The clean, conditioned air of Ben’s ridiculously oversized truck was a world away from the stale beer and simmering violence of The Swamp Devil. The scent of new leather and his familiar, subtle cologne should have been comforting, a balm to the raw nerves Nash Guidry had exposed.
Instead, it felt like a sterile enclosure, too quiet, too clean. I could still feel the phantom weight of the Gravedigger’s gaze on my skin, a heavy, assessing pressure that had somehow made me feel more seen than Ben’s gentle smile ever had.
“You’re quiet,” Ben said, his voice a low, smooth murmur that used to soothe me. He reached across the center console, his warm fingers wrapping around mine.
His touch was soft, his nails perfectly manicured. Nothing like the scarred, calloused hands I’d glimpsed gripping the bar back at that dive.
“Just thinking,” I said, my voice flatter than I intended.
“About him?” The question was casual, but a muscle ticked in his jaw. “The Gravedigger? Callie, you need to stay away from him. He’s bad news. Always has been.”
“He knew Hannah,” I stated, not as a question. It was a fact that had settled in my bones the moment our eyes met.
Ben sighed, a sound of practiced patience. “Everyone in a town this small knows everyone, Cal. That doesn’t mean anything.”
He squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry. I’m handling it. I’m handling everything.”
He turned off the main road onto a familiar dirt track, the one choked with weeds and memories. Towering cypress trees draped in Spanish moss crowded in on either side, their branches creating a dappled, secretive twilight even in the middle of the afternoon.
My heart gave a painful, nostalgic thud. Our spot.
He parked where the track dissolved into a patch of sun-scorched grass overlooking the lake. The water was a sheet of hammered copper under the descending sun.
A dilapidated wooden dock, the one his father had built and we’d claimed as our own in a hundred stolen summer afternoons, jutted out into the still water.
“Remember this place?” he asked softly, cutting the engine. The sudden silence was filled with the thrumming of cicadas.
“Of course I do.” It was where he’d first told me he loved me. Where I’d cried on his shoulder after my mom died. Where we’d made clumsy, heartfelt plans for a future that had never happened.
He got out and came around to open my door, a perfect gentleman. It felt like a performance. Everything with Ben felt like a performance lately. On the truck’s back seat, I saw a thick manila folder.
“I brought you something,” he said, following my gaze. He retrieved the folder and led me toward the dock. The old wood groaned under our weight.
We sat on the edge, our feet dangling just above the murky water.
He handed me the folder. My name, Callie Beaumont, was written on the tab in his neat, decisive block letters.
My breath hitched.
“What is this?”
“The official case file,” he said, his tone heavy with significance. “I shouldn’t be showing you this. If my dad found out… but I want you to trust me. I want you to see that we did everything we could.”
My fingers trembled as I opened it. The first page was the initial incident report.
I scanned the dry, bureaucratic language, my eyes snagging on Hannah’s name.
Victim: Hannah Dubois. Age: 22.
The words swam. I forced myself to keep reading, to absorb the clinical details of where she was found, the time of death, the official terminology that stripped all the life and light from my best friend and reduced her to a collection of facts.
Then I turned the page. And the next. And the next.
Thick black lines, stark and absolute, redacted entire paragraphs. Names, witness statements, sections of the coroner’s report—all of it was gone, hidden behind impenetrable bars of ink.
It was a mockery of transparency. A book with half the pages ripped out.
“Ben, what is this?” I asked, my voice rising. “This is… this is nothing. It’s all blacked out.”
“It’s procedure, Cal,” he said calmly, placing a placating hand on my back. “We have to protect the privacy of certain individuals, ongoing investigative threads…”
“Ongoing? You just told me the case was closed. That it was an accident.” I slapped the file shut, the sound sharp in the humid air.
“Which is it? Is it ongoing, or was it an accident? Because this,” I shook the folder, the papers rattling, “this feels like a cover-up.”
His handsome face tightened, the easy charm vanishing, replaced by a frustration he was trying, and failing, to conceal.
