The Watcher Girl(66)

He found us.

He came to stop her.

They argued about what to do next—and he chose me.

He chose to do the right thing, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time.

“When have I ever been one to dwell?” he asks. And he’s right. He was always daydreaming only of the future, leaving the past where it was.

“True.”

He pushes himself up, shuffles to the kitchen, and grabs a fresh beer from the fridge.

“She hadn’t slept in weeks,” he says when he sits. “An hour or two here, an hour there. I was out of town that first week, but when I got back, I knew something was different about her. By the time she told me you were in town, that she’d been talking to you, I started to keep an eye on her. That’s when I told her to stay away from you. And I told you to stay away from her. And neither of you listened.”

Sutton shakes his head and uncaps his beer with his bare hand.

“She asked me to meet her at the park one night,” I say. “Implied that you’d hit her. She’d been crying. There was a welt on her cheek.”

“Ah,” he says. “She had a couple of violent episodes the last few weeks. Sometimes she’d hurt herself. Sometimes I had to restrain her.”

I think of the kitchen camera that day, Sutton’s hands on her shoulders. He must have been restraining her, not shaking her.

“I just want you to know,” I say, “that I’m sorry everything turned out this way.”

“Grace, don’t be sorry. You didn’t cause any of this. Not directly anyway.”

“If there’s ever anything you need . . .” I don’t know what I could possibly have to offer him at this point, but he needs to know he matters to me. The man saved my life.

“Appreciate it.” He eyes the hallway, where his daughter sleeps behind a closed door.

I rise from the sofa.

He walks me to the door.

“You going to be okay?” I ask when I step out to the porch.

He leans in the doorway, elbow resting on the jamb, and leaves me with a bittersweet smile. “We’ll be fine, Grace. Maybe worry about yourself now for a change?”

I amble home, taking my time, dissecting his words as they echo in my head.

All this time I thought he wasn’t okay. He took one look at me and knew it was the other way around. And he’s not wrong.

For weeks, I thought I’d broken him.

Turns out I’m the broken one. While I ran away from love, Sutton embraced it. While I preferred to numb my feelings and avoid anything that could remotely disturb my emotional bluntness, he sprinted toward his future, eyes wide shut and arms wide open. He welcomed the good, the bad, the easy, and the hard. The certain and the not so certain.

Sutton had it right this whole time.

And me? I had it all wrong.

At thirty years old, I know now that I haven’t been living. I’ve merely been alive. And that’s the difference between him and me.

Ten minutes later, I stride through the front door of my father’s home, inhaling the lemon dusting cleaner. The hint of lavender. The scent of leather dress shoes. Breathing in the vintage rugs, the essence of time, of years gone by.

And for the first time in my life, this house feels like home.





EPILOGUE

Three Months Later

“So much for Charleston, eh?” Jonah crowds the last moving box into the passenger side of my U-Haul and carefully closes the door.

When I told him I was moving across the country, he insisted on driving down from Seattle to help. I almost turned him down, until he reminded me that my only other option involved paying strangers to touch my things.

He knows me too well.

“Someday,” I say. Charleston was going to be my next stop after Portland. I’d always heard it was slower paced than the West Coast, crammed full of history and charm with a side of those relaxed drawls I’d only ever heard in the movies. After that? Miami. Someplace vibrant and tropical.

But for now, I’m moving home—to Monarch Falls.

In a few months, Rose will have her baby, and she’s already asked me to be his godmother. She even asked me to choose his middle name. I told her I have horrible taste in names, but she insists. I hope for the kid’s sake she changes her mind before he comes. I’m making a list, just in case.

That said, I’m quietly excited to be an aunt. It’s not something I broadcast to strangers at the coffee shop or the woman cutting my hair, but I think about it often, this next chapter for Rose, the next generation of our family. And I’ve caught myself ambling into baby boutiques a handful of times, always walking out with something small to give after he’s born. A onesie with a dancing elephant. A sterling silver rattle. A muslin swaddle covered in sailboats.

In silence, I try to imagine Jonah as a dad, but I can’t. He’s as awkward and uncomfortable around tiny humans as I am. We both get tongue-tied and never say the right thing. Plus, neither of us is warm or fuzzy. Some people aren’t meant to become parents, and that’s perfectly okay.

I lean against the driver’s side door, arms folded, not quite ready to say goodbye yet.

“Let me know if you ever want your job back,” Jonah says.

“Appreciate it, but I hope it doesn’t come to that.” I chuckle. For ten years I’ve chased the dark side of the human psyche, spending my days in the underbelly of the internet. But it’s time to move on. It’s time to focus on other things—like getting to know my parents. And spending time with Rose and Sebastian.