Then he let go and turned to Rawley, his face already shifting into the expression I recognized from security briefings and tactical discussions—not performing competence or authority, just offering the thing itself.
“Situation report,” Decker said, voice carrying the careful neutrality of someone delivering information that mattered. “Two shooters down, one fled toward the highway road. One still unaccounted for on the north side of the property.” A pause, brief but deliberate. “Burke’s coming up from the Callahan place with Macon. ETA three minutes.”
Rawley nodded, the acknowledgment of a man who’d reached the same conclusions. “Organized?” he asked, keeping it simple.
Decker shook his head. “Not anymore. They had a plan coming in—timing, positioning, the whole operation. Now they’re down to one man alone in the dark on a property he doesn’t know.” He glanced at the door, then back at Rawley. “I say we hold position until Burke clears the north approach.”
Rawley nodded again, accepting what Decker had offered without pushing for more. “Hold position,” he said. “Everyone stays put until we get the all-clear.”
We waited in the barn—twenty minutes that stretched like taffy, each one longer than the one before. I sat with my backagainst the wall, Ethan asleep against my chest now, his small weight solid and warm through the thin fabric of my shirt.
Jojo sat beside me with one hand on his son’s back, the gesture of a man keeping physical contact with what mattered most.
Rawley maintained his position at the door, body angled to see out without being seen, his breathing the only thing that changed—a brief pause, then a long inhale, then a careful exhale that didn’t quite match the pattern before.
Decker stood with his back to the wall and his eyes on the yard, weapon held at ready rather than aimed, his face set in lines I couldn’t read, but recognized anyway—the expression of a man who’d decided what would happen next and was waiting for the moment to execute it.
No one spoke. No one moved beyond the minimum required to stay comfortable. The barn settled around us—the particular quiet of a building that had seen this before and knew exactly how it would end.
Twenty minutes. I counted them in my head the way I used to count respirations on the NICU monitors—one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand. The rhythm of a man who knew that the only way through was to measure it out in pieces small enough to handle.
Then Burke’s voice came over Rawley’s radio—crackling, slightly distorted, but unmistakable in its mix of competence and casual confidence.
“North approach clear,” he said, each word precise. “Fourth shooter is down. No casualties on our side. Road is clear.”
Rawley nodded once—the silent acknowledgment of a situation handled—and then moved to the barn door, pulling the rope free of the handle with a single practiced motion. The door swung open onto a yard gone quiet, the thin early light just beginning to separate the Black Butte mountain from the sky.
The farmhouse stood exactly as it had when we’d fled it—weathered wood and sturdy foundation, the screen door that needed oiling, the porch that creaked in three specific places.
But something had changed—not the building itself, but my relationship to it. The change in a place that had been safe and then suddenly wasn’t.
I stood with Ethan still in my arms, his small weight a counterbalance to the lightness in my chest. My legs felt suddenly unsteady, my hands not quite my own. I passed the baby to Jojo with careful movements, making sure the transfer was complete before I let go.
Decker crossed to where I stood, moving with the silent movement I recognized from my own time in the hospital—nothing wasted, just the direct line from where he was to where he needed to be.
He crouched in front of me, eye level, and looked at me the way he’d looked at me in a Nebraska side yard months ago—full attention, nothing held back, the focus of a man who knew exactly what he was seeing.
“You all right?” he asked, the simple question carrying more weight than its three words should have been able to.
I nodded, not trusting my voice, and then managed: “Yes.” It came out rougher than I’d intended—not quite steady, not quite certain, but closer to both than it had any right to be.
Decker reached up and put his hand against the side of my face, warm and still, and held it there for a moment. Then he dropped his hand and stood, already turning toward Rawley, already moving on to whatever came next in the day.
I looked down at the baby in Jojo‘s arms—Ethan, asleep now, one fist curled around the collar of his father’s shirt—and thought about the one I was carrying. About the shift that wasn’t a kick or a turn, but something quieter, more deliberate. Aboutthe man who had just crouched in front of me, who had gone toward the gunfire so I could run away from it.
The fear I had been living inside for months had finally, tonight, been spent on something real rather than something imagined. It did not feel like relief yet. It felt like the moment before relief, the breath before the exhale, and that was enough.
I put my hand on my belly—one palm flat against the place where our child was growing—and made myself believe that whatever came next, we would face it as something we had chosen rather than a situation that had chosen us.
The mountain filled the eastern horizon—dark and solid and exactly where it had been when we’d faced Gerald in the yard that morning. Some things changed; some things stayed. The difference was in knowing which was which, and in having the patience to wait out the things that couldn’t be forced.
I let myself have that—the warmth of Decker’s hand against my face, the solid presence of the mountain, the acknowledgement of a problem handled and a line held.
It wasn’t a plan or a promise or anything that needed a name. It was just a moment—one of many to come—and I was exactly where I needed to be for it.
Chapter Nineteen
~ Decker ~
