Random Fanfictions of a Thirty Something

Marvel:

Remy Lebeau x Reader: Ultimate masterlist.

Bucky Barnes-

Lust for life:

Summary: After multiple failed attempts at retirement, you keep getting pulled back into action by Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. Despite the constant bickering and teasing, there’s an undeniable tension between you and Bucky—something everyone else sees except the two of you.

When a new threat involving stolen Inhuman tech emerges, you reluctantly join Bucky and Sam for one more mission. As the stakes rise, your playful banter with Bucky deepens into something more, and the emotional walls you’ve both built finally begin to crumble.

Warnings: Swearing, Violence, Smut.

DC:

Rick Flag Senior: Bang Bang, Kiss Kiss.

Summary: For five grueling years, Taskforce X was both your lifeline and your torment. Mission after mission, you faced impossible odds with the dangling promise of a reduced sentence. Now, at last, you’re free—no more Belle Reve, no more danger. You’ve put that chapter behind you, determined to leave it locked away in the recesses of your mind.

But Amanda Waller has other plans. When she appears back in your life, she brings a new mission—and a new team. This time, you’re working alongside Rick Flag Sr., the father of your former team leader, and the members of Taskforce M. As the stakes rise, so do unexpected emotions. Tensions give way to an undeniable connection between you and Rick, a bond that deepens with every mission and threatens to pull you back into a world you thought you’d left behind forever. Warning: Slow-Burn, Age Gap, Violence, Swearing, Smut.

Rick Flag Junior: Is It Over Now? Summary: He wasn’t sure exactly when or how it happened—how he ended up standing in his bathroom at 2 a.m., wedged between your legs as you perched on his sink, wiping blood from your face and cleaning whatever wounds you came to him with. He always swore it was the last time, that he couldn't keep doing this; not with someone like you. Yet every night before bed he still walked over and unlocked that damn window on his fire escape. Every night he climbed into bed and waited until he heard your boots hit his floor. Every damn night he waited for you, waited until he could finally breathe again. Warnings; Slow-burn, Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Smut. Bulletproof

Summary: You bend the rules when they’re wrong. He lives by the book—until he doesn’t.

Thrown together on probation, you go from spilled coffee and reluctant partnership to stakeouts, rain-soaked arguments, and late-night rescues. Somewhere between fake domestic covers, tuxedo galas, and napkin-drafted rules, duty turns into something messier—and much harder to walk away from.

Warnings: Slow Burn, Enemies to Partners to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Smut (Eventually), Fluff.

Pairings: Alternate Universe! Colonel Rick Flag Jr/Reader.

Adrian Chase: Wonderstruck

Summary: Falling in love with your best friend wasn’t supposed to happen—but with Adrian Chase, it was inevitable. Maybe it started back in high school, when he smiled at you across the science lab. Or maybe it crept in later, during those long, adrenaline-soaked nights working (sort of, not really) for ARGUS, where the line between best friends and something more blurred every time he looked at you like you were the only steady thing in his world.

Loving him was easy. Living with the fact that he might never love you back? That was the hard part.

Because whether he couldn’t feel it—or just wouldn’t let himself—you were stuck in a limbo of almosts. Lingering touches, late-night confessions, unspoken things that hung heavy in the air.

And eventually, something was going to give. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Smut.

Misc:

Bittersweet Symphony ( Rafael Barba x Reader, Sonny Carisi x Reader) Summary: When you unexpectedly discover you're pregnant, you're thrust into navigating the complexities of your new reality. As the baby's father remains distant, it's your partner, Sonny Carisi, who steps up in ways you couldn't dream of. You find yourself grappling with a whirlwind of emotions, including the unexpected feelings of slowly falling in love with your partner.

Jimmy Logan x Reader: (Logan Lucky). Summary: After a decade away, you return to Boone County, stirring up old tensions and unresolved feelings with Jimmy Logan, the man who never truly let you go. As Clyde watches the two of you navigate the weight of your shared past, it becomes clear that your return isn’t just a visit—it’s a collision with emotions neither of you can ignore.

Pairings: Jimmy Logan/Reader Warnings: Angst, Smut, Slow-Burn, Swearing New Romantics (Stephen Holder x Reader. The Killing)

Summary: You and Stephen had an agreement—no strings, just sex after a long day. You set rules to keep things simple, laughing as you both fleshed out the details over cheap takeout and a notepad. At first it was a joke made by two colleagues who didn't have time for a relationship; but one by one, you find yourselves breaking every single rule. Sleepovers, secrets, meeting family, getting jealous—it all slowly crept in until there was only one rule left. And then suddenly, neither one of you were laughing anymore.

Warnings: 18+, Smut, Swearing, mentions of past drug use. Pairings: Stephen Holder/Reader. The Only Exception (Shane Maguire x Reader. Untamed)

Enemies to Lovers. Summary: When you- a stubborn, sharp-tongued chef from San Francisco takes a job at a remote luxury lodge in Yosemite as a favour from your old boss, you immediately find yourself butting heads with the park’s brooding Wildlife Management Officer, Shane Maguire—a man who’s as uncompromising and wild as the land he protects. Protective of his solitude, Shane has zero patience for people from the city who wander off trail and break his every rule. Your first encounters are a battle of wits and wills, all biting sarcasm, heated arguments, and barbed nicknames—especially when he calls you “princess” just to watch you get more irritated.

But when the dangers of the wilderness close in, you two are forced together again and again. The line between rivalry and attraction blurs as every fight leaves you more breathless, every secret shared chips away at your defenses, and every accidental touch lingers too long. You falls first, despite all your efforts to resist him—but when Shane’s walls finally crack, he falls so hard there’s no coming back from it. Pairings: Shane Maguire/Reader. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Fluff, Violence, Swearing, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Smut, Enemies to Lovers.

Pieces of Me Masterlist (Benjamin Poindexter x Reader. Daredevil)

Summary: You never believed in soulmates—until you came home to find Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter, bleeding and wanted, in your kitchen.

The pull in your chest you’d ignored your whole life snapped into focus; the fugitive with perfect aim was yours. Between sarcasm, stitched wounds, and midnight stakeouts, the two of you try to build something fragile and real.

He was precision; you were chaos. Together, you found strange sort of balance

Pairings: Benjamin 'Dex' Poindexter/Reader. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Swearing, Romance, Fluff, Smut, humor, smut.

Untouchable Masterlist (Jackson 'Jax' Teller x Reader. Sons of Anarchy)

Summary:

You moved to Charming looking for quiet — a rented house that looked nothing like your old one, a remote accounting job that you argued with your boss for, and no more of the club politics you grew up with. After cutting ties with your father, the president of a Nevada MC, you swore off anything with a kutte. But peace lasts exactly until you shoulder-check a man in the supermarket aisle.

From that collision on, the town stops being quiet. Jackson Teller keeps showing up — first to jump your dead car battery, then to ask for help with his ledger at TM. The banter turns familiar; the air between you gets heavier. But your last name is the kind that could burn down alliances, and the truth about who your father is sits like a loaded gun between you.

Part 2: And your infamous mouth once again fucks you over.

You could panic.

No, scratch that. You were panicking.

Not neatly. Not cinematically. There was no tasteful close-up of your trembling fingers, no melancholy indie song swelling in the background while you stared bravely into the middle distance. This was ugly, full-bodied panic. The kind that sat behind your ribs wearing steel-capped boots and kicked everything within reach.

Your hands were cold and your face was hot and your stomach had dropped so violently that several important organs appeared to have left the premises without submitting notice.

You didn’t know whether you were about to throw up, cry, turn around and walk straight back through the door, get into your car and drive all the way to San Francisco on terror and spite alone.

This absolutely was not how you had planned to tell him.

Actually, that wasn’t true, you hadn’t planned it at all.

You had spent several days imagining ways to tell him, which obviously was not the same thing. Planning implied progress. Decisions. Possibly a numbered list. What you had done was mentally stage seventeen different versions of the conversation, hate every one of them and then avoid choosing until your mouth took matters into its own hands.

You could have sat him down.

Made tea.

Held his hand.

Led gently with, So, I went to the doctor.

Or, I need to tell you something.

Or even, Before you panic, I’m not dying, although that admittedly risked setting the bar dangerously low.

Not this; Not you blurting it out the second he stepped into the cabin like a woman announcing you had once again lost his socks.

Not Shane stopping in the middle of the room with one hand still on the open door, his entire body locking as though someone had unplugged him.

Not the silence afterward.

And definitely not him blinking once and saying, “Excuse me?” in a tone that suggested his brain had received the information but rejected the file format and you needed to repeat what was being said.

Newsflash: you did not want to repeat it.

Unfortunately, your mouth had unionized with your anxiety and was now taking independent action.

“I’m pregnant,” you said again.

The words hung between you.

Awful.

Small.

Real.

Shane did not move.

The porch light caught one side of his face while the rest remained in the cabin’s dim warmth. His jacket was still zipped halfway up, his hair pushed out of place by the wind, the cold clinging to him in the smell of pine, damp earth and clean night air.

Usually you loved that smell. Usually you wanted to bury your face against his neck and breathe him in until your city-poisoned lungs remembered how to function.

Tonight it made your stomach roll.

His expression hardly changed, which somehow made it worse. No visible horror. No joy. No immediate attempt to escape through the nearest window. His eyes remained fixed on you as though looking away might cause the room to rearrange itself into an even less manageable reality.

“It’s yours,” you added, because apparently the situation lacked humiliation.

His brow barely moved.

“In case you were wondering,” you continued as a laugh slipped out of you.

Thin. High. Wrong.

The sort of laugh usually heard from someone standing beside a burning vehicle and insisting everything was under control.

Shane’s hand remained on the door.

The silence settled over the room again, thick enough to lean against. You could hear the heater humming near the wall, the faint rattle of the window in its frame and the irritatingly peaceful movement of branches outside.

“Say something,” you whispered.

Shane finally moved as he shut the door with deliberate care. The latch caught with its familiar, precise click. Of course it did.

The man could be told he was going to become a father and still remember basic cabin security.

He crossed the room slowly and sat on the edge of the bed. Not collapsing exactly, but close. The mattress compressed beneath him. He leaned forward, planted his forearms on his thighs and dragged one hand over his mouth.

He looked down at the floorboards.

That was what broke the little remaining structure holding your panic upright.

Not his silence; The fact that he couldn’t look at you.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked.

Normally, that question would have made you laugh.

Normally it would have been after sex, both of you tangled in sheets, overheated and half asleep. Shane would be lying on his back with one hand behind his head and the other moving lazily over your spine while you tried to extract verbal praise from a man who believed showing up with chopped firewood was a sonnet.

What do you want me to say?

Thank you would be a start.

Thank you.

With feeling. And praise. Because I’m good at what I do for you.

Then he would look at you with the tired affection of a man who had willingly adopted a difficult stray and say, You’re exhausting.

You would tell him he looked good exhausted.

He would roll you underneath him to prove a point neither of you had formally identified.

This was not that.

There was no warmth hidden beneath the words. No rumpled sheets. No playful escape route. There was only the tightening knot in your stomach and the sudden certainty that if he stayed quiet for another five seconds, you might start screaming simply to give the room something else to do.

“How about how you’re feeling?” you snapped. “Because this is what adults do.”

His gaze finally lifted, “You’re pregnant?” he offered.

“Yes.”

“How far?”

The practicality of the question caught you harder than it should have. It was reasonable.

Very Shane actually. Dates. Facts. Terrain. Establish the known variables before moving into hostile territory. But it led directly to all the other questions you had hoped to avoid for at least another century.

Why hadn’t you told him immediately?

Why had you gone to the doctor without him?

Why were you standing here now, after having known for weeks, delivering the news with all the tenderness of an overdue utility notice?

You twisted your fingers together until one of your knuckles cracked, “Like… eight weeks,” you said. “Around that.”

His eyes sharpened slightly.

“So it’s still really small,” you continued, because once you started talking, stopping would most likely require sedation, “Like a bean. Maybe a raspberry. The doctor said something, but I was concentrating very hard on this poster on the wall about measles where the guy looked like—"

“You saw a doctor?” He interrupted and there it was.

Not accusation exactly, but the first edge of hurt.

You swallowed, “After the test. I took one because I got sick at work and Mark made me go.”

“Mark knows?”

“He knows I went to the doctor. I didn’t exactly come back waving an ultrasound and handing out cigars.”

Shane looked back down. The news appeared to land in separate pieces.

The test.

The appointment.

Mark.

The fact that you had known long enough to build an entire fortress of dread around it while he had walked into the room thinking Brian’s cooking had finally developed a body count.

His jaw shifted, “You’re okay?”

The question hit you directly in the chest, because of course that was his first real concern.

Not whether it was planned, not what it meant for him, not even why you had kept it from him.

You.

Were you all right?

It was so painfully, infuriatingly Shane that you wanted to cry, laugh and shake him until a more emotionally useful sentence came loose, “Okay enough about me.” The plea in your voice arrived before you could hide it. “Talk to me, Shane.”

He rubbed his thumb against the side of his hand, gaze still lowered.

“Please,” you added.

He sat up a little, but the weight in his expression remained, “This is a lot and I don’t know how we’re going to make this work.”

It wasn’t the worst thing he could have said, that was the problem.

Because it was honest, because it was the exact thought you had spent days refusing to complete.

“But we can,” you said quickly, “We can make it work.”

Shane watched you for a long moment, and you almost shifted under his gaze. Then he asked, “Do you want to keep it?”

Everything inside you stopped.

There it was.

The actual question.

Not the nausea or the dates or the test currently tucked inside your handbag like the world’s least festive party favour.

The choice. You had imagined tiny socks hanging in the Yosemite sun. Shane’s hand spread over your stomach. His face bent over a sleeping baby, softer than anyone else ever got to see him.

You had also imagined yourself in San Francisco, sick and furious and alone while he tried to make the drive around emergency calls, wounded animals and tourists with no sense of self-preservation.

A cot in a tent.

A child you could never put in it.

Two homes three hours apart.

A baby spending half its infancy strapped into a car seat while its parents pretended petrol receipts were romantic.

You opened your mouth and at first nothing emerged but breath; but then: “This is something we both need to decide,” you said finally. “It can’t just be me.”

The room went still again. And there, at last, was the real shape of the thing sitting between you.

Not only a pregnancy.

A future.

A decision.

A whole human life waiting somewhere beyond the next few minutes while the two people responsible for it stood in a rented cabin glaring at each other with the emotional skills of frightened wildlife.

Shane leaned back and dragged his hand over his face. His palm rasped over the stubble on his jaw before dropping heavily onto his thigh and you realised then that he looked tired.

Not ordinary tired.

Not fourteen-hour-shift tired. Not spent-the-night-tracking-an-injured-bear tired. Not dragged-himself-to-the-city-after-work-and-then-listened-to-Trevor-upstairs-remix-the-same-bass-line-until-dawn tired.

This was older.

The deep, old-bone exhaustion that came over him when his mind started mapping ten miles of difficult terrain at once and found cliffs everywhere he wanted roads.

Because the problem was not only inside this room.

Both of you knew that; Every argument you had avoided resolving during the past year and a half had just climbed out of its grave and joined you.

The distance.

The driving.

The cancelled weekends.

The quiet resentments.

