I packed a bag with shaking hands and told myself it was about my father, not him.
It wasn't entirely true, and some small, honest part of me knew it even as I folded shirts I didn't remember choosing into a duffel I'd found shoved under the cabin bed. My father's betrayal was old, unfixable, a wound I couldn't do anything about now except grieve it in whatever private way I eventually figured out how to. Ronan's silence was different. Ronan's silence was fresh, and mine, and something I'd trusted enough to let close, and it had cost me exactly the way every other trust in my life eventually seemed to.
I moved through the small cabin methodically, the way I'd learned to move through any crisis — hands busy, mind quiet, grief packed away somewhere I could deal with it later when I had the
