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I lift my head from his shoulder.

His gaze holds mine. “No more deciding what you do or don’t need.”

My chest aches again, but this time, the feeling has room to breathe. “Good.”

His thumb brushes a damp track from my cheek. “And Pepper?”

“Yes?”

“I want the coffee dates too.”

A laugh slips out of me, small and exhausted.

“Three,” I say.

“More.”

“That sounds like a demand.”

“It’s courtship.”

I rest my cheek against his chest and listen to the purr under his skin. For this one amber-lit moment, Theo holds me without hiding, and I let myself believe that the next time fear comes to the door, he won’t answer it alone.

Chapter 27

Theo Heron

After the knot lets go, I carry Pepper to the couch. She makes a soft, cranky sound when I lift her, one hand fisting in my shirt as if she might argue with me in her sleep. I wait because I’ve learned at least one thing in the last twelve hours. If she tells me to put her down, I will.

Her face tucks against my chest, warm and trusting, and the shame under my breastbone pulls tight enough to hurt. She trusted me to hold her, and it makes me want to be the kind of man who earns that trust and the place beside her.

I clean her up as gently as I can. Just warm cloth, a fresh blanket, and one of my shirts tugged over her head when she mumbles that mine smells better. By the time I get her settled on the couch near Ezra, dawn is filtering through the windows.

Ezra sleeps curled beneath the attic blanket, one hand close to the bowl of water I set on the side table. The downstairs bathroom faucet runs low through the hall. It grates on the part of me that fixes leaks and pays bills, but the rest of me needs the sound. Water kept him here. I can worry about paying the bill later.

For a while, I stand between them and let myself look. Pepper on one couch cushion, my shirt riding high on her thigh, hair messily falling around her face. Ezra curled around her side, pale but solid, his mouth parted in sleep and one foot kicked out from under the blanket.

They haven’t slept enough. None of us have. But sleep isn’t something I’m gonna get any time soon. The house is quiet, but the cemetery feels loud in my mind. It waits past the windows with a cut patch of sod under the live oak, a picked lock on my records cabinet, and a marker I walked past for years without knowing it mattered.

I check the bathroom faucet, then the back door, then every feed that still works. The east camera shows the route marker clear in weak morning light. The Saints coin is gone because Wes bagged it before he left. The empty spot looks worse than the coin did, like a tooth pulled from a mouth.

I keep my phone on loud and write a note for Pepper in case she wakes before I return.

Outside gathering records and doing morning chores. Staying on property. Phone on. Back door unlocked. You and Ezra first. Always.

The words look plain on the paper. Plain is all I’ve got.

I take the ring of cemetery keys from the hook by the mudroom and go out before the sun is fully up. While I cross the yard, fog rolls in from the channel, crawling through the cypress roots and over the grass. I’ve worked this land long enough to know water fog. It lies about distance, makes a ten-foot ditch look like a lake and a far marker look close enough to touch.

This morning, the fog feels cruel about it. The maintenance shed looks farther than it should. The live oak looks too close. The dock flashes in the puddled reflection beside the porch, even though it sits behind the house and down the slope. For half a second, I see the wrong side of the property again. The old landing. The bait. The place Hammer sent me because he knew I would look where the threat was loudest.

I spit into the grass and keep walking. The cemetery has chores whether a man has slept or not. I reset two fallen flower cones near the Vaughn plot. Clear palm fronds from the walkway. Check the chain at the east cut and find it holding. I stop by the live oak but don’t get close enough to touch the disturbed marker. Wes taped off the section before he left, and Roman photographed everything twice. Still, my fingers curl around my keys until metal bites my palm.

“You were right here and I missed you,” I say to the marker.

The words sound stupid in the fog. I say them anyway. The old charity section has always been the kind of place people want to soften with words. Poor section. Forgotten section. Old ground. The truth is uglier. If a graveyard has gaps, somebody made them. Bad records. Cheap coffins. Floods. People with money moved first and wrote their names in stone large enough to survive the weather. People without money got half a line in a book that may now be missing.

I turn away before guilt tricks me into acting reckless. The maintenance shed smells like oil, mildew, and cut grass. I pull every box I can find that might matter. Old caretaker notes. Sale inspection photos. Paper plot cards that never made it into the digital file. A cracked blue tub from the back shelf. The flat archival case from under the workbench where I stuck it when the roof leaked two summers ago. A bundle of rolled surveys tied with twine.