moment — the absence of a follow-up, the way a man who had spent the night terrified for his wife might have pressed harder. How? With one hand?

He hadn't asked.

Maybe because he was too relieved to think clearly or because he trusted what I told him.

Or maybe... because the answer didn't matter to him becaise I came back..

I closed my eyes.

I was not well. I was running on four hours of fractured sleep and the residue of something that had been in my wine, and I was building a case out of details that could mean anything.

These were not evidence. They were the kind of things a tired, frightened mind assembled in the dark to feel like it was doing something useful.