Chapter 3

A week is a strange unit of time when you spend it arguing with yourself. Killian had spent his in exactly that way, turning Steven's words over each morning like a stone in his pocket, smooth on one side and sharp on the other, before he could talk himself out of them again each night. He knew what it would cost him to see her. He knew the price of opening a door he'd spent four years bricking shut, brick by brick, until he'd almost convinced himself there was nothing behind it at all. And still, on the seventh day, he found himself behind the wheel, driving toward a street he'd memorized without meaning to — the way some addresses never really leave you, no matter how hard you try to forget the route.

Steven was crossing it on foot when the car came around the corner too fast, tires screaming against the asphalt as it swerved and stopped just short of him, close enough that his heart slammed against his ribs like something trying to escape a cage it had outgrown.

"Whoa — whoa, what the hell, man! Are you insane? I would've died!" Steven shouted, stumbling toward the window, fury and adrenaline tangled together in his voice. The glass was tinted black, and for a moment he couldn't see anything but his own startled reflection staring back at him, pale and wide-eyed.

Then the window slid down, slow as a held breath finally let go.

It was Killian.

It had taken him a full week to decide whether he could do this — whether he could help Steven, help June, knowing exactly what it would cost him the moment he saw her face again, if he ever did. But he'd come anyway, the way a man walks toward a fire he knows will burn him simply because the cold has become unbearable.

"Oh my god, Killian, it's you," Steven said, breath still catching.

Killian looked at him steadily, something unreadable behind his eyes — a door open just wide enough to prove there was a room behind it, nothing more. "Get in the car."

"What? Why—"

"Are you getting in, or should I just leave?" Killian's voice was flat, impatient, the words clipped short the way a man speaks when he's trying very hard not to feel anything at all.

Steven didn't wait to be asked twice. He climbed in, and they pulled away from the curb into a silence so tense it seemed to take up its own seat in the car, heavy and unmoving, like a third passenger neither of them had invited.

The city thinned out around them in slow degrees — glass towers giving way to low rooftops, low rooftops giving way to open sky, the kind of sky that only showed up once you'd left enough behind. Steven watched the buildings disappear in the side mirror and found himself oddly grateful for the noise of the engine, the only thing in the car still willing to make a sound.

"I thought you weren't coming back," he said finally.

Killian said nothing. His eyes stayed on the road, but his grip on the wheel had tightened, knuckles pale, the only visible crack in an otherwise still face.

"Where are we going?" Steven tried again.

"To the countryside."

"The countryside? Why — I mean, did you find something about her?"

"I don't know if she'll be there," Killian said. "But it's where we used to go. Whenever things felt off, whenever life felt like too much. She might be there now."

Steven frowned, turning the sentence over like it didn't quite fit in his hands. "Wait — countryside? She never once mentioned a countryside place. Not to me, not to anyone. I'm her cousin, Killian. I've known her my whole life, and I'm hearing about this for the first time from you?"

"Hard to believe, I know," Killian said, the faintest trace of a smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth, eyes still fixed on the road.

"No, seriously, how does a place exist that I've never even heard the name of?"

"Maybe because it was never yours to know." Killian glanced at him sideways, just long enough to land the point. "Some places people keep for exactly one other person. You're just going to have to live with not being that person this time."

Steven opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again, equal parts annoyed and grudgingly amused. "Unbelievable," he muttered, shaking his head, but there was no real heat behind it.

Killian wasn't certain it was more than instinct, the kind that lives in the body long after the mind has stopped trusting it. It had been four years since he'd let himself drive that road, four years since he'd allowed himself to think about that house at all, and yet some part of him had never really left it, the way a key stays warm in a pocket even after you've stopped believing the door still opens for you. He needed to know — needed to see whether she still went back to the one place that had never stopped belonging to both of them.

Because that house didn't just hold an old habit. It held the best of what they'd been — quiet, unwitnessed, theirs alone, like a photograph nobody else had ever been allowed to develop. It was where they'd found each other again after the day at the veterinary clinic, the day neither of them ever talked about with anyone else. And it was the same house where Killian's orphanage had first taken root, where a handful of children with nowhere else to go had been the first people, besides June, to ever believe in him without asking for anything back. The land outside the windows kept rolling past, green and indifferent, while Killian drove toward the one place that had never asked him to be anyone other than who he actually was.