Matthew came back in through the front door after walking the grounds as I was poking around in the kitchen. The refrigerator was well stocked, the freezer full of plenty of food.

“How’s the freezer look?” he asked.

“Not too bad. Enough food here to keep an army fed for a month or two.”

“Probably only a week,” he said. “You’d be surprised how much armies eat.”

“What’s that old saying? An army fights on its stomach.”

“Something like that, yeah.” He came over to the kitchen island and leaned against the counter. “Now that we’re kind of settled in, we should probably call it a night. We’ve got a long morning ahead of us tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, my single word response gradually becoming a deep yawn. “I know. I’m just worried, that’s all.”

“About the meeting tomorrow?”

“Everything. I’m worried about everything. Is this going to be enough evidence to get Uncle Zeke out? Are these guys going to keep coming after me when it’s all said and done?”

“Well,” he said, straightening up a little, “I guess we can break it down a little. I think they’re just trying to scare you, trying to keep you from turning over any kind of evidence you have. Your testimony doesn’t matter for much of anything, to be honest.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Nope. You haven’t personally witnessed anything except for Reggie coming out and shooting at us. And, yeah, you could testify about that, but it’s not enough to make a dent in a criminal organization. Everything else? That’s just hearsay, and won’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny.”

“So, even if I turn over the evidence and we get Zeke out, everything’s going to be fine? There’s nothing they could do to me that would stop the process?”

“Right. Once we turn the evidence over, there’s no retracting it. It’s not like a witness testimony, it can’t lie or change its testimony.”

“What about you? You were there, he spoke to you.”

He pressed his lips together into a thin line. “Yeah. About that. I mean, I guess they could try and do something to me, but I wouldn’t ever flip like that.”

“You’re sure? What if they tried to get to the people around you instead?”

“Neither would any of the guys. They’d want me to keep going.”

“What about…what about their significant others?” I asked, knowing full well what I meant. What about me? “The people in their lives?”

He ran a hand down his face. “Worse comes to worst, guess I’d just leave the Rock,” he slowly said. “I mean, I like it here, but I don’t want to cause anyone any discomfort or pain by just being around. But if that’s what it takes to bring these guys down, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

“You’d just leave?” I asked, my eyes wide with shock. “Well, I’m coming with you, then,” I blurted out, surprising even myself.

He laughed, clearly a little taken aback by my pronouncement.

“No, it’s my fault you’d have to leave,” I continued before he could reply. “I’m the one who dragged you into this. Why shouldn’t I be the one to go with you?”

“You’re serious,” he asked quietly, “aren’t you?”

I nodded, realizing that I was. “Completely. I’m a good teacher, I can go anywhere I want and find work. And you’re a firefighter, you can do the same thing if you want to.”

He chuckled. “You do realize you just promised to follow me anywhere in the country, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

He shook his head, still smiling. “Rebecca, you hardly know me.”

“I don’t care if I hardly know you.” I looked away from him, down at the kitchen island’s counter top as I searched for the words hidden deep inside myself. I spoke without looking back up, my face red with preemptive embarrassment at what I was about to say to him. “There’s just something about you, Matthew. I don’t know what it is, but I feel drawn to you.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment, and my face just got redder as the silence stretched out further and further.

“You’re really one of a kind,” he finally said, his voice nearly a whisper, “you know that?”

I looked backed up at his smiling face, a little smile of my own spreading. “You know, in the short amount of time I’ve known you, I’ve begun to realize the same thing.”

Our gazes stayed locked like that for a long, unbearable moment, his dark eyes burning like embers as we stood motionless, both controlling our urges. I wanted him to leap across the kitchen counter, to wrap me in his arms, to carry my back to the bedroom like a firefighter saving a maiden from the flames. If he’d done it right then, I would have gone completely willingly, too.

He looked away first and my stomach dropped in disappointment.

“Well,” he said, yawning for the first time, “I think we should both get some sleep. It’s nearly one, and we have to be up in just a few hours.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, groaning a little inside as I pushed the thoughts from my head. “We do have a long day tomorrow.”

But before we got to the next morning, we still had a long night ahead of us.