Page 151 of The Ashes of Summer

It looks like nothing happened.

Like the world didn't end and rebuild itself while we were gone.

I bring the SUV to a stop and Jacob is out before the engine's finished settling, coming around to my side without being asked. He opens the door and holds out his hand, and I take it and step down, and the gravel crunches under my feet and the pine smell hits me and something in my chest comes completely apart.

I don't cry. I just stand there with his hand warm around mine and breathe it in. The cold air. The quiet. The stillness of a place that's been waiting.

"Come on," he says softly. Not rushing me. Just an offering.

We go inside.

The house is cool and still—that particular quiet that collects in a space when nobody's been in it for a while. Afternoon light falls through the kitchen windows in long pale strips across the floor. A mug sits on the counter near the sink. His, from the morning it all started, the coffee dried down to a dark ring at the bottom. His jacket hangs on the hook by the door where he always leaves it. There's a folded newspaper on the side table that neither of us is ever going to read.

Everything in its place.

I stand in the entrance hall and look at all of it and feel the strange doubling of a person who has been somewhere terrible and comes back to find the ordinary world still stubbornly—almost offensively—intact.

Then I see it.

The floor near the far wall. A stain, dark and irregular, spread in a shape I recognize on instinct because I've been around enough of it lately to know exactly what it is.

Haywood's blood. Dried into the floorboards. Something nobody had time to deal with before everything collapsed into chaos.

And something shifts in me at once—purposeful, urgent, cutting straight through the exhaustion and the grief and the fragile overwhelm of being home. I cross to the cupboard under the sink and pull out the cleaning things without thinking about it, and I'm on my knees before I've consciously decided to be. Cloth in hand. Spray on the stain. Working at it in tight circles that achieve almost nothing, and I keep going anyway, keep going, because if I can just get this one thing clean then maybe the rest of it⁠—

"Summer."

Jacob's voice comes from behind me. Low. Careful.

I don't stop. "It needs to come up before it sets any further." My voice sounds strange in my own ears. Too bright. Too practical. "If you leave blood too long, it gets down into the grain and then you can never really⁠—"

"Summer."

His hand comes down gently on my shoulder.

I stop.

The cloth is dark in my hands. My knees ache against the hard floor. I stare at the stain—still there, still stubbornly present despite everything I'm doing to it—and I feel the control I've been holding since the Ridge, since the warehouse, since every awful moment I promised myself I'd deal with later, start to come apart at the seams.

Jacob leans down and takes the cloth out of my hands without any resistance from me, and sets it aside. Then his arm comes around me and he lifts me gently to my feet and turns me into his chest and holds me there, his chin resting on the top of my head, one hand moving slowly up and down my back.

I press my face against him and close my eyes.

For a long time neither of us says anything. The house is quiet around us. The afternoon light moves imperceptibly across the kitchen floor. Outside, the pines shift in some faint wind we can't feel from in here.

"I can't," I say eventually, into the fabric of his shirt.

His hand stills for a second, then carries on its slow movement.

"I know," he says.

"Not yet." I pull back just enough to look up at him. His face is tired and pale, the bandaging visible above the collar of his shirt, and he's looking at me with an expression so completely free of pressure that my chest aches with it. "What happened to me at the Ridge—I'm not—I need time before I can⁠—"

The words don't come cleanly and I hate it. Hate that even here, even with him, I can't find the edges of what I'm trying to say.

"You don't have to explain it," he says quietly.

"I want to."