The insecurities that grew teeth whenever you spent too long apart.

A few months earlier, Kelly Miles had returned to Yosemite for another wildlife project, and you had handled the news with all the grace and emotional stability of a woman who absolutely had not searched through a biologist’s professional website at one in the morning.

Shane had mentioned it over the phone while you were putting groceries away; “Kelly’s back for a few months,” he had said. “She’s working on the deer monitoring.”

You had stopped with a jar of pasta sauce halfway into the cupboard.

“Oh,” you’d replied. “That’s nice.”

Shane knew your that’s nice. It was rarely nice.

“She got in yesterday,” he had continued after a pause.

“How convenient.”

“For the deer?”

You had shut the cupboard harder than necessary, “You two have so much in common.”

Silence.

Patient. Wary. Dangerous.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t sound like nothing.”

You had looked around your apartment and hated every empty part of it. The suitcase still sitting near the bedroom door from your last trip. His mug beside yours in the cupboard. The basil plant he’d bought because you said supermarket basil tasted like damp disappointment, now wilting on the windowsill because apparently even herbs struggled with long-distance relationships.

“I’m just saying,” you’d replied, “she likes wildlife. You like wildlife. She likes living in the middle of nowhere. You’ve built your entire personality around owning three shirts and identifying different kinds of faeces.”

“Scat.”

“See? Soulmates.”

He had heard the jealousy then, buried beneath several layers of sarcasm and a personal attack on his wardrobe. He had tried to reassure you.

Kelly was a colleague.

Nothing had ever happened.

He loved you.

She could stand naked in the ranger station holding a baby deer and a perfectly organized topographical map and he would still come home to you.

That last part had nearly worked as well but then your stupid arse had said, “Except you don’t come home to me, do you?”

And that had done it.

He had gone quiet and you had continued talking because stopping while ahead had never been one of your spiritual gifts.

Eventually he’d said, “I’m not doing this tonight.”

Then he’d hung up.

Which had naturally confirmed every irrational belief in your head because nothing calmed an insecure person like the sudden disappearance of the person they were insecure about.

The fight had resumed the next morning and become about everything except Kelly.

Your trust.

His patience.

Your tendency to poke at a bruise until it became a wound.

His habit of withdrawing the second emotion stopped following a logical path.

And inevitably, the same central problem every argument circled.

You lived three hours apart on a good day.

Three hours if the roads cooperated, nobody crashed, the weather behaved and California collectively decided not to be California.

Fortnightly visits had sounded romantic in theory.

In practice, they were exhausting.

There were Fridays when you finished dinner service, changed in the staff bathroom and got into your car only to sit behind the wheel trying to remember whether Yosemite was north or merely emotionally inconvenient. There were weekends when it was Shane’s turn to travel, but a search ran late, a storm damaged a section of trail or someone left food in a tent and summoned a bear like it was a woodland delivery service.

Sometimes one of you called and admitted you couldn’t manage the drive.

Those conversations always started reasonably.

I’m exhausted.

I know.

I don’t think it’s safe.

Then don’t come.

Then came a pause.

Just a little too long.

One of you would say, Okay.

And somehow that single word contained disappointment, resentment, loneliness and a minor accusation nobody had technically made.

Shane hated San Francisco.

He hated the traffic, the noise, the crowds and the fact that finding somewhere to park required divine intervention or a willingness to commit a felony. He hated that your apartment never became fully dark. He hated the shouting in the street and the delivery trucks before dawn. He hated that he couldn’t identify where every sound came from.

Once he had spent forty minutes circling your block before calling you.

“There’s nowhere to put the truck.”

“It’s a city, Shane. Not a stable.”

“Where do people park?”

“They don’t. They continue driving until they die clearly.”

He hadn’t found that funny.

You, meanwhile, maintained that Yosemite was beautiful in the same way a large predator was beautiful: preferably observed from behind reinforced glass with access to room service. You hated the silence when Shane wasn’t there to soften it. You hated the unreliable reception. You hated waking in the dark because something moved outside and not knowing whether it was a squirrel or a creature capable of opening your abdomen.

A bear had once tried to eat you.

Technically, no.

A bear had gone through the outdoor kitchen bins during your first few weeks at Ridgeview while you stood behind a locked door holding two bags of rubbish like a medieval villager drafted into war.

Shane had arrived, assessed the situation and later informed you the bear had shown no interest in you.

Which seemed unnecessarily insulting. He still referred to the event as “the dumpster incident,” and you still referred to it as attempted predation.

Neither of you had compromised.

But you could not turn this into another running joke.

There might be a baby now.

A baby needed a home or at least two homes close enough that travelling between them did not require a full tank of petrol, several snacks and an updated weather forecast.

You would have to look directly at the future you had spent a year discussing only in soft, hypothetical fragments.

Where would you live?

Who would leave?

Who would sacrifice?

Was there some magical town halfway between Yosemite and San Francisco where you could run a serious kitchen while Shane tracked wildlife, repaired fences and frightened tourists away from elk?

Would one of you become quietly miserable and pretend not to be because sacrifice was supposed to look noble when it was done for love?

And beneath every practical question sat the one you could no longer avoid, “Do you want this?” The words came out abruptly.

Shane raised his head and he looked at you properly then. His eyes moved over your face as though searching for the answer you needed and comparing it with the one he could honestly give.

“I don’t know.”

Your stomach didn’t drop, it plunged, taking several vital organs and the last scraps of your dignity with it. Your heartbeat accelerated. Your ears began to ring. For one awful second, the floor seemed to tilt sideways.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know if he wanted a baby with you.

He didn’t know if his future had room for a child.

Maybe he didn’t know if it had room for you once loving you required more than long weekends, borrowed shirts and sex in whichever home had won that fortnight’s custody battle.

“Okay,” you said flat. “Don’t do that,” He said firmly.

“Do what?”

“Shut down.”

“I’m not shutting down.”

“You are.”

“I said okay.”

“You say okay when you’ve stopped listening and started planning an escape route.”

Annoyingly accurate. You hadn’t packed a bag yet but you could feel yourself wanting to just walk back out that door. You could picture it. Clothes shoved into the suitcase without folding. Toiletries swept off the bathroom counter. Keys clutched between your fingers.

You could drive back to the city tonight; you could text him from Mariposa and say it didn’t matter.

You wouldn’t ask him for anything. You could raise the baby alone.

Stop.

The more reasonable part of your mind, small and badly funded, threw itself across the controls.

He had not said he didn’t want it. He had said he didn’t know. Which was objectively acceptable considering you had dropped this on him less than twenty minutes ago and he had not even enjoyed the luxury of throwing up first.

You had known for weeks.

He had known for the length of one deeply unpleasant conversation.

But fear preferred cruelty to patience, it found every vulnerable place and pressed.

The cruelest thought arrived before you could stop it.

He killed someone.

The knowledge remained inside you like something buried beneath floorboards. Shane had never given you a clean confession. Never sat you down and said plainly what Jill Turner had paid him to do to Sean Sanderson after Sanderson murdered Caleb.

But you knew enough.

You knew Sanderson had disappeared, you knew Jill had gone to Shane, you knew the history between Shane and Kyle Turner was not about an affair, no matter what everyone had assumed.

You knew what Shane could do when he decided someone deserved punishment.

The frightened part of your mind seized on it.

Why would you raise a baby with someone capable of that?

The thought made you feel ill, because dragging his darkest secret into this moment simply because you feared rejection would be ugly and cheap. Reaching for the nearest weapon and pretending you didn’t know where to aim.

You inhaled to calm the nausea you could feel building, “I want it,” you said.

Shane’s gaze snapped fully to yours.

The words surprised you too.

But once spoken, they settled somewhere deep and frighteningly certain, “I want it,” you repeated. “I think—no. I do.” Your hand moved toward your stomach before you caught yourself and curled it against your side, “And if you don’t, that’s fine.”

His brows drew together.

You continued.

Of course you did.

Once panic got access to the microphone, removing it required trained professionals and possibly a tranquiliser of some sort, “We can work something out where I have the baby alone. I won’t be alone alone. I have my parents. Friends. Mark will create a deeply invasive spreadsheet. Gabe will buy it a pink vape before it can walk, but we can establish boundaries.”

“Stop.”

“It’ll be fine,” you insisted, your voice climbing. “People do it all the time. I have a job. I have an apartment. Admittedly the second bedroom currently contains three boxes of cookbooks and a chair covered in clothes, but babies are small. It won’t need much space initially.”

“Stop.”

“And I wouldn’t expect anything from you. I’m not trying to trap you or force you to move or make you give up Yosemite. You could just—”

“Stop.”

This time Shane stood, the word cracked through the room loudly enough to close your mouth. He unfolded from the bed in one sharp movement, the mattress lifting behind him; For the first time since you told him, his expression was no longer careful.

He was angry.

Shane’s anger was rarely wild. It lived in the rigid line of his shoulders. The muscle shifting in his jaw. The way his hands opened and closed once at his sides as though he had to choose deliberately not to reach for something or move before he knew where he was going, “You don’t get to decide this for me.”

“You said you don’t know.”

“I said I don’t know how I feel yet.”

“That sounds remarkably similar.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“It does from where I’m standing.”

“Then listen to what I’m actually saying instead of translating it into whatever hurts you most.”

That landed.

Your face heated, “I’m not translating anything. You asked whether I want to keep it and then told me you don’t know if you do. Forgive me for not hearing wedding bells.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“I know.”

“Then stop making jokes.”

The command struck directly at your defences. You folded your arms, “Sorry. Should I start screaming? Would that be more productive?”

“Talking to me would be productive.”

“I am talking.”

“You’re planning a life where I don’t exist.”

“Because you told me you don’t know if you want to exist in it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say the opposite.”

“I found out twenty minutes ago!” His voice rose not by much, but enough to make the cabin shrink around you. Shane dragged a hand over the back of his neck and turned toward the window, “I walked in here thinking you had food poisoning,” he said. “Then you told me you’re pregnant. You told me you went to a doctor without me, that you’ve known for weeks and that you want to keep it. Before I can understand any of that, you’ve decided you’re raising my kid alone.”

My kid.

The words caught inside you. They sounded unfairly good coming from him. You looked down before he could see, “I panicked.”

“I can see that.”

“You don’t have to say it like I’m irrational.”

“You are being irrational.”

“Oh, excellent. Exactly what every pregnant woman wants to hear. Strong survival instincts there, Officer.”

He turned back, “Don’t call me that right now.”

“Why? It’s what you are.”

“You know what you’re doing.”

“And what’s that?”

“Pushing until I get angry. Then you can tell yourself you were right to be afraid of me.”

The breath left your lungs. For once, you had no immediate reply. That was rare enough to qualify as a medical emergency if you were being honest.

Shane saw the words land. Regret flickered in his expression, but he didn’t take them back.

So you reached for something sharp, “You walked away before.”

His brow tightened. “When?”

“The kitchen. After we kissed.”

“That was a year and a half ago.”

“And?”

“And I came back.”

“Eventually.”

“I was scared.”

“So am I.”

“I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do.” You unfolded your arms. “You get to say you need time because this is new for you, but it’s new for me too. Knowing for a few weeks doesn’t mean I processed it. It means I’ve spent weeks vomiting, lying to everyone and imagining seventeen versions of you leaving.”

“I’m standing here.”

“For now.”

His face became completely still. You knew immediately that the words were wrong.

Not because they weren’t born from something real but because they had been designed to hurt.

Shane stared at you for a long moment then he nodded once, “All right.”

The quietness frightened you more than shouting, “That’s not what I meant.”

“Sounded clear.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No.” He shook his head. “That’s the problem. I don’t. You tell me I’m allowed to feel whatever I feel, but the second I don’t give you the answer you want, you start preparing for me to abandon you.”

“I’m preparing to take care of myself.”

“You’re cutting me out before I get the chance to step in.”

“I’m trying not to ask you for something you don’t want to give.”

“You don’t know what I want.”

“Neither do you!”

“That doesn’t mean you decide for me,” His voice struck the walls.

Outside, something moved through the brush. A twig snapped. The heater clicked on with offensively ordinary timing.

You were breathing too quickly now, “You want honesty?” you demanded. “Fine. I don’t know how this works. I don’t know where we live. I don’t know which one of us gives up everything. I don’t know if you’ll resent me every time you’re stuck in traffic or if I’ll resent you every time I’m out here listening to a raccoon break into the walls.”

“Raccoons don’t break into walls.”

“Not the point.”

“You keep saying one of us has to give up everything.”

“Because one of us probably does.”

“No. We find another way.”

“What way?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Exactly.”

You threw your hands out. The movement made your head swim, “There’s a baby coming, and apparently it has no respect for our existing logistical issues.”

“If you’re eight weeks, we have time.”

“Oh, good. Seven months to solve housing, employment, childcare, the structural integrity of our relationship and whether our child will grow up believing a three-hour drive is a normal custody exchange.”

“Stop talking about custody.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re still together.”

“Are we?” The question escaped before you could stop it.

Shane looked as though you had struck him.

The anger disappeared for one bare second, leaving something worse behind.

You felt sick, “Shane—”

“Are you asking me that?”

“I’m asking what happens if we can’t agree.”

“We haven’t even tried.”

“You hate the city.”

“You hate it here.”

“Exactly.”

“So we talk about somewhere else.”

“And what do you do somewhere else? What do I do? Take over a diner in some halfway town while you commute back here and miss half the baby’s life because elk don’t respect paternity leave?”

“That isn’t fair.”

“No. None of this is fair.”

“To you?”

“To either of us.”

“You’re not acting like it.”

Your eyes narrowed, “What does that mean?”

“You keep talking like you’re the only person whose life is changing.”

The words found every tender place at once, “My body is changing.” Your boobs hurt, everything made you nauseous, you cant eat, you were tired, you kept getting headaches; you were so hungry all the time but nothing wanted to stay down.

His anger faltered.

You continued before he could answer, “I’m the one who’s sick. I sat alone in that doctor’s office while she told me how far along I was. I’m the one who has to decide if I can physically and emotionally do this.” Your voice trembled, which only made you angrier. “So forgive me if it’s felt like it’s happening mostly to me.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I know I’m not carrying it.”

“You’re not carrying any of it right now,” The second the sentence left you, you wanted to swallow it whole.

Shane’s face shut down.

The barrier rebuilt itself in real time.

Jaw set.

Shoulders lowered.

Everything open in him disappearing behind control, “That’s what you think?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You think because I don’t know how I feel after twenty minutes, I’m not carrying any of this?”

“I’m scared.”

“So am I.”

“Then say something other than that you don’t know.”

“What do you want?” he demanded. “You want me to say I’m thrilled? That this is perfect? That I’ve secretly been waiting for you to get pregnant so we can put a crib in the corner and pretend none of our problems exist?”

You flinched.

His expression tightened, but he was too angry to stop, “I can’t lie to make you feel better.”

“I’m not asking you to lie.”

“You’re punishing me for telling the truth.”

“I’m trying to understand if you want a future with me.”

“I have a future with you.”

“A fortnightly future.”

“That isn’t what this is.”

“Isn’t it?” Your laugh was brittle. “You visit me. I visit you. We keep toiletries in two bathrooms and argue about petrol money without technically arguing about petrol money. That isn’t a home, Shane. It’s a schedule.”

