Chapter 9 The Collision

The hallway stretched. Impossible. Twenty feet that felt like twenty miles. Wren’s boots moved—one foot, then the other—but the rest of her didn’t feel attached to them anymore. Dr. Webb walked beside her, steady as mountain stone, but she couldn’t hear his breathing over the rush of blood in her ears.

The office door was a sliver of light and wood. A soft warmth bled through the gap and made the polished floor glow. There was movement inside: the scrape of paper, a chair shifting, the low, precise sounds of someone arranging the morning into order.

Wren stopped. Webb stopped.

“You can do this,” he said quietly, not like a command but like someone handing her a rope.

Could she? One night of rehearsals had never felt so useless. She’d known this moment since she accepted the job—that she would have to walk into Jonah Raines’s office and sit in a chair he’d put in place, that she would hear sentences form on his face before he said them aloud. She’d practiced every apology and every possible explanation in the dark, the phrases arranged and rearranged like specimens on a tray. None of it matched the heat in her palms now.

Webb knocked—twice—soft and professional. “Director Raines? Ms. Blackwood is here.”

A pause, a measured breath. Then the voice she had not expected to hear in person for a decade, low and steady: “Send her in.”

He turned to the window before he turned to her — a small, deliberate delay, a defense of the last seconds he could control. Wren heard the chair scrape against the floor as he rose, the sound sharp in the quiet. She caught the rhythm of his footsteps crossing the room, steady but weighted, and the faint, clean click of his pen being set down. In that pause, she heard the office breathe — the hum of air vents, the whisper of paper, the silence pressing between them like a held breath.

“Please,” he said without looking, the single word both invitation and test. “Have a seat.”

Her feet clung to the floor, heavy with hesitation. Every instinct screamed at her to run, to turn and bolt back down the hallway, back to the safety of the lab’s steady hum and the sharp comfort of solvent in the air. But his voice held her — firm yet invisible, like a hand pressed gently at the small of her back. She moved, slow as the tide pulling against the shore, and the strap of her bag bit into her shoulder so sharply she flinched, the sting grounding her in the moment she couldn’t escape.

The office hit her in a dozen tiny ways. The scent first—cedar shelves, the faint endurance of black coffee, the sharp, clean tang of lemon polish from the windowsill. The space was larger than the photos on the museum site had led her to expect. Books aligned in perfect ranks, spines like a tidy town. A leather chair, a neat stack of accession forms, a lamp with the warm light of an evening that had been turned on early.

And then him—standing by the window, back to her, a shape she’d kept turning over in memory for years.

He moved in small, careful motions — reaching for a folder, adjusting the papers, smoothing a stack as though tidying them could quiet the storm inside him. She saw it, the fragile attempt at control, and felt her own heartbeat answer. The years had given him a narrower face, a jaw that no longer softened when he smiled, hair threaded now with silver at the temples. He still wore that look that had always made her want to both run and stay—intent, contained, the habit of someone who measured every step.

When he finally turned, the world peeled down to that single moment. He looked older. Sharper. Harder. And those eyes—green-hazel, precise, the kind of gaze that cataloged everything—met hers, and briefly she saw a boy she’d once known who had become a man more careful than she deserved.

She spoke without thinking. “Jonah.”

It left her like a breath. Too familiar. Too intimate. It cracked somewhere in the middle. He didn’t blink. He let the name hang there like an accusation and a plea at once.

For a long second, neither of them moved. The air in the room felt thinner, as if someone had drawn the walls closer to listen. Jonah’s hand flexed around a file folder on his desk. The folder trembled. Papers scattered when his grip faltered and slid across the polished wood—small white islands on a brown sea.

“Jonah,” she said again, this time steadier, because she needed to prove she had courage left. That she had crossed the mountain and the years to stand here.

He let the sound of her voice hit him. He had practiced his neutrality all night—rehearsed the lines he would use, the measured tones that would keep public and private separate. But rehearsal meets the body, and the body was treacherous.

“No.” He said it so softly it could have been a heart trying to stop its own memory. Denial as a reflex. He had built things out of denial—stability, the museum, his long mornings—and it stayed in him now like a scaffold.

“You knew,” he said after a pause that tightened the air. The statement was a flat stone dropped into water; it was not a question. It carried ten years of absence in it.

She nodded. The gesture was small. The room spun. “Yes.”

The admission felt like glass on her tongue. She’d signed the documents, filled the forms, given her previous employers’ contact—they all pointed her back home. She had known his name had to appear on the staff list. She had known, and she had let herself come anyway.

Jonah’s laugh then—short, bitter—cut the room off from the outside world. “You came anyway.” He let it hang. “You came back to this town. To my museum. You applied for a job I had to approve.”

“My mother…” The words tumbled out, fragile as paper that had been folded and unfolded too many times. “Ruth is sick, Jonah. She needs more help. Seattle is… the arrangements weren’t working. I—this job would let me be here. Near her.”

He listened, though his face did not change. He moved slowly around the desk to stand no further than a few feet from her. Too close and she’d have to remember the old weight of his hand; too far and he’d be a stranger whose distance cut at her chest.

“Convenient,” he said, and that single word tasted like acid. “So I was convenient. A location. A thing to make the logistics easier.”

“No,” she said immediately, the word tripping with the force of wanting to be believed. “Jonah. It wasn’t like that.”

“Then why?” He demanded it as if he had been saving the word through the years. The room compressed with it. “Why leave without telling me? Why not trust me enough to say we had a choice? Why leave me to build a life around a hole you made?”

Her throat tightened. She had practiced answering that in the dark a thousand times, but now his eyes were the size and color of accusation.

