Ryder Cross's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Ryder Cross had loved the woman for six months and never once told her the truth about his past. He wanted her. He wanted the kind of trust that let a man set down what he carried. But every time she asked where he came from, he changed the subject. Tonight she stood on the porch of the house he had driven her to, and she was waiting for an answer he had never given anyone. The house sagged behind him. Weathered siding peeled in strips. A broken window gaped above the sagging roof. He had grown up here, and he had not stepped inside in fourteen years. "You said you'd show me who you are," she said. "So show me." He climbed the rotted porch steps. His boots knocked hollow on the boards. He pushed the front door, and it dragged across warped wood. Dust hung in the gray light. He walked to the kitchen, knelt at a loose floorboard, and pried it up with his fingers. Under it sat a small carved heart on a cord. He had made it at twelve, from a scrap of oak, for a mother who died before he could give it. He had hidden it the night his father drank himself cruel and burned everything soft in the house. Ryder turned and put the carving in her hand. "My mother died in that room," he said. He pointed. His voice stayed low and rough. "My father blamed me. He made sure I knew it every day until I ran. I carved this for her. I never gave it to anyone because giving it meant someone could take it." She closed her fingers around the wood. She did not flinch, and she did not pity him. She stepped closer. "You just gave it to me," she said. He nodded. His throat worked. For the first time the past sat outside him instead of locked inside. The relief nearly buckled his knees. "I want you to keep it," he said. "I want you to know all of it. The parts I hate too." She lifted the cord over her head. The carved heart settled against her chest. She reached up and rested her palm on his jaw, and she did not pull away when he leaned into her hand. "Then we start there," she said. "All of it." Ryder had finally opened the door he swore he never would. She was no longer at arm's length. She stood against him now, wearing the truest thing he owned. But she wore something else too. He felt the thin band on the finger against his cheek. A ring he had never seen. She followed his eyes to it and went still, and he understood the truth had opened a door on her side as well, one she had kept shut just as long.