He stared at you.

You could see the hurt.

You hated yourself for saying it and you hated him for making it feel true.

“We were working on it.”

“We were avoiding it.”

“I asked you to move closer.”

“To you.”

“Yes.”

“You never offered to move closer to me.”

“I can’t do my job in downtown San Francisco.”

“And I can’t run the kind of kitchen I want from a town with one grocery store and a seasonal pancake house.” No matter how good that pancake house was.

“I never asked you to give up your career.”

“You assumed mine was more portable.”

“I didn’t assume anything.”

“You did. Every time you talked about moving closer, you meant closer to Yosemite.”

“Because you said you liked it here.”

“I said I liked mornings with you.” You gestured toward the window, where several thousand trees stood around contributing nothing useful. “That isn’t the same as wanting to be held hostage by forestry.”

Normally that would have earned something.

A twitch at the corner of his mouth.

A tired shake of his head.

Maybe a muttered, Trees don’t take hostages.

Then you would have reminded him trees blocked phone reception, dropped branches without warning and housed bears, making them accomplices at minimum.

Tonight he didn’t smile, he looked at the floorboards and pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek.

Then he nodded to himself, “I can’t do this right now.”

Your chest tightened, “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m angry.”

“So am I.”

“I know.”

“And if I stay, I’m going to say something I can’t take back.”

The warning should have stopped you. A mentally healthy person might have heard it and thought, Space. Sensible. Let’s cool down before we use our deepest insecurities as blunt-force weapons. You had never been accused of becoming mentally healthy under pressure.

As he moved toward the door, panic shot through you.

He was leaving. He had told you he didn’t know if he wanted the baby, and now he was leaving before you could force the uncertainty into something definite.

Your brain did not interpret this as a man stepping outside to control his temper, your brain interpreted it as the opening scene of a devastating breakup montage, “Say it.”

Shane stopped with his hand near the door, his back tightened beneath his shirt.

“Say what you want to say,” you demanded.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Push me.”

“I’m asking you to be honest.”

“I am being honest.”

“No. You’re walking out.”

“Because I’m trying not to hurt you.”

“Bit late.”

He turned enough for you to see his profile, “That’s why I need to leave.”

You should have let him but if he walked outside, he could decide he didn’t want this.

If he got into his truck, he could disappear. If you gave him space to think, he might realize you were difficult, demanding and inconveniently pregnant, which felt like a fairly damning combination.

“Say it,” you repeated. “Whatever it is.”

Shane turned around.

The restraint wasn’t completely gone—this was still Shane—but it had worn thin enough for you to see what lived underneath it. Anger sharpened his eyes. His jaw was locked hard enough to make the muscle jump beside his ear. One hand remained curled around the doorframe, like he needed something solid beneath his fingers before he said whatever had been building behind his teeth.

“You can move here.”

The bluntness made you blink. “What?”

“You can move here,” he repeated. “You could get your job back at Ridgeview tomorrow. You know Justine would take you.”

You stared at him.

“Brian would hand you his shifts. Gabe would throw some obnoxious party that somehow involved glitter and a fire-code violation. Mark would help you move.”

“Mark lives in San Francisco.”

“Then he’d drive.”

“He’d complain the whole way.”

“He complains when he’s happy.”

Annoyingly true.

Completely irrelevant.

“You have people here,” Shane continued. “You know the lodge. You know the kitchen. You know the area. You wouldn’t be moving somewhere you’ve never been.”

“You think knowing where the staff toilets are qualifies me to relocate my entire life?”

“We could make it work.”

“I don’t think we could.”

His expression tightened. “You keep acting like the only options are me moving to San Francisco or you raising the baby alone.”

“Those are the options that currently exist.”

“They aren’t.”

“Then what’s your brilliant third option?”

“You move here with me. Like I’ve been saying.”

The words landed with all the grace of a brick through glass.

“Right.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That tone where you act like I’ve suggested you live in a cave and survive on berries.”

“I’ve seen your original housing arrangement. A cave would’ve had better insulation.”

Nothing.

Not even the smallest twitch.

Your jokes had officially lost all market value.

“I can’t transfer my job to the city,” he said. “You can do yours here.”

“My career isn’t a library card.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you think you mean. Kitchens are interchangeable. I can walk into any building with an oven, insult the stock levels and rebuild my career around whatever postcode happens to suit you.”

“You did it here.”

“Temporarily.”

“You rebuilt Ridgeview.”

“And then I left.”

“Because you chose to.”

That struck harder than it should have.

“You chose the city,” he said. “You chose to go back.”

“I had a life there.”

“You had one here.”

“For six months.”

Admittedly, they had been six of the best and worst months of your life. Six months of mud, bears, broken equipment, terrible phone reception, Shane calling you Princess like he wanted to start a fight and then looking at you like he wanted to finish it in bed.

Still.

Six months.

“And after,” he said.

“Visiting every second weekend isn’t living here.”

“No. But you could.”

There it was again.

You could.

So simple in his mouth.

As though your life were a coat you could lift from one hook and hang on another. As though the shape of you wouldn’t change depending on where you were forced to fit.

“You think I’m refusing because I enjoy making everything difficult?”

“I think you refuse to seriously consider it.”

“I have considered it.”

“When?”

“Every time I’ve driven home.”

“That isn’t considering moving. That’s being sad the weekend ended.”

“Thank you for clarifying my own thoughts for me.”

“You asked for honesty.”

“I didn’t ask you to be a patronising dickhead," You snapped.

“You asked what I was thinking,” he said.

“And immediately the solution is me giving up my home.”

“The city isn’t your only home anymore.”

You stopped.

Something changed in his face. The anger remained, but something raw shifted beneath it.

“You’re my home too,” he said, quieter now. “And Yosemite is part of your life whether you want to admit it or not.”

Your throat tightened.

That was unfair.

He wasn’t allowed to say things like that while you were trying to remain furious. There should have been rules. Laminated rules. Posted somewhere visible between the fire evacuation map and the instructions for what to do if a bear entered the property.

“That doesn’t mean I have to move here.”

“No.”

“Good.”

“But stop acting like I’m asking you to live somewhere you hate.”

“I do hate it sometimes.”

“I know.”

“The silence makes me insane.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to live three hours from my parents.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want the highlight of my week to be whether the general store received decent avocados.”

“They had avocados yesterday.”

“They were rocks.”

“They ripen.”

“Not before the baby graduates.”

His nostrils flared.

For one brief, stupid second, you thought you might have cracked the anger.

You hadn’t.

Shane’s walls were still standing, higher now than before.

“You have an answer for everything.”

“Occupational hazard.”

“No. Defence mechanism.”

You flinched. “Don’t psychoanalyse me.”

“Stop turning everything into a joke.”

“Maybe jokes are the reason I’m not screaming.”

“Maybe I’d rather you scream.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“At least it would be honest.”

“You think I’m not being honest?”

“I think you decide what I mean before I finish speaking.”

“And I think you’ve waited for an excuse to tell me I should’ve stayed.”

“I wanted you to stay.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“No,” he said sharply. “Because wanting you to stay meant respecting that you chose not to.”

“And now?”

“Now there’s more to think about.”

Your hand moved unconsciously towards your stomach.

Shane saw it.

His gaze dropped, and for one second his anger tangled with something else—fear, wonder, disbelief. The stunned expression of a man trying to comprehend that something of his existed inside you.

Then the walls came back down over it.

“You have a choice,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“I can’t move my job to San Francisco.”

“You can find another job.”

His expression went still. “Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Wildlife management exists outside Yosemite.”

“Not what I do.”

“You aren’t the only wildlife officer in California.”

“I know.”

“Then why are we pretending you’re legally bound to one mountain?”

“Because this is my career.”

“So is mine.”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

“You said mine could move.”

“Because it can.”

A sharp, disbelieving laugh left you. “You genuinely don’t hear yourself.”

“What am I supposed to hear?”

“That your work is specific and important and tied to this place. Mine is just cooking. Something I can pack into a box with my knives and transport wherever your life happens to be.”

“I didn’t say ‘just cooking.’”

“You didn’t have to.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“No, Shane. It isn’t.”

Your next breath shook too much to settle anything.

“I spent years building a name in the city. I have suppliers who answer my calls. Staff who trust me. People book tables because my name is on the menu. For once, I’m not fixing someone else’s disaster. That kitchen is mine.”

“You could have that here.”

“No. I’d have Ridgeview.”

“You loved Ridgeview.”

“I loved what I did there. That doesn’t mean I want to do it forever.”

“You could build something else.”

“So could you.”

Silence.

Shane looked at you.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

You nodded slowly. “Right.”

“You don’t want to leave either.”

“Apparently mine matters less because I know how to operate an oven.”

“That isn’t what I’m saying.”

“It’s exactly what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying there’s a path for you here.”

“And there’s one for you in the city.”

“What? Leave everything I’ve spent my adult life working towards and do what?”

“I don’t know. Consult. Teach. Work for parks closer to the city.” You threw one hand into the air. “Become an influencer. Film videos where you glare at tourists who try to pet wildlife.”

His face remained thunderous.

The influencer suggestion had not helped.

The adult part of your brain told you to stop. Go to bed. Sleep. Talk about this in the morning like two people who loved each other and possessed functional frontal lobes.

Unfortunately, you had never been particularly good at listening to authority figures, even when the authority figure was the one sensible neuron left in your skull.

“You have no idea what I do,” Shane said.

“I know exactly what you do.”

“You know the parts you make fun of.”

“That isn’t true.”

It was a little true.

“You think I fix fences and lecture tourists about food storage.”

“You also criticise my kitchen.”

His hands dragged through his hair. “I know what your work means to you. I’ve never acted like it doesn’t matter.”

“You are now.”

“I’m asking why your career automatically wins.”

“It doesn’t.”

“It does every time you say I should be the one to move.”

“And yours wins every time you say I should.”

“Because you already have a place here.”

“And you already have a place with me.”

The words tore out of you.

Both of you went quiet.

Your apartment rose between you in fragments.

His heavy green mug in the cupboard beside yours, bought after he declared your matching cups decorative thimbles. His boots lined up beside the door, positioned so neatly that apparently even footwear needed tactical discipline.

The drawer you had cleared for him four months into the relationship had somehow become two. One held rolled shirts, socks and three pairs of underwear he seemed determined to own until death. The other contained pants and clothes he tells you not to wear but doesn't stop you wearing when you do.

His jacket lived behind your bedroom door.

His toothbrush stood beside yours, dark blue. His razor occupied the bathroom cabinet. His preferred coffee appeared automatically on your shopping list. A charger sat behind the sofa because he kept forgetting his, though you privately suspected he had begun leaving things deliberately.

Small pieces of Shane had accumulated throughout your city life until the apartment carried his shape even when he wasn’t there.

Not enough to call it moving in.

Too much to call it visiting.

Like he had been testing whether he could belong there one object at a time without ever having to admit that was what he was doing.

“That isn’t the same,” he said.

Your chest cracked another inch, “Why?”

His gaze shifted away.

“Why isn’t it the same?”

The heater hummed beneath the window. Outside, the wind moved through the pines, branches whispering together as though the entire forest had decided to listen.

“Because I don’t feel like myself there.”

The admission came low and rough.

You stared at him. “And you think I always feel like myself here?”

“No.”

“Then why does your discomfort matter more?”

“I didn’t say it did.”

“You keep not saying things while somehow making them perfectly clear.”

“And you keep hearing whatever proves I don’t love you enough.”

That stopped you.

Shane looked almost startled by his own words.

For half a second, the anger loosened enough to reveal the hurt beneath it.

Then the walls went back up.

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“You’ve been waiting for me to fail this conversation since you told me.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to say whether you want our baby.”

“I said I don’t know yet.”

“And now I’m supposed to move here because it’s easier for you.”

“I’m telling you there are options.”

“One option. Yours.”

“One you won’t consider because you prefer your comfortable life in the city.”

For one second, you could only stare at him.

Something inside you went cold with impressive efficiency.

“My comfortable life.”

“I meant familiar.”

“That isn’t what you said.”

“You know what I meant.”

“No.” Your voice dropped low enough that most sensible people would have begun locating emergency exits. “Explain it. Explain my comfortable life.”

His lips pressed together.

That should have warned you.

It did not.

“Is it the twelve-hour shifts? The burns? Supplier calls at six because a grown man can’t understand that twelve kilos of salmon doesn’t mean twelve individual fish?”

“That isn’t—”

“Staff shortages? Working weekends while customers send back fish because it looks too much like fish?”

“I never said your job was easy.”

“Maybe it’s the rent. Very soothing, watching half my income vanish so I can live in a box while Trevor plays electronic music above my bedroom.”

“You’ve never mentioned Trevor.”

“Because I refuse to give him more relevance.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I know the bass drop to four songs against my will.”

“This isn’t about Trevor.”

“No. It’s about you calling my life comfortable because I won’t volunteer to move into the woods and become Mrs Ranger Danger.”

His nostrils flared again.

It sharpened his face. Made the line of his jaw harder, the tendons in his neck visible beneath the open collar of his shirt.

You should not have found it attractive.

You were furious. He was furious. You were pregnant and possibly standing at the beginning of a catastrophic relationship collapse.

Still, some treacherous hormonal corner of your body noticed the width of his shoulders and the way his shirt tightened across his chest when he folded his arms. Apparently your reproductive system had chosen violence in several different forms.

“I didn’t mean your life was easy,” he said. “I meant you know how to live there.”

“And you know how to live here.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly.”

“But you also know how to be here.”

A humourless laugh escaped you. “I know how to visit.”

Shane huffed a breath and planted both hands on his hips. He looked down at the floorboards, shoulders rising once.

Then he lifted his head.

“From day one, I sacrificed for you.”

The words caught you off guard.

Not because he hadn’t.

Because he had never kept score aloud.

Shane did things and acted like they cost him nothing.

He drove three hours after long shifts, arriving close to midnight with stiff shoulders and tired eyes, then insisted he was fine. He slept badly in your apartment but still reached for you whenever you moved.

He attended restaurant openings where chefs in immaculate whites looked at him as if he had tracked mud across their family crest. He stood through conversations about fermentation and the moral collapse of truffle oil wearing the expression of a man trapped in a very polite hostage situation.

He wore collared shirts because you liked him in them, even though he tugged at the neck all evening like the fabric was trying to kill him. He remembered your staff’s names. Carried boxes. Fixed hinges. Sharpened every knife in your apartment because he found your home set depressing.

He had never told you any of it was hard.

Until now.

“I made sure you were safe and comfortable even when you made it nearly fucking impossible.”

Your eyebrows rose. “Nearly?”

His face didn’t move.

Right.

Not the time.

“I never asked you to move here in the beginning. I knew what your career meant. I knew what your life there meant.”

“You asked me to stay.”

“I wanted you to stay. That’s different.”

“Convenient.”

“It is different. I watched you pack. I loaded your car. Then I followed you back to San Francisco and spent a year and a half trying to make this work because I loved you more than I loved being comfortable.”

The sentence stole some of your breath.

He didn’t let you answer.

“Your apartment?” Shane said. “I don’t sleep there.”

“You sleep there all the time.”

“I lie there.”

“That’s generally the opening stage.”

