Page 21 of Midnight Between Us (The Timberbridge Brothers #4)

Chapter Eighteen

Simone

I don’t wake up to an alarm. Or a phone. Or the rhythm of agents shuffling down the hallway with status updates and tired eyes. I wake up because Keir is screaming.

They are guttural, raw screams tearing from somewhere deep. A fractured sound caught between memory and pain like his body is trying to expel the past one ragged breath at a time.

By the time I reach his room, he’s upright. Sweat-soaked, shirt clinging to him, chest rising in short, uneven bursts. One hand grips the edge of the mattress like he’s bracing for another collision. The other is fisted against his chest, knuckles ghost-white.

I don’t hesitate. I cross the threshold and sit beside him as I used to—back when we were young, reckless, and the world hadn’t cracked open beneath us yet.

“You okay there?”

He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t even acknowledge me. Not at first.

“I was in the trunk again.” His voice is frayed.

“You’re not anymore,” I say gently. “You’re safe, Keir. In a room on the outskirts of Birchwood Springs, safe.”

His eyes remain locked on some point across the room, fixed and vacant. “It smelled like gasoline. And rust. And something else. Sweet. Coopery. Rotten.”

I nod, throat tight. “Blood.”

He swallows hard. “You were in it too—in the trunk. Not at first. Later. I kept trying to scream for you to wake up. We were going to drown, but I couldn’t move.”

There’s a shiver in his words, barely contained. It cuts into me—cleaner than any scalpel ever could.

“You’re safe,” I say again, but it feels like a lie dressed up as comfort.

I used to say the same thing when he’d crawl through my window with a bruised jaw and busted ribs after one of his father’s tantrums. Sometimes, he let me patch him up.

Other times, he kissed me like it was the only way to survive.

Like he needed to lose himself in my body before he did something crazy like eliminate his father for good.

His hand reaches for mine. Not to hold. Not even to touch. Just . . . to get close. He stops so close I can almost feel him.

The scarred knuckles tremble an inch from mine.

There’s like a silent question suspended between us.

I know I should pull away, say no, or . .

. I should just stand up and leave him alone.

Let him deal with his nightmares and all the issues he carries with him.

I’ve done it before. Slammed that door shut more times than I can count after I check on him.

But tonight . . . I don’t. I can’t.

His fingertips brush my wrist. Barely. It’s such a small contact.

It’s like he’s asking permission to remember who we were before everything turned to ruin.

Before he destroyed the girl who had given him his heart and part of her soul.

That poor sweet girl is gone, and I . . . I should get the fuck out of here.

“I don’t know why I ended up . . . in that trunk or this house.” His voice is absent. I wonder if his mind is somewhere else in time or just . . .

“I don’t even know if I’ll make it out alive,” he continues, bringing me back to this moment. “But every time you look at me like I’m a stranger, it hurts worse than the rest of it.”

I freeze.

Because why would it hurt?

He’s the one who walked. Who disappeared as if I were just a phase he outgrew. Like our nights together—the heat, our midnights, the fucking ache of it all—meant nothing.

I remember the way he said it, too. He made me feel disposable.

Replaceable. It wasn’t any different than Nina or my grandparents.

At the end of it all, I wasn’t enough. It’s not like it matters anymore, though.

That was then when I was a lost child who couldn’t understand why no one loved her.

Some poor girl who tried her best to mold herself into what everybody else needed to be liked, even loved.

It didn’t work, though. No matter how many A’s I accumulated, how well I behaved or how exceptional the town thought I was, my grandparents always thought I was the little bastard who ruined their daughter’s life.

That’s when it hits me. He’s such a fucking narcissist that he expects I’ll still be begging for the morsels of attention he used to give me.

Fuck that.

I glance at the hand still hovering near mine. There’s a quiet tension between our skin, a pulse of everything I never had the courage to express.

Not again.

This time, I’m the one with the power. He’s the one who needs me. That changes everything.

“I can’t do this again, Keir,” I whisper. “I don’t mix business with history. Especially not this history.”

He doesn’t blink, doesn’t breathe either until he says, “Then tell me to stop trying.”

“I just did.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I do mean it.”

“Then why are you still here? Why am I still here?” he demands. “You can tell whoever is in charge that this assignment is impossible. It’s fucking with my head and . . . something tells me it’s fucking with yours too.”

That’s not what I expected him to say, not at all. Is this assignment fucking with my mind? Absolutely. Can I leave? Not a chance. I’m not even supposed to exist in this town for the time being. To everyone else—including my best friends—I’m in Arizona, sipping tea on my grandparents’ porch.

I take a hard look at him.

“Why you? Why not another doctor?”

“I’m here because it makes sense. You can’t just plant some city doctor in a small town. It’s not believable,” I respond because maybe this will ease his mind. “Was I expecting to see you again? Nope.”

He snorts. “That makes two of us. I was trying to get my brothers out before this place swallowed them whole.” He pauses and swallows hard.

“This company kept throwing money at me, trying to convince me to sell the timber business. They’d give me a bonus if I convince the Maple lady—that’s how they said it—to sell, too.

I knew there’s something wrong, especially when I rejected the offer too many times, and then they threatened us. ”

I nod because that sounds like him. He might have been cold toward his brothers but he always protected them—even Atlas.

“So you’re running the clinic now?” he asks.

I nod. “It made sense. Preacher’s granddaughter comes home? Town eats it up. Not that they care. I’m still Nina’s daughter. Still, the screwup who circled back because I couldn’t make it out there.”

“Who do you work for?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I shrug. “Hopefully, this is my last relocation.”

I don’t tell him the rest—that I’ve been offered a job in any hospital I want. That I’ve earned enough favors to open my clinic if I choose. That all this, this entire facade, was supposed to settle a decades-old debt. Except now I’m not sure who owes who.

The silence returns, thick and unmoving. Like we’re both too tired to pretend we’re not knee-deep in something neither of us understands anymore.

I should leave.

That would be smart.

That’s when I say, “Let me get you some tea. Might help you sleep.”

It’s easier than saying what we’re both too raw to admit: that the past still owns us in ways neither of us can explain—and that we’re both too scared to discuss it.