Trapped With My Husband's Cruel Brother

The Uber driver didn't even apologize.

He just stopped the car at the edge of a two-lane road that disappeared into black trees, popped my suitcase out of the trunk, and said, "GPS dies out here. Road's too narrow anyway. You're close enough." Then he was gone, taillights shrinking to two red dots and then nothing, and I was standing alone on the shoulder of a highway in the Adirondacks at eleven-something at night with a rolling suitcase and a coat that was absolutely right for a Manhattan April and absolutely wrong for this one.

Colton had said the lake house was easy to find.

Colton said a lot of things.

I walked. The gravel road was uneven and my suitcase wheel caught every rock like it had a personal grudge. The trees pressed in close on both sides, and the cold wasn't the polite kind of cold you feel waiting for a cab on Fifth Avenue. It had teeth. It got inside my collar and down my sleeves and by the time the tree line opened up and I saw the dark shape of the cabin sitting at the edge of the water, my fingers had gone from numb to not there at all.

I saw the orange flare first.

A cigarette, burning on the porch.

I stopped walking. My suitcase rolled one more half-rotation and stopped with me.

There was a man sitting on the porch steps. He had Colton's jaw and Colton's shoulders, that same broad, unhurried build, but nothing else about him was Colton. Colton was soft in the way that money makes people soft, rounded at the edges, always slightly underdressed for the weather because he never had to worry about consequences. This man was none of that. He was still in the way that things are still when they're deciding something. When the cigarette flared again, it lit his eyes for just a second — gray, or maybe green, it was too dark to tell — and whatever color they were, they had already taken me apart and put me back together before I'd taken another step.

He wasn't surprised to see me.

That was the part that made my stomach drop.

He stood, and the movement was unhurried in a way that felt almost deliberate, like time worked differently for him. He dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his boot. Then he walked down the porch steps.

"You're Harper." Not a question.

His voice was lower than Colton's. Rougher. Like something that had been worn down by weather or silence or both.

"Colton didn't—"

"Tell you I was here. I know." He reached out and took my suitcase handle. I hadn't said yes. My hand was still on it. For one strange second we were both holding it, and then he just walked, pulling it with him toward the door, and I stood there with my empty hand in the cold air.

He didn't look back.

I looked at the road behind