“It was an accident. She was drinking, she slipped and hit her head, she drowned. It’s a tragedy. A god-awful, horrible tragedy. But that’s all it is. These redactions are just… loose ends. Things that don’t lead anywhere. They would only confuse you, make you chase ghosts.”
“Let me be confused!” I shot back, turning to face him fully.
“Let me chase the ghosts. She was my best friend. I deserve to know what a ‘loose end’ looks like. I deserve to know who she was with, what the coroner actually said. Everything.”
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said, his voice dropping, becoming intimate, persuasive. He cupped my jaw, his thumb stroking my cheek.
“Can’t you see that? Dragging all this up again, poking around guys like Guidry… it’s not safe. Let it go. Please. For me.”
His eyes, the color of warm whiskey, were full of earnest sincerity. The Ben I had loved for years was in there, the boy who held my hand at funerals and drove two hours just to bring me soup when I had the flu.
He pulled me closer, his other arm sliding around my waist. The air between us grew thick with unspoken history, with the ghosts of who we used to be.
“We were good here,” he murmured, his breath warm against my temple. “Remember how good we were, Cal?”
I did. I remembered the easy laughter, the feeling of absolute safety in his arms.
It was a siren song, pulling me back to a simpler time, a time before Hannah was a name in a redacted file and Nash Guidry was a storm cloud on my horizon.
He leaned in, and I didn’t pull away. I couldn’t. Some part of me was exhausted, desperate for the comfort he was offering, for the familiar shore in the middle of this tempest.
His kiss was exactly as I remembered. Deep and sure, a taste of sunshine and certainty.
It wasn’t a question, but a statement. It spoke of shared memories, of lazy Sundays and tangled sheets.
His hand slid from my jaw to the back of my neck, his fingers tangling in my hair, holding me to him. For a breathless moment, I let myself sink into it, into him.
This was the life I could have had.
Safe. Predictable. Loved. A white picket fence and a golden retriever and a husband who would always, always try to protect me.
But from what?
The thought sliced through the nostalgic haze like a shard of glass. He wasn’t protecting me. He was managing me.
The case file, this trip down memory lane, this kiss—it was all a strategy to placate the difficult woman, to gentle her back into the box he’d built for her.
The comfort he offered wasn’t a safe harbor; it was a gilded cage.
The predatory intensity of Nash Guidry’s eyes flashed in my mind—raw, brutally honest, and utterly without artifice.
He hadn’t tried to soothe me with pretty lies. He’d told me to leave before I got hurt. It was a threat, but it was an honest one.
Ben’s kiss, so warm a second ago, now felt suffocating.
I placed my palms flat against his chest and pushed. Not hard, but with a finality that made him break away, his eyes wide with confusion.
“Callie?”
“No,” I said, my voice quiet but firm. I slid away from him on the dock, putting a few feet of splintered wood between us. The redacted file lay there like an accusation.
“Don’t do this, Ben. Don’t use our past to try and shut me up.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” he said, his voice strained. “I’m trying to remind you of what’s real.”
“What’s real is that my best friend is dead and you’re handing me a file full of black ink and telling me not to ask questions.”
I stood up, brushing splinters from my jeans. The magical, golden light of the sunset suddenly felt sickly and orange.
“What’s real is that you’re hiding something. I don’t know if you’re protecting someone or just protecting your father’s reputation as sheriff, but you are not telling me the truth.”
“Callie, that’s ridiculous—”
“Is it?” I looked him straight in the eye, and for the first time, I didn’t see the boy I once loved. I saw a man making a calculated choice, and I wasn’t the one he was choosing to protect.
“Hannah deserved better than a convenient accident and a redacted file, Ben. And I won’t let that be the end of her story.”
I turned and walked back down the dock, my footsteps echoing in the sudden, heavy silence between us.
He didn’t follow. He just sat there, a handsome, familiar stranger surrounded by the ghosts of a life I could no longer have, and no longer wanted.
The drive back to town was a cold, silent war. He was trying to offer me a yesterday I’d outgrown, a safe story to make the world make sense.
But I didn’t want safety. I wanted the truth.
And I had a sudden, gut-wrenching certainty that the only person in this godforsaken town who might give it to me was the one everyone, especially Ben, had warned me to stay away from.