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“I am protecting her,” I snarled over my shoulder, and I slammed the door in their faces.

We met Kimmy towards the edge of the village, where the horses were now ready. Without waiting, we mounted and started on the path towards home, Claire in front of me in the saddle.

It was a long time before she spoke, but eventually, she leaned back into me and murmured, “Thank you.”

I kissed her temple and kept my worries to myself.

Chapter 39

Claire

I’d never been so overjoyed as the moment the white farmhouse and faded red door came into view. Summerhurst was in full bloom as autumn neared, and the land was lush, green, and beautiful. Tears pricked my eyes.

“We made it,” John murmured by my ear. “You’re home, sweetheart. Like I promised.”

I blinked back my tears and lifted his hand to my lips to kiss his knuckles. “So you did. And you delivered.”

“Always do, don’t I?” he replied, amused, as he directed an exhausted Ghost towards the stables.

Over the next couple of weeks, I healed slowly but surely. I was essentially still bedridden, but in stable condition. Due to my broken ribs and his healing shoulder joint, neither of us could lift anything, which left Kimmy to do a lot of the work on the farm with help from the Armstrong kids, Danny, and Jenna. Matthew, who’d been taking care of the farm while we’d been gone, had done an excellent job of maintaining the crops we’d planted, and we’d have a hearty harvest when autumn came.

“You decided to make us equally useless, eh?” Danny teased John, poking at him with one of his crutches. He still needed them for his leg, though he didn’t rely on them as heavily as he had been the last time I’d seen him. The three of us sat on the back porch, watching over the fields as corn blew in the breeze.

John scoffed and gave his shoulder a playful shove.

“You’ll have to be on command duty at the station with me until you’re fit again. Don’t worry; my jokes are even funnier than before you left.”

“I’m shocked there hasn’t been a mutiny,” John said wryly, and Danny laughed and clapped him on the back.

“Good to have you back, Johnny.” He gave me a smile and a nod. “You too, Claire. We missed you both.”

His tone was so earnest and affectionate that I hid in the kitchen, overcome with emotion.

In the days after we arrived home, neighbours sent home-cooked meals to the house to welcome us. Isla, Noah, and baby Ely came to visit. Jenna visited my bedside and chattered away about how our students were doing, which warmed me. Nimkii gave me a pretty woven blanket. Even Jameson sent a small basket of corn muffins his daughter had made—conspicuously addressed only to me and not John, which made John roll his eyes and chuckle.

Throughout my recovery, John was always there. He brought me food and water, helped me walk to the bathroom, and kept me company. He comforted me when I was sore and miserable, massaging my aches and pains and telling me stories about his parents—something he’d never talked much about before, likely because they were all secondhand. He had no memory of them; he was only a few months old when they died.

“They lived in the old capital,” John said, idly rubbing one of my feet in his lap. “My father grew up here at Summerhurst, but he left for school when he was eighteen. He met my mother there.”

I shifted uncomfortably, trying to avoid hurting my ribs. “What were they like?”

“Dad became an engineer; Mom was a doctor. More than that, I don’t really know. Granny and Granddad didn’t like to talk about them much. I think it was too hard for them.”

“But they’re your parents,” I countered. “You had a right to know.”

He shrugged. “Maybe, but I get it. My dad was their only kid, and they weren’t just dealing with their grief; they also had two babies tossed in their laps when they thought they were done with all that.”

“How exactly did it happen?” I asked, voicing something I’d wondered about before but had never got around to discussing. “If you lived in the old capital…that’s far, and with the virus going around…”

John nodded, moving to massage my other foot. “It was, and they were moving toward quarantining the cities by the time I was a few months old. My mother worked at a big hospital, and she knew it was coming. They’d seal off the city, but she knew it wouldn’t work—the cases were already multiplying, and it was so contagious that people she worked with started dropping like flies.”

“Right,” I said, letting out a shallow sigh. “I can’t imagine.”

“Neither can I.” He looked reflective. “Her best friend was a nurse at the hospital, and got pregnant around the same time. Kimmy was her daughter—only a month younger than me. My mother refused to leave the city. As a doctor, she felt it was her duty to stay, and my father apparently wouldn’t leave her. But they were scared for me, so they arranged for my grandparents to come get me, bring me to Summerhurst. The farm was remote, so it was an ideal place to wait out the virus. Kimmy’s mother begged them to take Kimmy as well, so they did.”

He swallowed hard. “It was supposed to be temporary…until it wasn’t. A few weeks later, my grandparents lost contact with them. It was a couple more months before Granny got a box in the mail with their wedding rings in it, and a letter saying they’d died. Apparently, that was the last thing the postal service ever delivered, since it collapsed pretty quickly after that.”

Based on my history background, I was aware of what had likely happened to his parents’ remains. When things grew desperate with the horrible sickness, they began burning corpses to try to control the spread, to no avail. The hopelessness of that mental image made me burn with anger at the idea that it may have been a bioweapon. Julius had said it may have been developed by one of their competitors, but then he’d also confessed to being responsible for the cannibal population, and to killing the residents of Ashburn. The idea that Omega had no knowledge of the virus before it destroyed the world seemed improbable.