“I lie there listening to the refrigerator, Trevor playing the same six seconds of music, people shouting in the street and trucks unloading at four in the morning.”

“That’s the city’s natural soundscape.”

“I can’t breathe there.”

The words were quiet.

Too quiet.

Your anger faltered.

“There’s no space,” he continued. “Not only in the apartment. Anywhere. I walk outside and somebody’s touching me. Cars on every side. I can’t track where half the noise comes from. I don’t know who’s behind me.” His jaw shifted. “I don’t sleep.”

You stared at him.

You knew he hated the city.

You knew about his complaints over traffic, parking and people who walked four abreast on the pavement. You knew he always chose the restaurant seat facing the entrance. That he took the side of the bed nearest the door, no matter which home you slept in.

You knew sudden shouting from the street made his body tense before his face reacted. That footsteps outside the apartment woke him. That an engine backfiring had once sent him upright, one hand reaching beneath the pillow for a weapon that wasn’t there.

You had watched him scan crowded rooms.

You had felt his shoulders tighten on packed trains, his body shifting until you stood safely in front of him and no one could approach either of you from behind. After loud dinners, he often insisted on walking several blocks before returning home. Sometimes you woke at two in the morning and found him beside the open window, breathing slowly while San Francisco roared below.

You had called it restlessness.

Shane being Shane.

You had never assembled the pieces because he had never asked you to.

The traffic wasn’t simply irritating.

The crowds weren’t merely inconvenient.

The noise, the closeness, the inability to identify every movement around him—it scraped against instincts built in places where failing to know what was behind you could get someone killed.

The city triggered him.

And every time he came to see you, he swallowed it because he loved you. Your anger hesitated, suddenly unsure of where to stand, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you’d feel guilty.”

“Well, this is much better.”

“That’s what I mean.” Frustration broke through again. “I do things that make you happy because that’s what you do for someone you love.”

“So do I.”

“Do you?”

The question landed harder than anything else.

You went still.

Regret flashed in his eyes, but he had gone too far to stop without finishing.

“I drive after work. Sit in traffic for hours. Circle your block until I lose the will to live.”

“I offered to pay for a garage.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“You’re very focused on parking for a man who claims this isn’t about parking.”

“We eat where you want even when the menu requires translation and the food comes on a piece of slate.”

“It happened once.”

“It was a rock.”

“Ceramic.”

“A ceramic rock.”

“And you survived.”

“I make myself fit into your life,” he said.

“And I don’t?”

“You visit.”

The word struck like a shove.

“You visit Yosemite. Stay for the weekend, complain about reception, cook enough food for twelve people and then go home.”

“I come every second weekend.”

“When nothing comes up.”

“That applies to both of us.”

“Yeah. It does.” His voice stayed steady, but his eyes were bright with everything underneath it. “But when you’re here, you act like you’re enduring this place for me.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“You count down until you have reception.”

“I run a restaurant.”

“You complain about the mattress, shower pressure, groceries and silence.”

“The grocery store sells avocados capable of blunt-force assault.”

“Every noise outside becomes a bear attack.”

“One bear went through the bins.”

“Fifty feet away.”

“That isn’t far in bear measurements.”

“It didn’t even look at you.”

“Rude, considering the effort I’d put into my hair.”

His face stayed flat. Even the bear material couldn’t rescue you apparently.

“I’ve made room for your life here,” Shane said. “I bring your things down from the tent. I rent this cabin because you hate sleeping on the ground. You use half the wardrobe and the entire bathroom.”

“You own one bottle of soap. That isn’t a fair comparison.”

“It works on everything.”

“That is deeply upsetting.”

“You have people here. Justine. Gabe. Brian. Becca. Marco. People who care about you. You could walk into Ridgeview tomorrow and have a job.”

“I don’t want that job.”

“Then build something else.”

“Like what? With what money?”

The words left before you could soften them.

Shane recoiled slightly.

You regretted it immediately. Neither of you lived in the kind of financial bracket where property appeared through positive thinking. Shane had savings, but not enough to casually purchase a family home in California. And given the shadow of Sean Sanderson, suggesting Shane find a large amount of money was not a road your imagination needed to travel.

“I’d figure it out,” he said.

“That isn’t a plan.”

“It’s more of one than deciding I’m not involved.”

“I didn’t completely decide that.”

The heater clicked off and the sudden silence widened the cabin.

“I’ll keep doing it,” Shane said.

“Doing what?”

“Driving. Staying in the city. Eating off construction materials.” His eyes held yours. “I’ll make sacrifices for the rest of my life if it keeps you happy.”

Your throat tightened. It sounded like love but also sounded like a prison sentence.

“But you can’t stand there and tell me you’ve put the same effort into this relationship.”

There it was.

The ledger.

Every long drive, sleepless night and uncomfortable evening stacked neatly on his side. Your failures apparently scattered on yours like unpaid bills.

“You’ve been keeping score.”

“No.”

“You just gave me an itemised receipt.”

“I’m trying to make you understand.”

“You’re telling me I haven’t loved you well enough.”

“I said you haven’t made the same effort.”

“Because I haven’t?” His silence answered before he did.

“No.”

Heat rushed up your throat and into your face. There it was. Not just an argument anymore, but a verdict. Shane had been measuring the relationship in miles driven, nights slept badly and shirts with buttons, and somewhere along the way you had come up short.

“Right.”

“Don’t.”

“What?” You folded your arms tighter. “You want me to agree?”

“I want you to admit it would be easier for you to move here.”

“Easier for who?”

“For us.”

“For you.”

“For the baby.”

The room changed around the word.

Not it. Not the pregnancy.

The baby. Your hand twitched towards your stomach before you stopped it. Eight weeks and already it had weight. Not physical weight, exactly. Something heavier. A future pressing down on every choice you had spent years believing belonged only to you.

“And what?” You scoffed because tenderness felt dangerous. “We put a cot in your tent?”

“I’d buy us a place.”

You laughed once. “How?”

“I’d figure it out.”

There was that sentence again.

Once, you had loved those words. You had lived by them. I’ll figure it out meant freedom when the only person who could be disappointed was you. But Shane made lists for day hikes. Checked weather reports three times. Carried spare batteries for equipment that already had full batteries. Hearing him say it now sounded less like a plan and more like a plea.

Trust me.

Let me try.

“With what? Good intentions and ranger points?”

“I’d talk to a bank. Pick up extra work. Sell the truck if I had to.”

“You’d sell your truck?”

“If I had to,” He told you firmly. You lifted one thumb, “Excellent planning, Captain OSHA.”

Shane closed his eyes. For one long second, he stood completely still. Then he nodded slowly, as though you had just confirmed something he had been trying very hard not to believe, “Here we go.”

“What?”

“Every time I try to talk to you, you make it a joke.” Lies. But also the truth. He needed to stop saying it like it was shameful, “Because your plan is ‘buy house somehow.’”

“At least I’m trying to make one.”

“And I’m trying to find out whether you even want the child who’s supposed to live in this imaginary house.”

His eyes opened, you could see the anger was still there, but something beneath it had gone cold, “I can’t do this tonight.”

Your stomach dropped, “Of course.”

He turned towards the door.

“Shane.”

“I’m sleeping up the mountain,” He said it like he was announcing incoming weather. Practical. Final. A decision already made.

“Because that’s healthy.”

“Because I need space.”

“You have an entire national park. How much more space could you possibly need?”

His hand closed around the handle.

“Naturally,” you muttered.

He stopped, “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Notice the pattern?”

He looked over his shoulder. “What pattern?”

“Things get difficult and you disappear into the mountain.”

“I’m trying not to say something worse.”

“You’ve already told me I don’t put enough effort into loving you. I’m fascinated to hear the encore.”

Regret flickered across his face, then it was gone, “And you told me you don’t trust me to stay.”

“I’m standing here watching you leave.”

“For one night.”

“Still leaving.”

He turned fully then; for a moment, neither of you spoke.

You wanted him to argue. You wanted him to cross the room, tell you that you were impossible and take your face in his hands. You wanted him to promise he would come back. That none of this was bigger than the two of you. That love could solve distance and work and trauma and a baby neither of you had expected. You wanted something dramatic and romantic and completely unrealistic from a man who had survived his entire life by knowing when to retreat.

Instead, Shane opened the door.

Cold mountain air swept into the cabin, carrying pine, damp soil and darkness. The smell usually meant him. Safety. Home, in whatever strange divided form the two of you had managed to build it.

Tonight it only made your chest ache.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

You wrapped your arms around yourself, holding everything in place, “Don’t strain yourself.”

His jaw shifted and for one terrible second, you thought he might say something. Something angry enough to break what was left between you.

Then he stepped outside.

The door closed behind him with a careful click.

Not a slam; Shane never slammed doors. Even furious, even hurt, he made sure the latch caught properly.

You listened to his footsteps cross the porch, move over the gravel and fade towards the trees.

The cabin felt too large without him.

Then too small.

His jacket was still draped over the chair. Two mugs sat beside the sink. One of his shirts hung over the end of the bed where you had dropped it that morning. Your hand settled over your stomach. A raspberry. A bean. A tiny collection of cells with impeccable timing and absolutely no respect for existing relationship problems.

You stared at the closed door as the latch’s soft click echoed in your head.

Chapter 6: Paperwork as a Weapon. “Throw it down (The caution blocks you from the wind), Hold it up (To the rays) You wait and see when the smoke clears…” You Learn-Alanis Moresette.

Andrew Cody had held a lot of weapons in his life.

Guns, mostly.

Pistols small enough to disappear beneath a shirt. Revolvers that sat heavy in his palm and kicked up through his wrist when he fired them. Shotguns that bruised his shoulder even when he held them correctly. Rifles with cold metal pressed against his cheek while he watched a target through the sights and waited for someone else to give the signal.

He knew how every one of them felt.

He knew the difference between a gun that had been cleaned recently and one that hadn’t. He knew the smell of oil, metal and powder. He knew how ammunition clicked into place and how the weight changed when the magazine was full. He knew how a weapon could make a frightened man brave and a stupid man dangerous.

Knives were different.

Quieter.

More personal.

You had to get close enough to smell someone’s breath when you used a knife. Close enough to feel their body move. Close enough that there was no pretending you hadn’t meant it.

He’d held hunting knives, kitchen knives, switchblades and box cutters. Anything with an edge could become something else when it was put in the right hand—or the wrong one.

Pope had used things that had never been designed to hurt anyone.

A sledgehammer, a crowbar, a tyre iron. A length of electrical cable wrapped around his fist because it was what he had within reach. Chains. Rope. Broken glass. Heavy flashlights. Pieces of wood torn from whatever was close enough to grab. A brick once, rough against his palm, the corners biting into his skin as he lifted it.

He’d used doors as weapons, slamming them into bodies. Walls, too, if someone stood close enough to one. Floors. Countertops. Car bonnets. His own weight.

His hands.

His hands were the weapon he trusted most. They couldn’t be knocked away and forgotten in the grass. They didn’t jam. They didn’t need loading. They were always there at the ends of his arms, scarred across the knuckles and strong enough to turn fear into something physical.

Weapons made sense to Pope.

You held them.

You aimed them.

You used them.

Afterward, there was blood or damage or silence. Something you could see. Something you could understand. He had never realised how easily a few sheets of white paper could become a weapon.

Not until that Saturday afternoon.

Henry was sitting on the rug in the middle of your living room when Pope walked in, his legs folded underneath him and an alphabet puzzle spread across the floor. The wooden pieces were painted in bright colours, some of them chipped along the edges from being dropped or chewed or forced into the wrong places.

Henry held the letter R in one hand, turning it over and over while he stared at the empty spaces in the board.

“R,” he murmured through the lego tyre between his teeth.

“R,” you answered automatically from somewhere near the kitchen counter.

Your voice sounded wrong.

Not obviously wrong. You weren’t crying. You weren’t shouting. You weren’t doing anything that would’ve made most people stop and look.

But Pope knew you now. Not entirely, not in the way he wanted to.

Enough.

He knew the normal rhythm of your voice when you were tired. Knew the brighter, forced version you used around strangers and the quiet version you used when Henry was close to being overwhelmed. He knew your dry little laugh when you realised you’d said too much. He knew how you said his name when you were surprised to see him and how you stretched out okay when you were trying to convince yourself something really was.

This voice was too flat.

Too carefully held.

Pope shut the door behind him and checked the lock without thinking, turning it until he heard the deadbolt settle. The extra latch was already in place above it. You had added another one after your husband showed up.

You were standing at the kitchen counter with your back half-turned to him. One hand was pressed against the edge hard enough that the tendons stood out beneath your skin. The other held a piece of paper you weren’t reading anymore.

There were more pages spread across the counter.

White paper, black ink. A yellow legal envelope lying open beside it; You tried to hide the tears before you faced him.

He saw you lift your fingers to the corner of one eye. Saw the quick swipe, the irritated blink. Like you were angry at your own face for showing what you were feeling. But your nose was red. Your cheeks were flushed unevenly. Your breathing had that faint catch in it, barely there, the way it did when you’d been trying not to cry for too long.

Pope stopped near the edge of the living room.

He wanted to ask what was wrong, the question rose immediately, blunt and hard in his throat.

He wanted to ask who had done it; more than that, he wanted to ask how to fix it but you were moving too much. From the counter to the sink. From the sink to the fridge. Opening the fridge without taking anything out, then shutting it again. Picking up a dishcloth and folding it, unfolding it, folding it again.

You couldn’t stay still for more than five seconds.

Pope waited.

He’d learned that about you, too. If he pushed while you were moving, you’d make a joke. You’d offer him coffee. You’d ask about Craig or the weather or whether the gate was still holding properly.

You’d do anything except tell the truth before you were ready.

So Pope stood silently while Henry worked the R into the wrong space, pulled it back out and tried again.

Finally, you placed both palms flat against the counter and stayed there.

Pope looked at the paperwork, “What happened?”

You flinched as if you’d forgotten he was in the room, then you looked at him and attempted a smile, “It’s fine.”

It wasn’t even a convincing lie.

Pope’s gaze dropped to the pages again. You saw it and shifted slightly, not enough to block them. He wondered whether you were too exhausted to stop him or whether this was something else.

Trust, maybe.

The thought landed uncomfortably inside his chest; You trusted him enough not to hide the weapon.

“It doesn’t—” Your voice caught. You cleared your throat, pressing your lips together until the break disappeared. “It doesn’t matter.”

Pope walked toward the counter and you didn’t move to stop him.

That mattered. Months ago, you would’ve gathered the pages up. You would’ve laughed too loudly and shoved them into a drawer. You would’ve created distance between him and anything that might make you vulnerable.

Now you let him come close.

Not touching close.

Close enough to read.

The heading was formal. A petition. Temporary custody. Proposed arrangements. Statements written in the kind of bloodless language people used when they wanted cruelty to look reasonable.

Pope read slowly.

He wasn’t stupid, regardless of what people thought when they heard the pauses in his speech or watched him struggle to fit a thought into words. He understood paperwork. He understood contracts, police reports, court records and the way an official sentence could hide a threat behind neutral language. Your husband wanted primary custody.

Not twenty percent.

Not weekends.

Not even the twenty-eighty agreement you had mentioned over breakfast.

Almost everything.

