Firefly Nights

CHAPTER 19.45

|7 days later|

    The light came in slow.

Not golden, not soft—just pale and unsteady, the kind that doesn't warm so much as it reveals. It slipped through the cracks in the loft slats like it was trespassing, careful not to wake the dust or disturb the hush that blanketed everything. It pooled in the hollows between floorboards, stretched long and thin across the quilt, and touched the edge of the rope rail like it was remembering something it didn't quite know how to hold.

I hadn't meant to wake. Not really. But some part of me always did when he moved. The quiet absence of his body had weight, and even in sleep, I felt it shift.

Still curled on my side, I reached out across the bed—instinct more than thought—my fingers sweeping slow across the place where he should've been.

The cotton was cold. Not cool from a breath of wind or the draft that sometimes sneaked in through the barn roof, but settled. Long gone. The kind of cold that told the truth no matter how much you didn't want to hear it.

I flattened my palm against it anyway. Held still. Like maybe if I was quiet enough, he'd reappear. Like maybe I'd misread the signs, and he'd come walking up the loft steps with morning on his shoulders and coffee in his hands.

But there was no sound. No boots. No voice. No warmth bleeding back into the sheets.

My eyes opened, slow and wide, the ceiling above me nothing but a blur of pine beams and skylight—gray and washed out, the kind of color winter wore when it forgot how to be beautiful.

I stayed there for a moment, staring at nothing, the breath caught somewhere between my ribs and throat. The kind of pause that didn't feel like stillness, but bracing. Like my body already knew what came next and was trying to give me a head start.

Then I called his name.

Once. Soft.

"Colt?"

It hung in the loft like a thread waiting to snap.

Nothing answered.

And then I was moving. Fast. Messy. Like the truth had finally caught up with my body and shoved it forward. I threw the quilt aside, its weight folding in on itself like something that couldn't hold me anymore, and I stood too quick—dizzy for half a second, toes hitting the cold pine with a slap that sounded too loud for a morning that hadn't even begun yet.

The stairs creaked beneath me as I took them barefoot, not careful. My pajama pants dragged behind me, fleece catching on the worn wood, knees nearly buckling when I missed a step and caught myself on the banister like that might be where he was waiting.

But when I reached the barn floor, the silence was too complete.

Not just quiet. Absent.

The kind of silence that presses in on the lungs, fills the hollows behind your ribs like smoke, refuses to let sound find a place to land. I stood still for a breath too long, eyes darting toward the stalls as if one of them might hold an answer. But the air only held the faint memory of him—faded soap, old leather, something warmer I couldn't name.

I moved toward Red's stall without thinking, my heart rising into the hollow of my throat like it could stop what I already knew. My hand gripped the top rail, steadying myself. The gate was unlatched. The bedding inside—flat, untouched, the way it always looked before a horse stepped into it. No scuffed straw. No half-moon prints in the dirt. No shift of weight in the shadows. No warm breath huffing into the cold.

Just straw. And space. And nothing.

Red was gone.

Colt wouldn't have left without saying goodbye.