Page 142 of Carrick
So I gave her something solid. Something to hang on to.
“We don’t know what the meeting meant,” I said. “We don’t know if it was voluntary. We don’t know what was said. Wedon’t know what he’s caught in. All we know is that he got in that car.”
She swallowed, jaw twitching.
“And we’re going to figure out the rest,” I added. “Carefully. Smart. With every eye and angle we’ve got. And when wedoknow? Then we act.”
She looked at me, hesitating.
“You really believe that?”
“I do.”
Her eyes fell shut, breath shivering through her nose, and I watched it war inside her—hope on one side, history on the other. Love fraying at the edges of grief, grief sharpened by too many betrayals to count. She wore it behind her lashes like a bruise she’d learned to live with.
When she looked at me again, something had shifted—not because the fear was gone, but because I hadn’t flinched from it. I hadn’t moved.
“I don’t know how to survive this again,” she said, voice splintered thin. “Losing him once almost broke me. If I have to bury him…”
“You won’t.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“No,” I said, stepping closer, “but I can promise you won’t face it alone.”
Her breath caught. Her shoulders curled in like the weight of that truth was too much. But then she nodded—small, trembling, but sure enough to mean something.
And for now, that was everything.
27
Carrick
She satcross-legged on the bed, surrounded by the wreckage of her past.
Not the broken kind. Not the slashed cushions or torn pages from her apartment. These pieces were intact. The ones she’d salvaged. The ones that mattered.
A cracked leather journal, the spine worn to threads. A hoodie that used to be Rayden’s, crumpled in her lap. The photo that had been tucked into the back of the journal, now placed in a simple frame Maddy had found.
She clutched them like they were lifelines. Like they were the only proof she still existed.
I leaned against the doorway, watching her in silence for a moment. She sat perfectly still, eyes unfocused, like she was replaying a memory in her head. Her hair was tucked into the collar of my sweatshirt. Her face shone softly in the early morning light, the fight drained but not gone.
The room was quiet.
Not heavy, not brittle. Just… still. Like it was waiting to see what came next. I stepped inside and sat beside her without a word. She didn’t look at me. Didn’t speak. But when I reached for her hand, she didn’t resist. Her fingers curled into mineinstinctively, like her body knew what she needed before her mind caught up.
“He used to wear this every day,” she said after a while, smoothing her palm over the t-shirt. “Until it didn’t fit anymore. Then he gave it to me. Said it was lucky.”
I looked down at the faded fabric. The logo on the front was half-peeled. A band from a decade ago. Some tour they’d never actually gone to, but she told me once they used to dance in the kitchen to one of the band’s songs.
“He believed in luck?”
She smiled faintly. “Only when he was already in trouble.”
I exhaled through my nose and leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “You think he’s in trouble now?” I asked gently.
Her gaze didn’t move from the shirt.
