He hadn’t sat yet. He stood behind Emilio, forearms planted on the table, eyes fixed on me. It was an unspoken question, and after a moment I recognized the shape of it: he was waiting for me to start. The way you wait for a transmission to finish before keying your own mic.
I looked at the baby, then back at Hooper. “You want to know about the rest of it?”
He nodded, just once.
I put both hands around the coffee mug, absorbing the heat, and let the words come up. “It was a bathroom in Billings,” I said. “Not even a real bathroom—a single stall in the back of a Sinclair. They had the kind of lights that turn your skin green and make your eyes look like you’ve been up for three days, which I had.”
Hooper didn’t blink, just listened.
“I bought the test at the same gas station. I waited until it was empty, then locked the door behind me and sat on the edge of the toilet. I remember thinking,This is exactly how your mother would want it. Classy.”
He almost smiled, but not quite.
I sipped the coffee again, then set the mug down. “It wasn’t a surprise, exactly. I’d done the math a dozen times before that. But seeing it… It was like getting a call from the future and not understanding the language.”
I looked at my hands, which were shaking just a little. I pressed the palms flat to the table, felt the grain of the wood under my skin. “I sat there for twenty minutes, just trying to figure out the next step. Not even the big stuff, like where to go or what to do—just literally, what do I do with the test stick now? Do I throw it away? Do I keep it, like a receipt, in case someone wants proof?”
I glanced up. Hooper’s face was neutral, but the lines at the corners of his mouth were deeper than I remembered.
“I left the test there,” I said. “On the back of the toilet tank, under a wad of toilet paper. Like a message for the next guy, I guess.” I let out a breath. “I spent a week in a motel after that. Eating peanut butter, watching cable news, and trying to decide if I was actually going to do it. Every time I went out, I checked behind me for a tail. The only time I wasn’t scared was when I was asleep, and even then I’d wake up every hour thinking someone was outside the door.”
Emilio let out a sigh, soft and almost human. I looked at him, then at Hooper. “I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. Everyone back home had a stake in the outcome. Even my friends—they were all friends of Eleanor’s. Or her father’s. It was like being the only person who knew the world was ending, and everyone else just wanted to talk about weather.”
I ran a thumb along the rim of the mug. “When it got too close, when I knew she was about to send someone after me, I just got in the car and drove. The first plan was to keep moving, to stay ahead until the baby came, and then—” I stopped, not sure what the and then was anymore. “The plan wasn’t a plan. It was just survival.”
Hooper nodded. “That tracks.”
We sat there, not talking, for maybe a full minute. The silence wasn’t awkward. It was solid, like new ground settling underfoot.
When Hooper finally spoke, his voice was even. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for it.”
It was the first time I’d heard an apology that didn’t ask for anything in return. No promise, no absolution, just the admission of a fact.
I let it sink in. The words filled the space between us, then went quiet.
Emilio’s hand opened, then closed, searching for something. I reached over and touched his fingers. They were small and impossibly strong. He gripped my thumb and held on.
Hooper watched, then finally took a seat across from me. He cradled the mug in both hands and stared at the steam rising from it.
We didn’t talk about what came next. We just drank our coffee and watched the morning come in through the kitchen window, the snow outside bright and blank and waiting for us to make our mark on it.
For the first time in months, I felt like maybe I could.
I heard someone coming before I saw him. The front porch boards gave three deliberate protests—one, two, pause, three—followed by the brief, metallic rattle of the door latch. He came in trailing the cold, a column of it that moved ahead of him and stripped the kitchen air of every scent but snow and static electricity.
He didn’t bother taking off his boots. He stood in the threshold and used one hand to rub the chill from his scalp, the motion making the whole of his frame contract and then expand, like a bear shaking off river water. His eyes landed on me, then on Emilio, then on Hooper, all in the space of a heartbeat.
“Morning,” he said. His voice was the same as always—clipped, deliberate, every syllable weighed and measured before it left his mouth.
Hooper nodded in reply, but didn’t stand. He was holding Emilio against his chest, baby’s head tucked under his chin, and rocking slightly in a way that must have been unconscious because I’d never seen Hooper do anything unconsciously.
He gestured to me. “Liam, Emilio’s birth father.”
I almost sucked in a breath.
Rawley’s gaze slid back to me. “You up for a sitrep about Eleanor and your situation?” he asked.
I glanced at Hooper. Just how much did he know?
