I Was Never One of Them novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Caretaker's Cabin

Rhys stitches her hand and sets one rule for the night, Whitney's cut of the video goes viral, and at 2 a.m. Gavin calls the caretaker Nolan Briggs.

I got in because the rain was coming down sideways and I had no other option.

The truck smelled of wet wool and cut wood.

He did not ask where I was going or what had happened.

"How do you know my name?" I said.

"The guest list is on the kitchen counter. I stock the pantry." He kept his eyes on the road. "It has full names."

That was a reasonable answer, so I let it go.

The wipers could not keep up.

A mile on, a pine had come down across the road, as thick as a man, with its roots torn out of the bank.

He stopped the truck in front of it and sat there a moment with his hands on the wheel.

"Pass is closed behind that," he said. "Nothing gets through till the crew cuts it at dawn."

"Then take me back to the lodge."

"You don't want that."

He was right, and I hated that he was right.

"My cabin's a quarter mile back," he said. "Stove's lit. It's dry."

I looked at the scar across his eyebrow.

I looked at his hands, big and still and scraped across the knuckles.

"I'll take the stove," I said.

The cabin was one room, a woodstove, a narrow bed against the wall and a table with one chair.

He dropped a folded flannel shirt and a towel into my arms and turned his back.

I changed behind the open door of a cupboard.

When I came out, he was standing at the table with a first aid kit open.

"Your hand," he said.

I looked down.

The veil's tiny comb had cut a line across my palm, and I had been bleeding on my mother's lace for a mile without noticing.

"I'll do it," I said.

"You'll bleed on the lace."

He said it flatly, a fact about the lace, and I let him take my wrist.

His fingers were rough and very careful.

He cleaned the cut and pressed a butterfly strip across it.

His thumb rested on the inside of my wrist for one second longer than the bandage needed.

My pulse jumped against it, and I knew he felt it.

Neither of us said anything.

He let go and stepped back to the stove.

"Here's how this goes," he said. "You stay till the road opens. In the morning I drive you down to the highway. Till then, no questions about the Lockridges. Not from you and not from me."

"Why not from you?"

"Because I work for them."

"Fine," I said. "What's your name?"

"Rhys."

He did not offer a last name, and I did not ask.

I sat on the bed with the lace in my lap while he fed the stove.

My phone buzzed against the table, then again, then kept buzzing.

I picked it up.

Whitney had posted the video from the mock wedding.

It was cut to forty seconds.

It showed Whitney in the veil and me tearing it off her head, and nothing else.

There was no kiss and no ladle and no Gavin's hand on her back.

The caption said, *Sore loser ruins her own engagement party. Pray for Gavin.*

Four hundred thousand views in three hours.

I scrolled the comments.

*She looks unhinged.*

*Imagine being this jealous of your fiancé's bestie.*

*The bestie was LITERALLY a bridesmaid. Chill.*

The room swam.

"They cut the kiss," Rhys said quietly.

I looked up.

He was not looking at my phone.

He was looking at the fire.

"How would you know that?"

"I know how that crowd edits."

I set the phone face down on the bed.

At 2 a.m. the knocking started.

It was fast and polite, the knock of a person used to doors opening.

Rhys stood, wiped his hands, and opened the door.

Gavin stood on the porch in a good raincoat, with water running off his hair.

Whitney stood behind him with a flashlight and her phone held up and the red light on.

Gavin saw me on the bed in a flannel shirt that was not mine.

His face went through three expressions, and none of them was sorry.

"Haz. Come on. You've made your point. Come back to the lodge."

"No."

"You're sitting in a stranger's cabin at two in the morning."

"He's not a stranger. He's the only one who stopped."

Whitney laughed behind her phone.

"She doesn't know," she said. "Gavin, she really doesn't know."

Gavin's eyes finally went to the man in the doorway.

He had to look up to do it.

"Hello, Nolan," he said.

Rhys did not move.

"Gavin."

"You're not supposed to go near guests. Your parole says so." Whitney tilted the phone toward him, delighted. "Isn't that right, Nolan Briggs?"

The stove ticked in the silence.

I knew that name.

I had read it eight years ago on the sentencing papers, and I had heard it since in my mother's voice.

It belonged to the man who had killed my brother.

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