Jennifer’s POV
The first thing I noticed when I woke up was silence.
Not the heavy, suffocating silence from the night before, but the soft kind—the one that made the world feel clean.
The fire had long gone out. Jack wasn’t in the room anymore. I stretched, rubbed my eyes, and tried to shake away the fragments of memory from last night. My stupid rambling. His sharp voice. That single word: Stop.
Heat crept up my neck, but I shoved it down. I wasn’t going to think about that. Not today.
Instead, I busied myself. The cottage smelled faintly of cedar and smoke, and for once, I didn’t want to just scrape together something edible. I wanted to cook. Something real. Something good. Maybe because it gave me an excuse to move, maybe because it made me feel like this place wasn’t just walls