The pages described you as unstable. Financially insecure. Unable to provide consistent care without support. They mentioned your reduced work hours. The late bills. The move to Oceanside. Every difficult thing you had ever survived had been rearranged into evidence that Henry should be taken from you.

Pope felt his jaw lock.

Henry placed the R into its correct slot, “R,” he said again, pleased.

“Good words, buddy,” you replied, your voice cracking around the edges.

The contrast made something vicious move through Pope.

Henry was sitting five feet away, safe and calm because of you because you knew the jam had to go over butter. Because you understood that Oh no, little baby, what happened? meant he’d hurt himself. Because you kept tyres in your pockets for him to chew and installed locks high enough that he couldn’t reach them. Because you worked less so that he had someone who understood him when the rest of the world became too loud.

The man who had lasted one night alone with his own son was telling a court that you were incapable.

Pope could picture him still. Maroon Henley. Dark hair. Boot wedged in your door.

Pope’s fingers curled against the counter.

He could make this stop.

The thought came with the same cold clarity as a plan.

He could find out where the man lived. It wouldn’t take long. Follow him for a few days. Learn when he left for work, where he parked, whether he lived alone. Pope could put him in a room and make him understand that Henry wasn’t a bargaining chip and you weren’t property he could keep through signatures and court dates.

He could put divorce papers in front of the man and hold his hand steady until every page was signed.

Simple.

Clean.

Effective.

The anger wasn’t wild, that was what made it dangerous. It settled into Pope’s muscles with purpose, drawing his shoulders tight and slowing his breathing.

Then you looked at him.

Your eyes were still wet, and there was something open in them that stopped the plan before it could fully form.

You trusted him.

Not with everything. Not yet; But with this.

You had let him read the papers. Let him see your face when you couldn’t hold it together. Let him stand in your home while Henry played on the rug and you had nothing polished left to give. The feelings Pope had for you had been growing so quietly he hadn’t known when it became something he couldn’t ignore.

With you, Pope didn’t imagine becoming clean.

He imagined becoming honest, that was worse.

That was more dangerous.

Because when he looked at you now—red nose, flushed cheeks, hands shaking over custody papers—he didn’t want you to save him. He didn’t want you to make him normal.

He wanted to stay.

He wanted to be someone you could fall apart in front of without regretting it afterward. He wanted to take the papers out of your hands and carry some of the weight, even though he didn’t know how.

And the fact that he wanted anything that badly terrified him.

You wiped beneath your eye again and gave him another strained smile, “What brings you over anyway?” you asked, as though the answer mattered. As though you weren’t standing beside documents designed to take your entire life apart. “Did you need something?”

Pope stared at you.

You were doing it again. Redirecting. Making yourself useful. Giving him an escape from your pain so he wouldn’t have to be uncomfortable.

He looked back down at the petition, “It matters,” he said.

Your smile faltered.

Pope tapped one finger against the page. Not hard, but enough that the paper shifted, “This.”

You swallowed. “Andrew—”

“He wants Henry.”

The words came out low and flat.

You folded your arms tightly across your chest, a barrier built too late; “He wants to punish me,” you corrected quietly. “Henry’s just how he’s doing it.”

Pope already knew that.

Hearing you say it still made his anger sharpen. He thought again about asking where the man lived. The question sat ready behind his teeth.

Instead, Pope forced his hands open, “You got a good lawyer?”

You gave a tired laugh that contained no humour, “I have a lawyer.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Your eyes met his.

For one second, Pope thought you might snap at him. A spark of irritation moved across your face, and he welcomed it. Anger looked better on you than shame. Anger meant there was still fight left.

Then the fight sagged beneath exhaustion.

“But, you know, family court is slow,” you said. “And expensive. And apparently everyone involved gets paid by the hour, so there’s no real incentive for anyone to stop sending twelve-page letters saying the exact same thing in increasingly creative legal language.”

You gestured toward the pages.

Pope glanced at the envelope. The name of the law firm sat printed in the corner.

He memorised it without trying.

“And he has money,” you continued. “Not unlimited money, but enough. Enough to keep going longer than I can.”

Your voice went quieter on the final sentence.

There it was.

The weapon beneath the paperwork.

Not that your husband had a stronger case, that he could afford to exhaust you.

Pope understood endurance as violence. Not the loud kind. Not the kind that left blood on the floor or bruises blooming beneath skin. This was quieter. Cleaner. The kind of violence people could commit while wearing suits, speaking politely and sending letters on expensive stationery.

Smurf had used it against all of them.

She knew pressure didn’t have to break a person immediately. Sometimes it worked better if it didn’t. You applied it slowly. Consistently. You made every day slightly harder than the one before it. You withheld affection, money, safety—whatever someone needed most—and then waited.

Eventually resistance became more painful than surrender.

Eventually people stopped fighting because they were too tired to remember what they had been fighting for.

Smurf had built an entire family that way. She could make Craig crawl back with money, Deran with guilt, Baz with power. With Pope, it had always been love—or whatever warped, conditional imitation of it she had taught him to recognise as love. She would pull him close, call him her baby, make him feel useful, then withdraw everything the second he stepped beyond the limits she had drawn for him.

A leash didn’t need to be visible to work.

Your husband understood that too.

Different house. Different weapon. Same strategy.

“He thinks you’ll give up,” Pope said.

His voice came out low and certain. He was still staring at the papers on your counter, at the neat blocks of legal language that tried to make cruelty sound reasonable.

You looked down at Henry instead of answering immediately.

Henry had moved on to the letter S, running his thumb slowly over the painted curve. The puzzle piece was bright yellow, worn along one edge where his teeth had found it more than once before you’d redirected him to the little black lego tyre. He turned it around in his hand, studying it from every angle as if the shape might change if he looked long enough.

“S,” Henry murmured.

You watched him with an expression Pope had come to understand over the last few months.

Love first.

Fear underneath it.

Always fear underneath it.

“No,” you said at last, your eyes still on your son, “He thinks I’ll run out of money.”

There was no self-pity in your voice. That made it worse.

You said it like a fact. Like gravity. Like the inevitable conclusion to an equation you had worked through too many times to pretend the answer might change.

Pope’s gaze shifted to the pile of unopened mail near the fruit bowl.

It wasn’t even hidden anymore.

When he’d first started coming inside, you used to turn the envelopes face down or sweep them into a drawer when you caught him looking. Now they sat in plain view: electricity, water, insurance, something from your lawyer, something from a debt collector. White envelopes with red ink. Final notices. Amount overdue. Late fees added to late fees, the quiet accumulation of punishments for not having enough money in the first place.

The world liked to charge poor people extra for being poor.

Pope understood that kind of logic. The Cody jobs had started in places like that—rent due, food running low, Smurf saying there was money out there and only cowards waited for permission to take it. Eventually they had stopped pretending they stole because they needed to. But the beginning had mattered.

Need could make almost anything seem reasonable.

He looked back at you, “How much?”

Your head lifted. “What?”

“The lawyer.”

The question changed your face immediately.

Not dramatically. You didn’t recoil or tell him to mind his business. But suspicion tightened the corners of your eyes. Your shoulders drew back from the counter. Your arms folded loosely across your stomach, as if your body had decided to guard itself before your mind caught up.

Pope regretted the question as soon as he saw it because he knew what it sounded like.

Money offered with a hand already reaching for ownership.

Smurf had never paid for anything without buying part of the person along with it. Rent, cars, legal trouble, jobs—she called it taking care of family, but the bill always arrived eventually. Sometimes months later. Sometimes years. She would drag up every dollar she had ever spent and lay it at your feet like evidence that your life belonged to her.

Pope didn’t want you looking at him and seeing that.

He didn’t want you hearing How much? and thinking, What will he want from me afterward?

His eyes dropped back to the custody petition and for a moment, he thought about Lena.

He had done everything backward with Lena.

He had wanted to keep her close because closeness felt like protection. He had wanted to surround her with money, walls, people who would make sure she never understood what it was to go without. Every job, every risk, every envelope of cash could be turned into a justification if he looked at it the right way.

College. Rent. Food. A life where Lena didn’t have to stand at a kitchen counter staring at bills and deciding which one could survive being ignored for another week.

He had continued working jobs after prison because criminal work was the only kind of work the Codys had ever properly taught him. And when Lena was still close enough for him to pretend he could build her a future, he had told himself the money could become something clean once it reached her.

That was the lie men like Pope lived on.

The money was dirty. The reason didn’t have to be.

He had imagined Lena older without really knowing what older looked like. A place of her own. Tuition paid. A fridge with food inside it. A car that started every morning. No one using money to tell her where she belonged. He had wanted to give her the kind of safety cash could buy because he hadn’t known how to give her the kind it couldn’t.

In the end, the safest thing he had ever given Lena was distance from him.

He had let her go.

Now, looking at you, Pope wondered whether anyone had ever been willing to take risks for you like that.

Not own you. Not rescue you so they could remind you later, just take some of the weight off your shoulders.

Had anyone ever looked at the impossible numbers in front of you and thought, Fine. Then they’re mine too?

Your husband clearly hadn’t. He had money, or at least enough of it to keep paying someone to frighten you. Enough to make family court into a waiting game he believed he could win. Enough to turn time into another weapon.

Pope had money.

Cody money.

Cash that never looked quite right in a bank account and couldn’t be explained without questions. Money made from safes and heists and fear. Money that could pay your lawyer but might poison everything between you the second he placed it in your hands.

He could solve the cost; He didn’t know how to solve what the offer would mean.

“It doesn’t matter,” you told him. “I’ve got it sorted.”

Pope stared at you.

You absolutely did not have it sorted.

He could tell by the unopened envelopes. By the way you had started buying the cheaper coffee even though you complained it tasted like burnt dirt. By the small repair in the knee of Henry’s trousers. By the fact that you hadn’t replaced the microwave even though it only worked if you slammed the door twice.

You were winging it.

Moving money from one bill to another. Paying enough to stop one company from calling while another sent a final notice. Hoping the lawyer wouldn’t ask for another retainer before you found a way to scrape it together. Hoping for the best because hope was currently cheaper than a court application.

You turned away from him and leaned back against the sink. Your palms pressed into the edge behind you, your shoulders hunching as if you needed the counter to hold up part of your weight.

“I just…” Your eyes lowered to the floor.

Pope waited.

He had learned not to fill the gaps when you were trying to talk. If he interrupted, you used the interruption as an exit. You would smile, make some dry comment and retreat before the truth could finish leaving your mouth.

“Every time I think it’s done,” you began, “every time I think we’ve come to an agreement, he comes at me with something else.” Your fingers tightened around the edge of the sink, “First he said he’d sign if I didn’t ask for anything. So I didn’t. I didn’t ask for the house. I didn’t ask for money. I didn’t ask for half of anything because I just wanted out.”

Pope felt his jaw tighten.

You had been trying to purchase freedom by leaving everything behind.

Your husband had taken the payment and kept the cage locked anyway.

“Then it was visitation,” you continued. “Then it was the custody split. Then it was that I’d moved without consulting him, even though he knew I was moving. Then it was that Henry needs consistency and apparently that means staying near a father who has seen him three times in the last year.”

The bitterness in your voice sharpened with every sentence.

Good, Pope thought. He preferred your anger to your shame. Anger meant you still understood this wasn’t your fault.

You rubbed at your forehead, pressing two fingers between your eyebrows, “And I’m so tired.”

The anger vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.

That frightened Pope more.

“I’m tired of not being able to relax,” you said. “I’m tired of not sleeping. I’m tired of checking my phone and wondering what new thing he’s decided I’ve done wrong.”

Pope’s eyes flicked toward the front door, the additional bolt sat high above the handle. The chain was drawn across even though it was the middle of the afternoon. Your phone was face down on the table, but Pope had noticed it vibrating twice since he arrived.

You continued, quieter now, “I’m tired of thinking about what’s going to happen to Henry if he gets sent to his father.” Your voice caught, you swallowed hard and stared at your son.

Henry was still occupied with the puzzle. The S hovered over the board as he searched for its place, unaware that two adults were standing ten feet away discussing where a court might decide he belonged.

“He doesn’t know him,” you said. “Not really. He doesn’t know what the different sounds mean. He doesn’t know that Henry saying ‘oh no, little baby’ means he’s hurt himself. He doesn’t know he’ll only eat the toast if the butter is underneath the jam, or that if you cut it into triangles instead of squares he sometimes won’t touch it.”

Pope listened.

“He doesn’t know the difference between Henry being upset and Henry being overloaded. He thinks every meltdown is bad behaviour. He thinks if Henry doesn’t respond, he’s ignoring him on purpose,” Your eyes filled again, but this time you didn’t turn away quickly enough to hide it, “What happens when Henry’s screaming and he can’t make it stop?” you asked, your voice almost breaking. “What happens when he bites or hits because he can’t communicate and his father decides he needs discipline?”

Pope’s hand curled against the counter.

He knew exactly what could happen when an adult treated distress like disobedience. Smurf had built whole punishments out of that misunderstanding.

“What happens when Henry runs?” you continued. “He doesn’t check locks. He doesn’t think he should have to. He used to get angry at me for putting latches up because he said they made the house look ridiculous.”

Pope glanced again at the bolt. The locks weren’t ridiculous, they were the reason Henry was still inside the house.

You dragged in a breath that shook on the way down, “I keep thinking about him waking up somewhere that isn’t here. Looking for me. Not understanding why I’m gone.” Your mouth twisted, trying and failing to contain the grief of a thing that hadn’t happened yet, “He’ll think I left him.”

Pope’s chest tightened so quickly it felt like impact.

For one second he saw Lena—not as she had been when he last watched her from a distance, safe and settled, but younger. Confused. Waiting for adults who kept disappearing. Wondering whether she had done something wrong.

He saw Julia, too.

People always thought abandonment was about the person who left. It wasn’t. Not to a kid. A kid turned it inward. A kid built explanations out of themselves because that was easier than accepting the adults around them had failed.

Pope couldn’t let Henry believe you had left him.

The thought arrived without qualification.

Not he didn’t want it.

He couldn’t let it happen.

He could plan robberies.

He could study a building until he knew where every camera pointed, how long a guard took to walk his route, what street would be clear at a certain time. He could account for vehicles, weapons, witnesses and mistakes. He could create contingencies for contingencies until the thing in front of him felt small enough to control.

He could plan violence down to the second; But he couldn’t work out how to help you without making you feel like you owed him.

Money would solve part of it.

Money would also look like a chain if he handled it wrong.

He wanted to say, I’ll pay.

He wanted to place enough cash on the counter that you never had to look at another red notice again. He wanted to make the lawyer answer every letter, file every motion and keep fighting until your husband ran out of spite or breath.

But Pope knew you. You would refuse.

Not because you didn’t need it, but because you would rather drown than discover the lifeboat had a rope tied around your ankle.

He needed another route.

A way to help that didn’t require you to take anything directly from him. A way to understand what was happening before he acted. Information first. Plan second.

“Who’s your lawyer?”

You blinked at him.

“What?”

“Your lawyer,” Pope repeated, slower this time. “Who is it?”

Your eyes narrowed slightly. “Why?”

Pope looked back down at the petition.

The law firm’s name was already printed on the letterhead, but he wanted to hear you say it. He wanted to know whether you trusted this person. Whether they returned calls. Whether they were any good or simply the only one you could afford.

