Caleb’s POV
Grief doesn't knock. It picks the lock while you're sleeping and rearranges the furniture so that everything familiar becomes a place to stub your toe in the dark.
The clearing is quiet when I arrive. Late afternoon light filters through the oak's canopy.
Serena is on the swing. Even from here I can see the tear tracks on her cheeks.
I don't ask what happened. I lower myself beside her and wait.
"My dad used the insurance money from my mom's death to pay for his wedding to your mother." The words come out flat. "All of it funded by Elizabeth dying."
I let the silence hold it. She doesn't need me to fix this.
"It feels like she funded her own replacement." She wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand. "Like her death was the opening act for everyone else's fresh start."
"My mom would understand that. She rebuilt her whole life on the ashes of what Simon burned down."
Serena turns to look at me. "Do you ever feel like loving someone is just rehearsing for losing them?"
"Every day." I stare at the canopy. "When I was nine, Simon took me fishing. Only time he ever did anything that looked like fatherhood. When we got home, he told me he'd only taken me because a neighbor was watching. He said I should remember that feeling of being happy, because it would teach me how stupid hope is. That expecting good things from people was a weakness he was doing me a favor by beating out of me early."
Her hand finds mine, fingers sliding between my knuckles.
"You were nine years old." The fury in her whisper could level this whole forest.
"And for years, I believed him. He rewired the way I see every good thing that's ever happened to me."
"That's why you were cruel to me. You couldn't let yourself want something without punishing yourself for wanting it."
"And punishing you for making me want it." I meet her eyes. "Yeah."
The honesty strips us bare. No armor left. Just two people who grew up where love came with conditions, holding hands in the fading light.
Serena kisses me first.
Not the desperate collision we've been before. Not stolen or frantic or shadowed by fear.
She lifts her hand to my jaw, tilts my face toward hers, and presses her lips to mine with a slowness that feels chosen.
Like she's planting a flag and daring the universe to pull it up.
The taste of her tears is still on her mouth, salt mixed with warmth, and I hold still because I need to feel the full weight of this. She chose me.
Not in a dark hallway with adrenaline screaming through her veins. Not behind a locked door with the clock ticking. Here, in the open, with nothing chasing us.
I pull her off the swing and into my lap on the ground, the moss soft beneath us, her thighs bracketing my hips.
Her fingers slide into my hair, nails scraping lightly against my scalp, and the sound I make against her mouth is raw enough to embarrass me if I had any pride left where this girl is concerned.
I don't.
My hands find the hem of her shirt and I pull it over her head slowly, watching the light catch on her collarbone, the dip between her breasts, the faint freckle below her left shoulder I've memorized from every stolen glance I was never supposed to take.
‘I would burn the entire world down for that sound.’
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