“I thought—” she started, and the soft, practiced sentence she’d planned for years evaporated. “I thought I was protecting you. I thought if I left, it would let you go, let you become what you wanted. I didn’t want to anchor you to a small town if you were meant for bigger things. I was afraid I’d ruin you.”

He took a breath that came out like a small choke. “You decided that for me. You decided you knew what was best for my life.”

“You asked me once—we were young—what did you want? You said the museum, Jonah. You wanted this. You wanted to… build it. I thought I was sparing you the trap of a life you didn’t choose.”

He laughed then, the sound like a brittle twig. “You ran, Wren. That’s what you did. You ran and left wreckage behind and expected me to sweep it up.”

“Jonah—” she moved a half-step forward, and he retreated a half-step. The enlarging and shrinking made her dizzy.

“Stop.” The single word landed with the weight of a gavel. He breathed hard enough that she could see the movement at the base of his throat. Then his voice folded into a quieter shape. “Don’t give me reasons. Don’t ask me to explain. Don’t make me indulge the possibility that I could forgive you with a tidy set of circumstances.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. The reasons pressing against her heart were heavy with selfishness, fear, and too many nights spent tallying the cost. None of them could heal the years between them.

“You left,” he said finally, cold as a winter branch. “You left, and I learned to live without you. I learned to build walls. I learned to be someone who was not demolished by missing you.”

It was a confession honed into a defense.

She felt something inside her fold in on itself like a book closing. “I’m sorry,” she said, and the phrase was small and huge at once.

“Sorry.” He repeated the word as if tasting it. “I’ve heard that before, Wren. I spent the first two years after you left untangling promises and pictures. Sorry is thin. It fits into small gaps. It doesn’t repair.”

She wanted to argue. She longed to tell him about the nights on the road, about the fear of a future so heavy she had forced it onto someone else’s shoulders, about the little girl in Seattle whose eyes mirrored his. But those truths had no place in the plan he had drawn for them; she had learned they were too tender for the weight of the hurt he held.

Jonah stepped around the desk again and stood so close she could smell the coffee stain at the corner of his mug and the faint leather of his chair. Close enough to see the fine lines that edged his mouth now. Close enough that she could read the fatigue in the set of his shoulders.

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said, the words near a roar and then intentionally soft. “I don’t want to hear the reasons because I know how reasons work—someone argues, someone defends, someone asks for forgiveness and expects it like a ticket. I cannot give you that.”

The stillness that followed was heavy and absolute. She felt as if the museum itself had exhaled and decided to hold itself between them, waiting.

“But we work here,” she said, voice hollow. “Jonah, I’m here to work. I can be professional. I can—”

“You are hired. You will be paid. You will do the work expected of you.” He rounded his words like a corner and fixed them with a business-slate calm. “You are my employee. That is not negotiable.”

His eyes finally looked full on her. They were iron-hard, but within the steel she caught—was it grief? A memory?—the quick flash of something that used to be softness.

She swallowed. “I understand.”

“Good.” He sat without ceremony, picked up the scattered papers, and sorted them with hands that trembled only barely. “Dr. Webb will show you to your station. Ask him anything you need to know about procedures. If you have questions I can’t answer immediately, we’ll arrange a time to go over them. During business hours.”

“Ms. Blackwood.” The title cut her like salt wind. Not Wren. Not her name, not the person. He had turned her into a professional label, something tidy enough for a file but too cold for a heart. And it hurt in a way she hadn’t expected — bureaucratic, distant, closing.

“Yes.” She heard how small her reply was. She meant it to be larger, to stand on its own feet. It failed.

She turned, the world narrowing into the wooden door frame in front of her. Hands that had guided specimens, smoothed feathers, and repaired eyes felt clumsy at her sides. She reached for the handle.

“Wren.” The single use of her name stopped her like ice water. Hope flared foolish and immediate.

“Don’t,” he said before she could say anything. It was not an order now; it was a plea. The edge in his voice was gone. What remained was the naked center of a wound laid open.

“Don’t what?” she asked because her mouth refused to be quiet.

“Don’t make me remember.” The words were a whisper that cracked. He looked away quickly, back to the ledger to hide the way his face betrayed him.

She understood in a way that slid past shame and lodged in rawness: not because he hated her, but because remembering would mean reopening the ache he had spent years learning to live with. He wasn’t asking her to be forgotten; he was asking to be spared the sudden exposure of what he still felt.

She left him then—the door whispered closed behind her—and the hallway felt like a cavernous place of echoes. Her knees gave once, nd Webb’s firm hands steadied her. He caught the weight that folded in the middle of her, the collapse that followed the exchange.

“Easy,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”

She let him, because strength had to be borrowed in this moment. Her breath did not come evenly. The world tasted like metal and old varnish.

“He hates me,” she said into his chest, the sentence a confession she needed to get out of her ribs.

Webb’s fingers flexed just slightly against her arms. He did not smile. He was not blithe. He was steady and old and soft in a way that made guilt and comfort sit in the same space.

“No,” he said. “He doesn’t.”

“You didn’t see—” she started, the memory of Jonah’s hard face like a hand closing around her heart.

“I’ve known him five years,” Webb interrupted, firm but kindly, the voice of someone accustomed to telling truths carefully. “And I can tell you with absolute certainty—he doesn’t hate you.”

Wren looked up at him, eyes raw. “Then what—”

Webb tightened his hold — not to restrain, but to steady her. His voice carried a careful sorrow, the kind of knowledge that comes only from standing too near another’s breaking point.

“He still loves you,” he said quietly. “And that’s what’s killing him.”