“Because you said you had one,” Pope replied.

“I do,” Your mouth tightened.

Pope could see the wall going up again. The instinct to protect what little control you had left.

He softened his voice—not by much, but enough, “Are they good?”

You hesitated slightly, “They’re… fine,” you said at last.

Pope stared at you and stayed quiet.

“Andrew.”

“Fine doesn’t keep him from taking Henry.”

Your face went pale.

Pope regretted the bluntness immediately, but he couldn’t take the words back. He didn’t know how to wrap danger in softer language. He only knew how to point at it.

You looked down at the floor, “No,” you said quietly. “It doesn’t.”

Pope’s anger shifted,  he took the lawyer’s letter from the counter and read the name printed beneath the signature for a second time.

Marianne Keller. Keller Family Law.

Pope fixed it into his memory.

The address too.

He didn’t need to write things down when they mattered. His brain held onto details differently when there was a threat attached to them—the name on a security uniform, a licence plate, the timing of a camera sweep, the exact position of a lock. Once something became part of a problem he intended to solve, it stayed.

He placed the letter back on the counter in precisely the same spot, “I’m not giving you money,” he said.

Your head lifted sharply.

The movement was so immediate Pope knew he had guessed correctly. Whatever you had expected him to say, it had involved money. An offer. An argument. Another person deciding what was best for you and demanding you be grateful for it.

Pope forced himself to meet your eyes.

It was harder than facing a gun. Guns were simple. A gun pointed at him meant danger. A finger moving toward the trigger meant act first. There were only so many outcomes, and Pope understood every one of them.

Your expression wasn’t simple.

There was suspicion there, but not only suspicion. Fear. Pride. Exhaustion. The faint embarrassment of someone who hated being seen when they were struggling. The guarded look of a woman who had learned that help was rarely free and that generosity could become evidence against you later.

Pope understood that look because Smurf had put it on all her children eventually.

“I know you won’t take it,” he continued. “And I’m not gonna make you.”

Some of the tension left your shoulders, but not all of it. Your arms remained folded over your stomach. Not defensive enough to be obvious, but Pope noticed the way your fingers curled into the fabric at your sides.

“Then why do you want to know who my lawyer is?”

Pope looked down at the letter again; He thought about telling you he wanted to check the lawyer out.

That sounded like he didn’t trust your judgement.

He thought about saying he knew people who could find out whether Marianne Keller was competent, whether she had ever been disciplined, whether she won cases or simply kept sending bills until her clients could no longer afford to answer the phone.

That sounded like what it was: surveillance.

He wanted to tell you the truth; Because if you won’t take the money, I can bypass you and give it directly to the lawyer.

But he knew how that sounded too.

It sounded like your answer didn’t matter. Like no was merely an obstacle and Pope was already searching for a quieter way around it.

It sounded like Smurf.

The comparison turned his stomach.

Smurf never accepted a boundary she didn’t like. She smiled, changed direction and found another point of entry. If one of her boys wouldn’t take money from her hand, she paid a debt behind his back and waited until the favour became useful. She called it love because the word control wasn’t warm enough.

Pope didn’t want to control you.

He didn’t want to buy a place in your house or make you feel as though every cup of coffee, every conversation over the fence and every moment with Henry existed because he had paid for the privilege.

But he did want the problem gone.

That was the part of himself he couldn’t make gentle.

Pope saw a threat and removed it. He found a weak point and reinforced it. He saw someone he cared about drowning and couldn’t understand why he should remain on the shore merely because they were too frightened to take his hand.

Cared about.

The words passed through his mind before he could stop them.

His eyes shifted to you.

You were standing against the sink in an old shirt, your hair pulled back badly, your face still blotched from tears you had tried to hide. There was nothing polished about the moment. Nothing romantic in the way people usually imagined romance.

There were dirty breakfast plates beside you. A stack of legal papers on the counter. Henry’s abandoned chew near the fruit bowl. A damp patch on your sleeve where you had wiped your face too quickly.

Still, Pope felt something draw tight beneath his ribs.

He had started noticing too much.

The tiny line between your eyebrows when you were calculating money in your head. The way you checked Henry’s location every few seconds even when he was sitting safely within sight. The different versions of your laugh—the real one that escaped before you could control it and the thinner one you used when you were trying to make something painful sound funny.

He knew which mug you reached for first in the morning. He knew you forgot to drink your coffee while it was hot. He knew you touched the lock after closing the door, even when you had watched it click.

He knew you said I’ve got it sorted when what you meant was I don’t have another option.

Pope didn’t know when learning those things had stopped being observation and become affection.

Maybe it had happened slowly enough that he hadn’t recognised the danger.

A gate fixed here. A conversation there. Henry’s hand in his, pulling him toward a missing puzzle piece as though Pope’s presence required no explanation. You looking over the fence and smiling when you saw him, not because you needed something but because you were glad he was there.

Nobody had ever made Pope feel wanted in such an ordinary way.

There had always been a function attached to him. Smurf wanted what he could do. The family wanted him when something needed force, planning or cleaning up. Even affection had usually come wrapped around usefulness.

You asked him inside for breakfast.

You gave him coffee; You talked too much when you were nervous and then looked embarrassed, as though he might resent being trusted with the details of your day.

Pope didn’t resent it. In fact, he collected every detail.

He carried them home with him.

“Because I want to make sure they know what they’re doing,” he said finally.

Your mouth tightened slightly, “You’re going to investigate my lawyer?”

“No.” The answer came too quickly.

Your eyebrows lifted.

Pope corrected himself. “Maybe.”

Despite everything, a breath of laughter escaped you. It was quiet and damp around the edges, but it was real.

The sound went through him like warmth. Pope’s face remained mostly still, but something softened behind his eyes. He would have done more than investigate a lawyer to hear that sound again without the exhaustion beneath it.

“Andrew,” you said, his name carrying a warning that wasn’t particularly convincing.

“What?”

“You can’t intimidate my lawyer.”

“I didn’t say I was gonna intimidate anyone.”

“You didn’t say you weren’t.”

Pope glanced at the letter, “I won’t intimidate your lawyer.”

The pause before lawyer was small.

You noticed it. Your eyes narrowed. “Or anyone else involved in my custody case.”

Pope looked back at you.

That was harder to promise.

Your husband had put his boot in your doorway. He had used Henry to keep you frightened and legal paperwork to make the fear look respectable. Pope could picture several effective ways of removing him from the situation. None of them involved family court.

You held his gaze, waiting.

Pope’s jaw shifted, “I’m not gonna do anything that hurts your case,” he said.

It was not the promise you had requested.

You knew it.

Pope knew you knew it.

But after a long moment, you let out a tired breath and looked toward Henry, who had started lining the puzzle pieces along the edge of the rug instead of putting them into the board, “That is disturbingly specific.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Not necessarily comforting.”

Pope’s mouth pulled faintly at one corner. He watched your shoulders loosen another fraction, and the feeling inside him deepened—quiet, possessive only in the sense that he wanted to protect this moment from whatever came next.

Not possessive of you.

He was becoming careful about that distinction.

You belonged to yourself. That was the whole point.

Your husband treated you like something he could keep by refusing to sign his name. Smurf treated people like extensions of herself. Pope had spent too much of his life confusing love with ownership to pretend he didn’t recognise the danger.

Whatever was growing inside him could not be that.

He would not make you another thing caught in a Cody grip.

He looked down at the letter one last time.

Marianne Keller.

“I’m just gonna check,” he said.

“Check what?”

“That she’s good.”

“And what happens if she isn’t?”

Pope’s eyes moved back to yours, “I find someone who is.”

You stared at him as though trying to decide whether his certainty made you feel safer or more nervous. Probably both. That was usually what Pope did to people.

You rubbed your palms against your arms. “I can’t afford someone better.”

Part 1: Well, That Stick Has Ruined My Morning. You could say it.

They were only words.

Two of them, technically. Tiny, ordinary words. You’d said worse in kitchens at full tilt with a printer screaming and three people asking stupid questions at once. You’d said harder things to people you liked less, with less sleep, and more mascara running. Separately, the words were nothing. Harmless. Manageable.

Together, they were enough to make your stomach turn over so hard it felt personal.

I’m pregnant.

You stared at yourself in the bathroom mirror like your reflection might volunteer to do it for you.

It did not.

The little ensuite in the hotel here in Yosemite was too small for a crisis of this size. The sink was narrow, the light above the mirror too fluorescent that made you look even worse than you felt, the window cracked just enough to let in a seam of mountain-cold air that lifted the damp hair at the back of your neck. Your toothbrush hung useless in your hand, toothpaste foam cooling in your mouth while your brain ran itself into a wall over and over again.

You looked ridiculous.

Hair loose and sleep-mussed. One of Shane’s dark blue shirts hanging off you, the hem barely decent, one side slipping low enough to show the curve of your shoulder. Your skin looked annoyingly good, which felt like betrayal on a molecular level. Fresh air, less stress, actual sleep when Shane forced you into it, less city grime. Yosemite had done wonders for your face.

Fantastic.

You’d add that to the pros list the next time he tried the whole move closer to me conversation in that maddeningly calm voice of his, like he was discussing weather patterns and not the possibility of uprooting your life.

Pros:

Skin clear.

Boyfriend stupidly hot.

Unfortunately pregnant.

You spat toothpaste into the sink with more force than strictly necessary and rinsed your mouth, eyes never leaving your own.

How the hell were you pregnant?

You had been careful.

You had used protection. Every time, except maybe that one time but that barely counted because you’d both been half asleep and very much in love and very stupid in that specific way people get when they think, well, what are the odds? You’d done the responsible adult things. The deeply unsexy, practical things. The things people in pamphlets and women’s health articles told you to do if you wanted to remain a person with agency and not become a cautionary tale with stretch marks.

You even went to the bathroom after because UTIs were no joke and you were not about to let romance make you medically negligent.

You stared harder at yourself.

Actually, scratch that.

You knew exactly how you were pregnant.

You were not, tragically, the Virgin Mary.

You were just a woman in a borrowed shirt in a bathroom in Yosemite, trying very hard not to throw up from anxiety before nine in the morning. Your laugh came out thin and hysterical enough that if anyone else had heard it, they’d have started backing away slowly.

“Okay,” you whispered to the mirror.

Your voice sounded nothing like yours. Too high. Too careful. Like if you moved too fast the whole room might crack down the middle.

“Okay,” you said again, because repetition had always felt vaguely like control.

It was fine.

It was.

You were an adult.

Shane was an adult.

The two of you could have an adult conversation in an adult way about this very adult situation that had arrived in your life like a fucking wrecking ball. Never mind that the two of you had never actually discussed this.

Not really.

Not in the one year and six months you’d been together.

There had been jokes. Passing comments. The occasional god, can you imagine? when a toddler had a public breakdown in Trader Joe’s or when you and him had stood in an elevator with a screaming baby and the mother trying to shush them while apologising to you at the same time. But never a real conversation. Never a sit-down, eye-contact, what do we want? what would we do? kind of conversation.

Because, if you were being honest, you’d both behaved like the future was this vague, generous thing that would wait for you both to be ready.

Apparently not.

You both still drove between cities and towns once a week, that had turned into once every two weeks once you both realised that a six-hour round trip every weekend was actually exhausting and not really maintainable in reality. You dragged both hands down your face and inhaled through your nose.

The room smelled like Shane. Soap. Pine. The faint, warm cotton smell of clothes that had been slept in. Under it, the chill mineral scent of mountain air coming through the cracked window. Out in the other room, it was quiet in that particular morning way—floorboards settled, kettle not yet on, no radio crackling at his shoulder, no boots moving around. He was still asleep.

Of course he was.

Because the universe loved a joke and apparently since day one of you meeting this man you were the absolute fucking butt of them all.

You pictured him in bed—half on his stomach, one arm shoved under the pillow, hair a mess, face soft in sleep in that way he never let the waking world see. One knee bent up because the mattress in the Yosemite rental was too soft for his back but he tolerated it because you liked it. Mouth slightly open. Breathing deep and even. Completely unaware that in the bathroom ten feet away you were trying not to have a religious experience over a stick of plastic that was still sitting in the bottom of your bag.

God.

You could just show him the test.

That was an option.

A valid option.

You could walk out there, pull it out, hold it up between two fingers like evidence in a murder trial, and let him do the math himself. Let him say it first. Let him be the brave one for once.

You could almost picture it.

His face going still.

His eyes dropping to the test, then back to yours.

The silence.

Maybe he’d take it from you. Maybe he’d stare at it too long. Maybe he’d say your name first in that low voice he used when he already knew that this wasn’t something you were going to make a joke about because you were going to throw up instead. Maybe he’d say, Are you sure? which, fair. Maybe he’d say nothing for just long enough to make your soul leave your body and take up residence in the heating vent.

You clutched the edge of the sink.

No.

No, if you did that, he would look at you with those stupid steady eyes and you would immediately burst into tears like a child and he would hug you and say all the right things to make you feel better but nothing actually helpful except “I’ll stand by you no matter what,” like the stupid sensible asshole he was. You needed at least ten more minutes of pretending to be a person with executive function.

“Jesus Christ,” you muttered.

From the bedroom, nothing. No movement. No voice. No miraculous intervention coming from the sky that would do all the hard work for you.

Coward, your inner voice said.

You glared at yourself. Your reflection, unsurprisingly, did the same. You looked pale now. Less dewy mountain-skin miracle, more woman about to announce life-altering news in her boyfriend’s shirt while trying not to disassociate.

You reached for your brush just to have something to do and ran it through your hair too hard. It snagged at the ends. Good. Pain. Useful. Grounding.

You could do this.

You could.

You’d done harder things.

You’d left cities. Rebuilt kitchens. Loved a man who lived half in wilderness and half in silence and somehow taught him how to let himself be loved back. You had survived weddings, disasters, raccoons, rumors, breakups, awful bosses, your own brain, and a truly humiliating phase in high school where you thought low-rise jeans were a personal right.

You could say two words.

Your hand paused mid-brush.

Unless he didn’t want this.

There it was. The thought you’d been sprinting away from finally catching you by the hair.

Your stomach dropped so hard you had to grab the sink again. Not because Shane would be cruel. Not because he’d be angry. Not because he’d ever, ever make this harder than it already was.

That was the problem.

He’d be kind.

He’d go quiet first, because he always did when something mattered. He’d think before he spoke. He’d ask if you were okay before he asked how he felt. He’d make coffee. He’d sit you down. He’d put one hand on the back of your neck, thumb under your ear, and say we’ll figure it out.

And maybe he would mean it.

Maybe he’d mean every word.

But what if underneath all that steadiness was the truth that he hadn’t wanted this? Not now. Not like this. Not before a thousand conversations you’d both failed to have.

Your throat tightened. The room suddenly felt too bright, too close, too full of every future at once.

A baby.

Shane holding a baby.

Shane absolutely refusing to admit he’d cry and then crying anyway. Tiny socks hanging to dry in the Yosemite sun.

The thought arrived first because apparently your brain had decided subtlety was for weaker women. Tiny white socks clipped to a line outside, moving in the high clear mountain air like surrender flags. So small. So offensively small. Little things made for a person who did not exist yet and somehow already had the power to ruin your composure before breakfast.

