Her heels fade down the concrete, and the silence they leave behind is worse—thick with the name Ethan Cole and the ghost of her cigarette smoke curling under the door. I stay pressed against the workbench until the garage door clangs shut, until I hear her car engine turn over and pull away, and only then do I realize I've been holding my breath.

Derek's hand is still on the doorframe, his knuckles white where they grip the metal. He doesn't move for a long moment, staring at the space where she stood, and I see the lie still living in his eyes—the one he told her, the one he told himself, the one that's been building between us since the bus.

"She's not gone," I whisper.

He turns to me, his face hard, jaw tight. "I know."

He crosses the room in three strides and pulls me off the workbench, his hands rough on my hips, fingers biting into the denim I just barely got buttoned. "But we've got a head start now."

I feel his cum still drying on my thighs, cooling against my skin, and the pill dissolving somewhere in my stomach—that tiny white tablet that might already be too late, that might already be fighting a war it can't win. The countdown ticking isn't two weeks anymore. It's hours. Maybe less.

"She knows," I say. "She knows I'm here. She knows everything."

"She knows what I told her." His voice is low, controlled, the same voice he used on the bus. "That you left. That you were a mistake I was fixing."

The word lands like a slap. Mistake. I pull back, and his grip loosens just enough for me to see his face—and there it is, the crack, the thing he doesn't say. He told her I was a mistake to save me. He made himself small so I could stay hidden. And I hate that I love him for it.

"And Ethan?" I ask.

"Ethan's a problem." He says it like it's a fact, like a bolt that needs tightening, like a thing he can fix with his hands. "But he's a problem who gave us the name of a dead man's brother."

"Vince's brother." The illegible paper is still in my pocket, the ink smeared from the rain, but I memorized the address. I could draw it in my sleep. "He's the one who—"

I stop. I don't have to finish. Derek heard everything. He heard it over the phone, my screams in his ear, and I see the memory flash through his eyes now—dark, quick, gone.

"I know what he did." His voice drops lower, rougher. "I know what they both did. And I know what I'm going to do about it."

"You're not going to kill him."

He doesn't answer. That's the answer.

I reach up and put my hand on his jaw, feel the stubble, the tension, the pulse jumping under my palm. "Derek. Look at me."

He does. And for a second he's not the man who planned my assault, not the man who watched me for three years, not the man who paid off Mer and lied to her face. He's just Derek—tired, scared, holding on.

"We decide together," I say. "That's what you promised me. No more secrets. We decide together."

His hand covers mine on his jaw, and he presses his lips to my palm. "Together," he says, and the word feels like a vow.

But the silence after it is the worst kind—the kind where I can hear the clock on the wall, the drip of something in the garage, the hum of the old fluorescent light. The kind where I can feel the two-week countdown shrinking to something smaller, something with teeth.

"She said Ethan's been asking about a girl who smells like motor oil and fear." I let that settle. "He's not going to stop. He's never going to stop."

Derek's eyes go hard again, that predatory focus I know too well. "Then we don't wait for him to find us."

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the PAID receipt, creased and worn, the stamp bleeding into the paper. He looks at it for a long moment, then sets it on the workbench between us—a marker, a line in the sand.

"We go to him," he says. "Before he comes to us."

And I feel it—the shift, the turn, the thing that changes. Not the two-week wait. Not the pill. Not the fear. The plan. The choice. The moment where hiding stops being an option.

I look at the receipt, at the stamp that was supposed to end this, and I know it didn't end anything. It just changed the shape of the fight.

"Okay," I say, and the word tastes like steel. "Then we go."

The grocery store checkout line feels like standing in quicksand. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, since I pulled a test from the pharmacy shelf—a brand I've never bought, colors I don't recognize, because I never got far enough this time before to need one. Derek's at the register paying for it like it's a pack of gum, and I can't look at the cashier's face, can't risk her seeing mine.

"Whatelse?" he says—that tight smile he gives strangers, half-flirtation, half-shield.

