I nod once. He does too, and just like that, the moment passes. He moves back toward his office.
Beckett watches him go, then exhales. “One day I want to have that effect on people.”
I grab my coffee and head for the dayroom. “You’d need discipline for that.”
He calls after me, “I have presence.”
“Like mold has presence,” Ray says.
This time, Beckett actually laughs.
I leave them to it and drop onto the couch in the dayroom with my mug in one hand and my phone in the other. The room is dimmer than the kitchen, lit mostly by a lamp in the corner and the weak wash from the hall. One of the recliners has a split seam in the arm that nobody has fixed because there’s always something more important. The television is off. The station settles around me in layers—pipes creaking somewhere overhead, a door closing down the hall, the low murmur of Beckett and Ray still talking in the kitchen.
I look at the time.
10:17 p.m.
That weird stretch of the night where it’s too early to feel dead tired and too late to feel fully useful if no one needs anything from you.
My phone buzzes.
Mom:are you eating enough protein to sustain all that heroism?
I huff out a quiet laugh and type back.
Me:define heroism
The answer comes almost immediately.
Mom:I knew it.
Mom:what did you eat?
I glance down at the half-finished coffee in my hand and the plate I already scrubbed.
Me:wings.
A beat.
Mom:microwaved?
I stare at the screen.
The woman has some kind of supernatural surveillance network. That’s the only explanation.
Before I can answer, another text comes through.
Hadley:mom says drink water or she’s coming down there
I text back.
Me:tell mom I am a grown man
Hadley:no one believes that when you’re with Beckett
That one gets me. A real smile. Small, but there. Maybe that’s the part of me I keep feeling shift these past couple of weeks. Not gone. Just quieter. Like I’ve taken the louder pieces of myself and moved them farther back so they don’t get in the way of the rest.
The goofball still exists. He just doesn’t get first pick of the room anymore. That should feel sadder than it does. Instead, it feels like growing up in a way nobody warns you about. Not the version where you become serious all at once and leave everything easy behind. The version where you realize you can still joke, still laugh, still be the one who makes my nephew snort milk out his nose and Hadley threaten to disown you over dinner, but parts of life now require steadier hands than that.