Then the next thought hit hard enough to make your grip tighten on the sink.

You, back in the city, nauseous and furious and alone for weeks at a time while Shane tried to make the drive work. Your apartment with its slightly warped floorboards and the upstairs neighbors who lived like they were training for a hoofed migration. The smell of hot pavement and garbage day in summer. You sitting on the edge of your bed with a bucket between your knees, hating everyone. Missing him. Resenting that you missed him. Resenting him for being somewhere all that sky and silence still fit around him while you tried not to throw up into municipal plumbing.

A cot in a tent and a child you could never put in it.

That one cut deepest.

Not because you thought Shane would suggest something that stupid. He wouldn’t. But because the image of his life—his actual life, the shape of it, the limitations of it—suddenly stood up in full, impossible detail. Canvas walls. Ground pad. Lantern light. The clean practical solitude of a man who could live out of a pack for days and somehow make it look like a philosophy instead of an inconvenience. You had spent a year and a half loving him in pieces and practicalities and now all of it was rearranging itself around a new fact.

His hand on your stomach.

Your mother’s face when you told her.

Mark’s face, God help you.

Brian and Gabe losing their entire collective minds.

The life you thought you had arranged for yourself tilting, then tilting more, then becoming something else entirely.

And underneath all of it—quieter, smaller, somehow more terrifying than panic—was the tiny glowing fact that some part of you was already protecting this.

Not deciding. Not planning. Not ready.

Just protecting.

Like your body had picked a side before your brain had even found the ballot.

The nausea hit so fast it felt personal.

One second you were staring at yourself in the little bathroom mirror, pale and wide-eyed in Shane’s oversized shirt, and the next your mouth flooded with that awful sharp water that meant you had maybe five seconds before this became a housekeeping issue.

“Oh, no,” you whispered to no one.

You lunged for the sink just in time.

It was not elegant.

There was nothing cinematic about it, nothing delicate or tragic. Just the humiliating violence of your stomach deciding it had opinions about the morning and wanted them heard immediately. Your hands braced hard on either side of the basin, hair dropping forward like it had joined the attack, shoulders tightening under the thin cotton of his shirt while you threw up once, hard enough to make your eyes sting.

You stayed bent over the sink afterward, breathing through your mouth, the tap still off, the room too bright. The toothpaste-and-pine smell of the bathroom had been replaced by acid and panic and the thin cold line of fresh air coming through the cracked window above the toilet.

Your eyes watered.

Your throat burned.

You could hear the blood rushing in your ears.

The floorboard in the other room creaked and then he was there.

Shane appeared in the doorway half asleep and somehow more awake than you had ever been in your life.

His hair was wrecked from sleep, one side flattened, the other sticking up in a way that would have been funny if your life wasn’t currently trying to fold itself inside out. He had on a grey t-shirt and sleep-soft flannel pants, bare feet on the cold floorboards, one hand still half braced against the doorframe like his body had arrived before the rest of him. But his eyes—those were already fully awake. Focused. Locked on you.

“Hey,” he said immediately, low and rough.

He crossed to you in two steps, turned the tap on without needing to think about it, and put a hand between your shoulder blades.

Not pressing. Not fussing. Solid.

Warm.

His palm moved slow once, twice, up and down your back while the water ran cool and clean over the porcelain.

“Hey,” he said again, quieter now. “You okay?”

A braver woman would have spilled then and there.

A braver woman would have turned around with shaking hands and wet eyes and just said the words. She would have let the cards fall where they may. She would have trusted him enough—or herself enough—not to stall.

But you were not, at this exact moment, a braver woman.

You were a woman who had thought once about disappointing her boyfriend and then, very stupidly, allowed that thought to set up camp in her ribcage and stayed.

No.

No, because that was the thought that kept catching its sleeve on everything.

Shane did deer and bears and raccoons and fences and missing hikers and stubborn chefs from San Francisco.

He didn’t do babies.

Your hand shook as you cupped some water and rinsed your mouth. Shane reached up with his free hand, gathering your hair out of the way and tucking it behind your ear with that maddeningly gentle practicality that always made everything worse.

“You’re burning up,” he murmured.

“I think Brian’s trying to poison me,” you said hoarsely, still bent over the sink. “I feel awful.”

You heard, rather than saw, the faint shift in his expression.

Because yes, objectively, that was ridiculous. But it was also the exact kind of thing you would say when you were trying very hard not to say the thing you actually meant.

His hand stilled against your back for half a second before continuing.

“Mm,” he said, in a tone that was deeply unconvinced. “Brian’s method’s gotten more ambitious, then.”

You let out a weak laugh that hurt your throat.

The water kept running.

You stayed facing the sink because turning around felt like walking straight into a wall you’d built yourself.

Behind you, Shane leaned one hip lightly against the vanity, staying close enough that you could feel him there without him crowding you. The little bathroom held the shape of him too easily: broad shoulders in the mirror behind yours, one hand still at your back, the quiet smell of sleep and cotton and skin and the mountain cold he always seemed to bring in with him.

He was watching you carefully now.

You could see it in the mirror without having to face him.

The furrow between his brows. The way his head tipped slightly, reading you. The stillness.

Your heart started doing that awful uneven thing again.

You took another sip from the tap just to buy yourself a second.

Then another. And then you straightened too fast, shut the tap off, and pressed the heels of your hands into the counter as if the cheap laminate might keep you from floating clean up and out of your own body.

For one horrible second, the room tilted anyway.

The bathroom was too bright. Too small. Too full of the sound of your own blood in your ears. The mirror gave you back a version of yourself that looked pale and wild-eyed and deeply unconvinced by her own coping mechanisms. Behind you, in the reflection, Shane stood in the doorway in sleep-soft greys and bare feet, one hand still braced against the frame, his face sharpened by concern and the kind of quiet attention that always made lying feel like amateur theatre.

He waited.

Of course he did.

Shane always waited.

He waited when you were furious and talking too fast, letting you burn through the first layer of temper before he answered. He waited in kitchens while you found the exact right word for what you meant, even if everyone else in the room had already decided they understood. He waited on trails when your pride made you insist you were fine, half a step back and to the outside, like patience itself had learned to wear flannel. He waited the first time you kissed him back, the first time you said you loved him, the first time you cried in front of him and tried to pass it off as allergies and rage. He waited at your worst with the same maddening steadiness he used at your best, like there was never a version of you he wasn’t prepared to stand still for.

So he waited now, in the little Yosemite bathroom that smelled faintly of mint and cold air and panic, while you tried not to come apart.

“Okay,” you said, because apparently your mouth had mistaken itself for a manager. “Coffee?”

Your own stomach responded to the word with a sharp little curl of protest.

You grimaced.

Shane’s eyes tracked that immediately.

“No,” he said.

The answer was so immediate, so flatly certain, that under any other circumstance you might’ve laughed.

He pushed off the doorframe and stepped fully into the room, gaze still on your face, taking inventory the way he always did—color, posture, breathing, whether you were still upright out of choice or stubbornness.

“I think,” he said, voice low and even, “what you’re going to do is have a shower, go lie down, put something mindless on, and stop trying to pretend you’re the foreman of this situation.”

You blinked at him.

He kept going, already planning, already moving pieces into place like a man laying out gear before weather hit.

“I’ll go into town and grab you some things. Crackers, ginger ale, whatever sounds good when I text you. I’ll call Brian and let him know he needs to do some actual work on the dinner menu instead of whatever bullshit he’s currently bringing to the table.”

“I thought I left the kitchen in safe hands,” you muttered, weakly defensive on behalf of your own command structure.

Shane’s mouth twitched.

“Safe-ish,” he allowed. “Contained, maybe. Not unsupervised.”

You wanted to argue. You really did. On principle, if nothing else. You were fully capable of managing your own nausea, your own crisis, your own deeply inconvenient emotional breakdown before breakfast.

But the truth was you were suddenly so tired you could’ve folded in half.

And Shane, the traitor, had already turned toward the shower.

He reached in and turned the water on, checking the temperature with his fingers the way he checked everything—carefully, practically, without fuss. The pipes groaned once before the stream evened out into a steady rush. Steam began to breathe slowly into the room.

You watched him through the mirror.

The quiet competence of him.

The way nothing in his body language was panicked, even though he had every right to be. The way he was handling you like you were something real and fragile and not an unexploded bomb he wanted to push back into the wilderness and hope never found its way home.

When the water had warmed enough, he turned back to you.

“Arms up,” he said.

You stared at him.

His eyebrow climbed.

You obeyed.

He hooked his fingers lightly into the hem of the shirt you were wearing—his shirt, dark blue, hanging off you in wrinkled surrender—and pulled it up over your head in one easy movement. The air hit your skin cool and immediate. You gave him a look the second you was bare from the waist up, because obviously.

He did not look down.

He very specifically did not look down.

Which, honestly, was more offensive than if he had.

You narrowed your eyes.

He kept his face pointed firmly somewhere around your shoulder, jaw set in that suspiciously neutral line he wore when he was behaving on purpose.

You caught the tiny tell, though—the faintest tension at the corner of his mouth, the discipline of a man very consciously not glancing where he absolutely wanted to.

Your eyebrow arched higher.

He felt it, “I can hear you judging me,” he said, dry.

“You should be judged,” you replied. “This is a hostile work environment.”

His eyes flicked to yours then, just yours, and there it was—that small, dangerous warmth that always lived under his restraint now, easy and private and entirely too dear.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and leaned in to press a kiss to your forehead.

It was a soft one. Not hurried. Not absent. The kind that said I know this is hard without the insult of saying it aloud.

Then he stepped back toward the door. “Shower. Bed. I’ll be back soon.”

You moved toward the steam with all the dignity of a damp Victorian ghost. “Yes, sir,” you muttered.

He paused with one hand on the doorframe and looked back at you.

That look.

Half warning, half amusement, all trouble, “Don’t.”

Your mouth twitched despite yourself, “I didn’t do anything,” you said, smiling as you stepped under the water.

It was a lie so obvious it practically glittered.

His gaze dipped—not indecently, just enough to let you know he was, in fact, still a man and still your boyfriend and still very much aware of the fact that you were naked in his bathroom, smiling at him like a menace while he was trying to be responsible.

Then he looked back up at your face and gave you the smallest, most betrayed huff of laughter.

“You know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”

You grinned at him through the steam. “That sounds like a you problem.”

His smirk arrived slow and unwilling, the way it always did when he was fighting one and losing with dignity, “Take the shower, Princess.”

“Oh, now you’re calling me Princess when I’m naked and emotionally compromised?”

“You’re the one who started with yes sir.”

“I was being respectful.”

“You were being a brat.”

The laugh that escaped you this time was real. A little shaky, but real. And that—somehow—that little scrap of ridiculous flirting in the middle of everything made your chest ache almost worse than the nausea had.

Because this was still you.

Still him.

Still the two of you, somehow, even with the world tilting under your feet.

He pointed once at the shower, like you were both a problem and his favorite one. “Five minutes. Then bed.”

“You timing me?”

“I’m considering it.”

“You’re obsessed with me.”

“That’s not the word I’d use.”

Your smile softened before you could stop it.

His did too.

For one second neither of you said anything. Just looked. Steam between you. Morning light catching on the edges of everything. The kind of quiet that didn’t ask for much except honesty.

Then he straightened, like remembering he had to actually leave if he wanted to get anything done, “I’m serious,” he said. “Shower. Bed. Phone on loud.”

“Yes, dear.”

He sighed like a man carrying an impossible burden. “You’re lucky I love you.”

You blinked once.

There it was again—that simple, matter-of-fact way he said it now. No drama. No weight thrown around. Just truth, offered the same way he’d offer you water or a jacket or his hand over rough ground.

Your throat tightened, “You too,” you said, quieter.

His face changed at that. Small. Wrecked around the edges. He covered it with a nod and stepped out, closing the bathroom door most of the way behind him.

You listened to him move through the cabin for a few seconds after that—the soft thud of boots being pulled on, the cupboard door, the rustle of keys, the muted clink of his ranger-issue mug being moved off the counter.

Then the front door opened.

Closed.

And suddenly it was just you.

You stepped fully under the shower and let the hot water hit your shoulders.

It should have helped.

It absolutely didn’t.

The room felt too loud now. Too bright. The water too sharp against your skin. Your stomach twisted again—not enough to send you back over the sink, but enough to keep your body on edge, every nerve waiting for the next wave. You braced your palms against the tile and bowed your head until your forehead rested there, the heat running over the back of your neck and down your spine.

The tile was smooth and cool beneath the steam.

You shut your eyes.

And there it was. Everything.

Not just the nausea, but the fact that you were too much of a coward to tell the man you loved the biggest truth of your life.

You’d told him you felt awful. You’d let him build a plan around symptoms. You’d let him kiss your forehead and tell you to go to bed and text Brian and take charge and do all the things he always did when you were fraying at the edges.

And still you hadn’t said it.

Your mouth opened on a breath that turned into something perilously close to a sob.

“God,” you whispered to the tile.

Coward.

You could fight with him, you could flirt with him, you could climb mountains, rebuild kitchens, confess love, steal shirts, make life plans, sleep in his ridiculous tent and bully him into buying a motel room instead.

But this?

This had reduced you to standing naked in a shower in Yosemite, forehead against the wall, trying not to cry because the truth was too big and too alive and too capable of changing everything.

You loved him.

That was the worst part.

You loved him enough that his reaction mattered more than your own panic.

You loved him enough that the idea of disappointment crossing his face for even a second felt unbearable.

You loved him enough to already be halfway protecting him from news that was as much his as yours.

And underneath all of that, low and glowing and impossible to turn off, was the other truth: some part of you was already protecting this too.

You pressed your head harder to the tile and let the water pour over you while your stomach twisted and your heart made a wreck of itself and the whole morning kept moving forward whether you were ready or not. <><><><><><><><> “Shane said you’re sick.”

Gabe’s voice drifted across the porch with all the casual menace of a man who’d absolutely clocked too much and planned to weaponize it gently.

You looked up from where you were sitting on the back step of the bar, one knee bent, the other stretched out, a sweating glass of water pressed hard against your cheek like cold could fix bad life choices. The porch boards still held some of the day’s warmth, but the evening air coming off the trees had that Yosemite bite to it—pine and damp earth and the faint smoke of someone, somewhere, making fire behave. The fairy lights strung overhead hummed softly, throwing a warm halo over the service path and making everything feel just intimate enough to be dangerous.

Gabe stood there in the doorway for a beat, pink vape in hand, hoodie half-zipped, looking offensively unbothered by existence. He took a long pull, then exhaled a cloud that smelled like spun sugar, processed strawberries, and regret.

Your stomach twisted on instinct.

You made a face and brushed your hand in front of your nose. “I thought you were quitting.”

“I did,” he said, stepping out and dropping down beside you on the step with the long-suffering grace of a man settling in for gossip he had no official right to. “Then I thought about how great I was doing, had one celebratory puff, and now here we are.” He held the vape up between two fingers like evidence in a trial. “I’ve realized there are worse things in life than me vaping—”

“Like what?” you asked, still pressing the glass to your face because if you let it go you might combust.

“Capitalism. Global warming. The housing market.” Gabe ticked them off on his fingers. “Brian shaving his head again.”

