(Hailey's point of view)
The peace that returned to our home carried Liam’s imprimatur: efficient, impenetrable, ringed with silences that shouted louder than any words. It wasn’t the easy peace we’d known before—stitched together from laughter and small, careless omissions. This was an armed peace, watched and paid for, its cost a slab I could feel settling over us though I didn’t yet understand its full weight.
Liam moved with the outward calm of a man who'd solved a problem, but his eyes never rested. They swept windows and hedgerows, cataloguing the boundaries of our property as if waiting for a familiar shadow to reappear. I didn’t need explanations; the tension hummed in the air, in the way his fingers brushed mine like a coiled spring. He had gone hunting in territory that used to