"Nothing. Let's just—" I take the bag from his hand, paper crinkling, and the weight of it might as well be a brick.

The exhaust from the truck idling feels like it's coating my lungs when I climb in. He doesn't ask if I'm ready. He just points us home, drives the fourteen minutes without touching the radio, one hand on the wheel, and I count streetlights all the way back.

The garage smells the same. Oil. Dust. Cooldamp. This newer thread of it I know so well now—the warmth under the hood of a truck that tracked through rain, faint diesel clinging to work shirts. Two weeks ago I took another white pill in another bathroom under pale lights, and I taught myself not to think about the shape of a body inside mine.

The plastic lanyard on the pharmacy keyring digs into my palm while Derek locks the deadbolt behind us.

"Now or later?" he asks, careful. His hand hovers at the small of my back like he's offering an exit, except there isn't one. We invented "now or later" so I wouldn't feel cornered. I own the door. I own the clock.

"Now." My voice comes out flat, mechanical, which I hate, because this matters so much I have to muzzle it.

I unbutton my jacket one button at a time. He doesn't watch the jacket. He watches me, and I realize he's holding his breath the way I did when Mer left, that snake tension in his chest he thinks I don't notice.

I cradle the cup under the trickling tap. The medicine cabinet mirror gives me my own face, tired but still mine. Even my reflection looks like it's waiting.

On the bathroom shelf: his deodorant, a scarred tube of toothpaste, the open lip balm I've kept there since the first night. Right where the pill bottle stood for those few hopeful days, now nothing. My thumb finds the tide mark of that ghost on the ceramic.

I press the test into the mist. White plastic, two thin windows, dead silent. Outside, the garage stillness swallows even the hum of the old fridge. I don't let myself blink.

("Don't leave yet," I can hear him thinking from the other side of the door, though he has never once crowded me on this.)

The second window tints, barely. Just a faint rose while my hands already feel like blood. Each tick of a minute is a door vaulting open or slamming shut—I cancel my breath until the faint stain darkens, drags, hot, unmistakable.

No. The word isn't relief, isn't regret. It's just the axle unlocking. No.

I open the door. He's propped against the opposite wall, arms folded too tight for his nonchalance. The second I step all the way out he reads my answer without saying one word.

"Nothing." I hold the stick between us like I'm presenting evidence, the second line barely a ghost at all—back through that slim rising-casing of a window it is either already late or has never come at all.

Derek's breath hauls free of him. Not disappointment in my body, relief in both of us: we get to choose again. Not fated or forced, but the two of us deciding out loud when our lives begin.

"So we're still climbing to the top of that bumpy hill," I say, teasing the ghost of a cry out of my voice: the bruise-tender spot I still carry inside.

Something rearranges over his easy smile. He pulls my hips to his, wraps the gold an inch of not-being-alone around me, and breathes, "Then let's renegotiate 'later' aren't we right at that doorway again, baby."

He takes the test from me, lifts it small, watching the blank space where a positive line could have come—would it steal the next three weeks from me, or hand them back?

A tick—the last second of that hanging between—and then I see it. His other hand finds my wrist, wraps warm above the line of his own uncertainty, and he kisses me kneedeep into a whole new doorway: between relief and determination. Waiting wasn't the shape of us anymore. Making was.

"You want to try again right now?"

The test still reads "not pregnant," and he looks at it like it's the exact pardon that is owed us. He drops the test into the sink with a clink, turns the hot tap, and washes it down the drain while I watch the last chalky ink dissolve into the rust from his hands.

"Not again," I tell him softly from the frame of the mirror. The line came back slowly: because a line that faint can still be a line. A beginning with wobbly edges, still inside a body still choosing impossibly.

The bathroom grows closer. He crosses to me with water still clinging to his knuckles and presses me against the counter, mouth on my neck—and I hold my breath the whole length of our long inch, waiting my arms out:

begin in a word stolen eager from the mouth of a fog, belonging back to us alone, two steps in pass-through, opening curtain on testing-light horizons. .