I shook my head. “Don’t bother. He’s as much mine as yours.” It was a lie, but not the kind that mattered.
He nodded, then closed his eyes for a second, like he was resetting his system.
Emilio shifted against my chest, a little shudder of breath and then a slow, automatic curl of his fist. I pressed my palm tothe baby’s back, rubbing circles there. Liam watched my hand, then reached out—hesitant at first, but then with a kind of bone-deep certainty—and pressed his finger to Emilio’s hand.
The baby’s fingers closed around it, even in sleep. Pure reflex, no thought. But it landed somewhere in Liam, a sharp and quiet thing that took him by surprise. His face did something complicated—grief and relief and maybe a little bit of joy, all tangled together and fighting for real estate.
He let the moment stretch, then let go. His finger lingered for a beat, then withdrew.
I shifted Emilio so that Liam’s hand could rest on the baby’s belly if he wanted. I didn’t say anything about it. He took the offer, and we sat there for another half hour, three of us in the low light, the only noise the click of the cooling stove and the faint rattle of the wind outside the old glass.
There were questions waiting for us just outside that circle of warmth: where would Liam sleep, what would Rawley want to know, who was going to watch the roads come dawn. But for now, there was just the kitchen, the baby, and the man across from me—the one who’d run every mile between here and hell to make sure his son was safe.
When the silence got heavy, I broke it with the only thing I could think of.
“You ever played chess?” I asked.
He smiled, a real one this time, wide and open. “I’m terrible at it.”
I grinned back. “Good. Me too.”
We sat there, side by side, until the world stopped feeling dangerous and started feeling just a little bit possible.
Chapter Eight
~ Liam ~
The first thing I registered was the smell—cedar dust layered with a faint, greasy note of machine oil, like someone had been sharpening saw blades in a closet made for monks.
The second thing was the heat, real heat, not the recycled exhaust of a dollar motel baseboard but a warmth with weight to it, pressing up from under the mattress and seeping down through the rough wool blanket that clung to me like a living thing. My body had gone soft in the night, all its alarms temporarily stood down.
For a few seconds, I let myself lie there, unmoving, cataloguing:
- One: the blanket, some off-brand military surplus that itched through the flannel of my borrowed pajamas.
- Two: the seam of light slicing across my closed eyelids, white and cold and absolute, cut through a rip in the curtain that had probably existed longer than I had.
- Three: the mattress itself, unfamiliar in its generosity, every spring catching and releasing the memory of whoever had slept here last.
- Four: the low, slow creak of the house as it settled into morning, each complaint of the old wood a small reassurance that the place was still on its foundation.
I flexed my toes inside the blanket and tried to reconcile the numbness in my legs with the memory of how I’d gotten here. It was a jumble of movement and hunger and the overwhelming sense of being, at long last, off the road. It felt fragile as hell.
Then, from somewhere beyond the thin drywall, I heard Emilio.
Not a cry, not the sharp animal demand that meant he was wet or hungry or just done with the present moment. This wasa sound I’d learned to recognize in the weeks before I left: a kind of self-satisfied mmm, like the hum of a tuning fork struck against a bone. He made it when he was awake and wanted the world to know, a noise that was mostly air and pride.
The sound landed like a rock in the pool of my consciousness, breaking the surface tension. With it came everything else: the kitchen table, Hooper’s hand steady on the bottle, the way Emilio’s eyes followed the shadow of the ceiling fan even as his body went limp with exhaustion. The feeling of safety, so absolute it bordered on terror.
I turned my head, slow as a man testing for injury, and took inventory.
The room was narrow, barely wider than the bed, but the smallness felt like shelter, not like a trap. There was one window, the kind with a rippled, imperfect glass that distorted the view of the snowfields outside into waves. The curtain was flannel, blue and gray, a print meant to suggest calm but so faded it looked like the memory of a curtain. The air was still and dry, laced with the faint mineral tang of old heating pipes.
On the wall opposite the bed was a single wooden hook, painted over so many times it had lost its edges. My jacket hung there, draped neatly, the sleeves empty and pointing at the floor like arms at rest. The rest of my clothing—a thrift store shirt and jeans, both clean and folded—sat on the chair under the window.
But it was the nightstand that stopped me. On it, propped against a mug with a chipped rim, was the photograph. Not just a photograph, my photograph: Emilio, five days old, pink and furious and so new the skin on his knuckles still wrinkled like old paper. My own face, visible in the edge of the frame, tired and gray-eyed and not even pretending to smile.
I’d told myself a dozen times to throw it away. I’d nearly done it in three separate towns, each time chickening out at the last moment and folding it back into my wallet instead. I’d kept iteven when the wallet itself was a liability. Now it was here, set up where I’d have to look at it before I did anything else.
