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Cade had picked up on it, too, without me having to say anything. But all we could do was hang back and observe.

Might be nothing.

Could be something.

We wouldn’t know until we knew.

So ultimately the work side of things was fine.

What wasn’t fucking fine was Whitney.

I wasn’t sure if what I’d told her about Jesse was the culprit, or if the admission that I’d be giving her my entire cut was the reason, but Whitney had been distant in a way that went beyond anything I’d seen from her so far. I was pissed that Brooks had gotten that whole conversation started, and Vincent for piling on because he just felt like being an asshole, but it wasn’t their fault. I hadn’t told anyone yet. I was planning on telling her after I got home from work that day.

But the blame fell on my shoulders and I should’ve anticipated something like that happening. Fuck, I’d never get tired of chasing her, though. That got my adrenaline pumping like nothing else.

Her prickly, vicious nature I could handle easily. I enjoyed handling those parts of her. But this new quietness, the lack of reaction when I tried to goad her?

It was unsettling and left me feeling at a loss.

She seemed uncomfortable in her own skin, restless and jittery and not having a single clue what to do with herself.

I realized quickly that she wasn’t accustomed to not having to watch her back every second of the day. She wasn’t accustomed to having nothing to do, nowhere to go. She didn’t know how to relax.

I’d find it endearing if she wasn’t ignoring me.

It was stressing me the fuck out.

I’d deep cleaned the bathroom three times already, alphabetized the books on my shelves by the author’s last name rather than the title of the book, which was how they’d been organized before. I rearranged all my clothes in my drawers by color rather than size.

Nothing was helping.

She seemed to be stuck in her own head. After everything we’d told her, I didn’t blame her for feeling some kind of way about it. But my gut told me it wasn’t just the things she’d recently learned. It was a memory.

A bad one.

Something sour and twisted and deeply embedded in her psyche. Something I’d said or done had awakened it, I just couldn’t figure out exactly what.

Her distance brought up painful memories of my own, times when my mother would withdraw into herself and seem to be consumed with a darkness that had dug its claws into her so deep it might kill her to rip them out.

Cade and I did what we could for her, but in the end, it had to be her that dug her way out of that awful place. And every time she did, it seemed like she lost a piece of herself in the process until ultimately there was nothing left of her.

I didn’t want that to be Whitney. I didn’t want our saving her to torment her in ways I couldn’t fight on a physical plane.

Either telling her about my brother or revealing what Thorne and Tom had planned for her had lit a match against a dark memory buried in the back of her mind. I wanted to know what it was so I could burn it away and bring her back from wherever she’d gone. Her disinterest in and discomfort with me, the house, the boys, the heist…it grated on the part of me that wanted her attention. Craved her dark looks and biting words.

It had never been my intention to rattle her this thoroughly. Truth be told, I didn’t know her as well as I wanted to. Yes, I’d gleaned every morsel of information about her I could in the two months I’d spent watching her. But knowing her character, how she might react in certain situations, wasn’t the same as knowing how she’d respond to every single situation or bit of information. I didn’t know anything about her past, and how she was acting now was different, something I hadn’t been able to anticipate, and I had to figure out how to help her through it.

But she wasn’t fucking letting me.

In spite of ignoring me when I tried to engage with her, she was still very conscious of me. I was painfully aware of Whitney watching me. But every time I’d look her way, she’d turn her head and pretend she’d been looking at something else.

If I asked her direct questions, she’d grunt in assent and not say anything if she disagreed or didn’t like the question. At first, I’d thought she just needed time to process things. But it soon became clear that in my attempt to let her work through things on her own, she wasn’t getting better.

By the eighth day of this behavior, I’d had enough.

When Cade and I got home from a long day of putting up drywall, all I wanted to do was curl up in my bed with Whitney in my arms.

I walked into my room to find her sitting on my bed, scrolling through channels on the TV. Having her here in my own space—in my room, in my bed, in my clothes—it felt right. She fit here.