You turned your head slowly and looked at him.

He met your stare with complete seriousness.

“Right,” you said after a second, because frankly there was no arguing with that level of confidence.

He nodded once, satisfied, then nudged your shoulder with his.

It wasn’t  a hard nudge; It didn’t need to be.

You winced anyway.

His head turned toward you in one sharp movement. “Okay,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “That got a reaction.” He leaned back slightly to look at your face. “So. Park Narc thinks you’re sick. What’s the problem?”

You kept your gaze on the service alley in front of you. The back path ran down toward the trees in a strip of gravel and shadow, still damp in places from the afternoon rinse. Beyond it, the lodge’s outer lights cut soft rectangles across the ground. Somewhere inside, someone dropped a pan and swore with conviction.

“Just Brian’s cooking,” you muttered.

Gabe made a noise so disbelieving it was almost artistic, “Nah uh.” He shook his head and took another drag. “Brian’s record of food-to-food-poisoning ratio is below average.”

You turned to look at him fully this time. “Should I be concerned that there’s an average? Does Justine know there’s an average?”

“I don’t know,” Gabe said, exhaling another plume of candy-scented poison into the night. “Ever since she went on holiday and met a man called Pedro, she’s had her head in the clouds. Which, frankly, is adorable and makes her less likely to notice when Brian nearly kills a tourist with aioli.”

That got the tiniest corner of your mouth to twitch before your stomach rolled again and reminded you this was not a fun, flirty porch scene in a movie. This was your life. Your very stupid, very loud, very hormonal life.

Gabe clocked it all.

Of course he did. He leaned his elbows on his knees, pink vape dangling from one hand, and looked over at you with the kind of concern he disguised so aggressively it almost passed for sarcasm.

“So,” he said. “Is this like sick sick, or sick sick?”

You blinked at him, “There’s a difference?”

He grinned. “There’s always a difference. I’ll bring out the sliding scale again if I have to.”

You let out a slow breath through your nose. “God, not the sliding scale.”

“Oh, it’s back,” he said. “It’s laminated now.” He held up an invisible chart in the air between you. “Sick is ‘I need soup and a day off.’ Sick sick is ‘I am about to alter the trajectory of my life and also maybe throw up in the fern by the ice machine.’”

That was too close.

You looked down at the glass in your hands. Condensation slicked your fingers. The ice had already started to melt, a quiet little collapse you felt strangely seen by.

“Seriously,” Gabe said, and the grin dropped away enough to show the real thing underneath. “You good?”

You wanted to say no.

No, you were absolutely not good.

You were tired in that deep cellular way that made sitting upright feel like a negotiable act. You were sore. Your back hurt. Your stomach had been turning itself inside out in waves all day—hungry, but also repulsed by food, except for when you were suddenly ravenous for the exact wrong thing at the exact worst time. You were exhausted from not sleeping and from too much sleeping and from the fact that your own brain had apparently become an enemy insurgency.

You had to think about your future.

And Shane’s future.

And your future with Shane.

You had to think about whether he would really move to the city for you and a baby, or whether he was still quietly, stubbornly fixed on not doing that in any permanent sense. Whether he’d sacrifice the mountain one week at a time and call it enough. Whether you’d end up giving up your career to move somewhere in between—some compromise town with one decent grocery store and a lot of emotional resentment—because neither of you could decide who got to keep the version of home that mattered more.

You had to think about apartments and doctors and distance and money and babies and bodies and jobs and time and whether loving someone was enough when geography was a very big very real thing.

You had to think about how Shane had looked at you that morning, all rough sleep and concern, and how he’d touched the back of your neck like he already knew you were balancing on the edge of something enormous.

You had to think about the fact that you still hadn’t told Gabe.

Or Becca.

Or Brian, who would cry and then make it weird and then cry harder.

You had to think about your mother.

Mark.

The kitchen.

Your own body, which no longer felt fully like it belonged to you.

You had to think about all of it at once, all the time, and you were so tired.

Instead, you lowered the glass into your lap and said, with a small, defeated sigh: “I just need another nap.”

Gabe stared at you. Then one eyebrow climbed. Slow. Deliberate. Dangerous.

“A nap,” he repeated.

“Mm-hm.”

“You’ve had, like, four today.”

“I’m committed to the bit.”

He leaned back on his hands and looked out into the dark for a second like he was giving the universe one final chance to make this less obvious. It declined.

When he looked back at you, the expression on his face was annoyingly gentle. “Chef,” he said carefully, “if you tell me you’re dying, I’m gonna be supportive. If you tell me you murdered someone, I’m gonna need details first but I’ll hear you out. If you tell me you’re just tired, after I personally watched you glare at a bread roll for thirty full seconds like it owed you money, I’m calling bullshit.”

You let your head fall back against the porch post with a quiet thunk.

The fairy lights overhead blurred for a second, “Don’t,” you muttered.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re being unusually observant.”

“That’s one of my worst traits.”

Silence stretched between you, but not an empty one. Inside the bar, someone laughed too loudly. A chair scraped. Music bled faintly through the back wall, something bass-heavy. Outside, the mountain held its own quiet around all of it.

Gabe nudged your knee with his, lighter this time. “I’m not gonna push,” he said. “Mostly because you get mean when cornered and I happen to enjoy my face where it is.” A beat. “But, hypothetically, if this is bigger than Brian’s shitty aioli, you don’t have to do the whole thing alone; you have family here.”

Something in your chest tightened so fast it hurt. You swallowed. You loved this stupid asshole.

Looked down at your hands and at the clear glass between them.

At the water you hadn’t actually wanted but kept drinking because doing something felt better than sitting still with your own thoughts.

Your voice came out quiet.

“I know.”

And you did.

That was the worst part.

Because if you said it out loud—if you said the truth, if you took the thing in your chest and turned it into sound—then it would stop being yours alone. It would become real in a whole different way. Bigger. Sharper. Less containable.

Gabe, blessedly, did not fill the silence. He just sat there beside you, blowing smaller, more guilty-looking clouds into the dark like he was trying not to be offensive to your apparently fragile internal ecosystem.

After a minute, he held the vape farther away from you and said, “For the record, if this turns out to be something more serious than food poisoning, I’d like it noted that I was very cool and mature on the porch.”

You let out a tired breath of a laugh.

“No you weren’t.”

“I was porch-perfect,” He grinned.

“You smell like a carnival.” He looked offended. Truly offended, like you’d insulted his lineage and not his vape. “It’s strawberry.”

“It smells awful,” you said flatly.

Gabe pressed a hand to his chest. “Wow.”

“That,” you continued, pointing vaguely at the pink plastic crime in his hand, “is not strawberry. That is artificial strawberry.” You gave the word the same tone you reserved for “frozen hollandaise” and “pre-shredded parmesan.” “That’s what a strawberry would smell like if it had been described over the phone by a man who’d never met one.”

Gabe opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again, clearly ready to defend his chemical nonsense to the death; then his attention lifted over your shoulder and his face changed all at once.

Not softened. Not quite.

It just slid into that familiar, delighted expression he wore whenever the universe handed him a live episode of your life to narrate.

“Ah,” he said, straightening a little and lifting the vape in salute, “Canyon Casanova.”

You twisted enough to look.

Shane was coming down the gravel path from the lodge, one hand in the pocket of his jacket, the other swinging loose at his side. The outside dark had settled properly now, all cool blues and silvered edges, and he moved through it like he belonged to it in an infuriatingly photogenic way. Gravel crunched under his boots in that even, decided rhythm that your body had learned before your brain got a say. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, looked from Gabe to you, and then pointed at you like he was correcting a factual error.

“She does it better,” he said.

You blinked.

Gabe barked a laugh and pointed the vape at you. “See? Finally, a man of culture.”

The romance was not dead in your relationship. It was simply buried under several layers of sarcasm, practical concern, and a mutual need to bully each other for sport. Which was convenient, really, because you were currently sitting on a porch, keeping a pregnancy secret from your boyfriend, and trying very hard not to throw up on his shoes.

Those stupid boots.

Usually, the smell of him hit you like safety—pine, clean sweat, his soap, cold air, sun-warmed fabric, whatever impossible non-cologne cologne he’d been pretending not to wear for a year and a half. Usually it grounded you.

Tonight, the second the mountain air brought him closer, your stomach turned so violently you had to swallow back a gag.

God.

How had you once found outside on him attractive?

You loved him, apparently. Deeply. Idiotically. Enough to have his child, as it turned out. And right now he smelled like wet bark and fresh hell.

He came up the last step and stopped in front of you, eyes going immediately to your face. Not to Gabe. Not to the glass in your hand. To you.

The humor in his mouth faded just slightly.

“You eaten?” he asked.

The question was casual on the surface, but you knew him too well now. It wasn’t a question thrown out into the air. It was a check. Inventory. Data collection disguised as concern.

You opened your mouth.

Gabe beat you to it, “I tried to feed her,” he said, with the solemnity of a man giving a witness statement. “She glared at a bread roll, drank some water, then came out here. Me, being the concerned citizen that I am, followed. You’re welcome.”

Shane looked at him.

“You’re a community idol,” he said, deadpan.

“Finally,” Gabe murmured, basking. “The recognition I deserve.”

You looked between them and felt another small wave of nausea roll through you, less violent this time, but enough to make you sit a little straighter and breathe through your mouth.

Shane noticed that too.

Of course he did.

He always noticed.

His gaze dropped briefly to the untouched water in your hand, then back to your face. “Come on.”

You stood because arguing seemed like work and because if you stayed sitting another minute Gabe was absolutely going to evolve into emotional support stand-up comedy.

“I’m taking my break very personally,” Gabe said as you handed him the glass.

“You’re taking my whole life very personally,” you muttered.

“That’s friendship.”

“That’s surveillance.”

Shane’s hand landed briefly at the small of your back as you stepped past him. Not enough to steer. Just enough to say watch the step without saying it out loud.

You hated how much comfort there was in that.

Gabe watched the two of you go with the expression of a man who was absolutely going to have opinions later and knew better than to voice them while Shane was still in range, “Don’t die,” he called after you.

“Professionally impossible,” you said without turning.

The service path back to the cabin was quiet.

The lodge noise dropped away behind you in layers—the clink of glasses, the faint thud of music, somebody laughing too loudly near the side entrance—until all that was left was the crunch of gravel under your boots and the thin night sounds of Yosemite settling into itself. Pine boughs moved overhead in the breeze with that soft whispering hush that usually calmed you and currently just made everything feel bigger. The air was cold enough to wake your skin up, and still your body felt hot and strange and wrong.

Shane didn’t push.

Didn’t ask again if you’d eaten.

Didn’t fill the silence with one of his low, practical lectures about water and electrolytes and trying not to run yourself into the ground.

He just walked beside you, half a step closer than he needed to.

You could feel him looking over at you every so often, not obviously, just little glances in the dark that caught on your cheek, your posture, the way you kept one arm folded too tightly across your middle. Taking stock. Waiting for you to either speak or break.

Your brain, meanwhile, had completely abandoned dignity and started offering up ways to tell him.

Congratulations, you’ve been promoted.

Surprise, the protective custody unit got bigger.

Brian didn’t poison me, but someone did get me pregnant and frankly I’d like to speak to management.

That one almost made you laugh, except you were too busy trying not to throw up in the shrubbery.

Others were worse.

Blunter, harder.

I’m pregnant.

We need to talk.

Please don’t look at me like that.

You hated every version.

You hated that no arrangement of words seemed right enough for something this enormous. Too flippant and you’d look insane. Too serious and you might start crying before you got through the first syllable.

And sooner or later he was going to realize this wasn’t just Brian’s cooking.

Shane might not do babies, but he did patterns. He did observation. He did noticing when you tied your laces wrong or skipped breakfast or lied about being tired or pretended you weren’t hurt when you absolutely were. He noticed weather shifts and broken latches and the angle of your jaw when you were trying not to say the truth.

The longer you kept this from him, the worse he was going to take it Because he’d be hurt.

Because he’d look at you with those steady eyes and go quiet in that way he did when something mattered, and you would know immediately that waiting had been the wrong choice.

He glanced over again.

You felt it before you saw it.

“Still feel sick?” he asked at last, voice low.

“Yes,” you said, because that was easier than all the other answers stacking up behind your teeth.

He nodded once. “You want tea?”

Tea.

The domesticity of that nearly knocked you sideways.

He was talking about tea and you were carrying his baby and your entire life had become a bad rom-com written by someone who really liked stress.

“Maybe,” you said faintly.

He didn’t comment on your tone. Just adjusted his pace slightly when your steps slowed, as if the dark itself had asked him to.

The cabin came into view through the trees a minute later, porch light glowing soft and yellow against the wood. The small familiar shape of it made something in your chest tighten so hard it hurt. Home, for now. Home with his flannel over the chair and your boots by the door and his mug on the counter and the secret still lodged sharp under your ribs.

Shane went ahead the last two steps to the porch, pulling his keys from his pocket. The metal jangled softly in the night. He unlocked the door with the easy muscle memory of a man who had done this enough times to stop thinking about it.

You stood behind him, staring at the back of his jacket, at the broad line of his shoulders, at the nape of his neck where his hair had gone soft from the evening air.

You could still wait.

You could go inside, drink the tea, sit down, try to find a better moment.

A gentler one.

A smarter one.

Tomorrow morning, maybe. When the world felt less thin-skinned. When you hadn’t spent the evening trying not to vomit because your boyfriend smelled too much like actual wilderness. But then he pushed the door open and stepped inside, and the sight of him crossing the threshold—safe, familiar, his place, your place, the place the truth would have to live in eventually—made your panic spike so hard it overrode every last ounce of strategy.

“I’m pregnant,” you blurted.

He stopped.

Not gradually.

Just stopped dead in the middle of the cabin, one hand still on the edge of the door, body half turned back toward you as if the words had physically reached out and caught him by the chest.

The silence after was instant and absolute.

Your own heartbeat turned deafening.

The cabin suddenly seemed too small, too bright, every object inside it unbearably clear—the chair with his jacket over the back, the half-read field manual on the table, the lamp by the couch, the folded blanket, your water glass from this morning still sitting by the sink.

You had said it.

Oh God.

You had actually said it.

There was no taking it back now. No softer version. No strategic retreat. No joke.

Your stomach dropped so hard you thought for one insane second you might actually pass out and that would be not only humiliating but wildly off-brand.

Shane turned.

Slowly.

His face was unreadable in that first terrible second, not because he didn’t feel anything, but because he felt too much all at once and every part of him had gone still trying to catch up.

Your mouth opened, closed. You had the wild urge to immediately make it worse by talking.

To explain. To apologize. To say I was going to tell you earlier or please say something or I know this is bad timing or I know this is probably not what you wanted.

Nothing came out.

The panic was full-body now, hot and electric and humiliating. It buzzed in your fingers. Sat high in your throat. Made your knees feel weirdly detached from the rest of you.

Because now you had to wait, now you had to see his face change. Now you had to find out what that silence meant. And standing there in the doorway with the night still at your back and the truth hanging between you like a lit fuse, you realized with a horrible, crystal clarity that this was the part you had been afraid of all along:

Mot the pregnancy. Not the nausea. Not even the future.

This.