Outside, the sun climbed, the air going sharp and clear and so cold it could have sliced you in half. But in here, the kitchen was warm, the smell of tea and toast filling the space, and for the first time in months, maybe years, I didn’t feel like I had to keep moving.
There was still a threat. There always would be.
But we were here, together, and the house felt like a place worth defending.
I finished my coffee, watched the steam rise, and let myself believe in it.
At least for now.
Chapter Fourteen
~ Liam ~
The fire snapped in the fireplace like it was chewing through the last of the kindling, each pop and spit a punctuation in a room otherwise silent. Not a comfortable silence—this was the kind you find after a storm when every animal has already run for higher ground, a silence that can’t decide whether it’s relief or just the absence of anyone left to make noise.
I stood at the kitchen counter with Emilio propped on my left hip, watching Hooper at the table. He sat hunched in the chair, hands bracketing a coffee mug I’d put there without asking, the navy blue of the sleeve almost black in the low morning light. His eyes tracked the window, then the baby, then the table, then the window again.
I caught my own reflection in the glass—pale, hair a mess, shoulder slumped like I was trying to make room for the baby and a backpack full of cinderblocks at the same time.
The snow pressed against the glass so flat and white it looked like the whole house was suspended inside a salt lick, waiting for someone to break the surface.
“Is the other car gone?” I said, voice so raw it surprised me.
Hooper nodded. “Took off soon as the SUV did. Burke got most of a plate. Rawley’s got a guy at the sheriff’s office running it down.” He sipped his coffee, made a face like he’d expected whiskey instead of the bitter instant I’d managed to scrounge.
He didn’t complain.
I shifted Emilio, whose only contribution to the morning so far was a series of hiccups and one brief, searing diaper. He’d calmed now, head on my shoulder, face angled toward the window as if he could see through the snow to the last known position of the threat.
I stared at Hooper’s hands. They dwarfed the mug. Each knuckle was a different flavor of scar, and there was something about the way he held the ceramic—like he was keeping the heat alive through grip alone.
I asked, “You think they’ll come back?”
Hooper rolled the mug between his palms. “They don’t send a guy in a suit unless they want to be seen. That was for us, not for you. They’ll escalate next time. Legal, most likely. Once Eleanor’s lawyers confirm the marriage certificate, the play shifts.” He looked at me, dead on. “We’ve got a week, maybe two, before it’s a court thing instead of a driveway thing.”
I looked at the window. The drive was a blank, the ruts already filling with new snow. “She’ll contest it,” I said. “If she’s got counsel, she’ll argue fraud, or capacity, or that I was coerced. It’s what they do—undercut the story before it’s even told.”
Hooper’s mouth twitched, a half-smile with no comfort in it. “You know her moves better than anyone here,” he said. “That’s why we’re meeting with Rawley this afternoon. You’re going to help us build something she can’t just walk through.”
He said it like he was reporting the weather, no drama, no room for debate.
Emilio made a small, wet sound and shifted in my arms, one tiny hand reaching out and batting at my jaw with the force of a paper airplane. I repositioned him to the other hip, my arm sore from holding him so long. The baby smelled like sweat and talc, an oddly reassuring counterpoint to the burnt-dust heat of the stove.
I ran my thumb over Emilio’s shoulder and asked, “You want me in that meeting?”
Hooper looked up at me, really looked, and the weight of it made the room tilt a degree. “I want you in charge of it. No one here knows how this kind of family plays dirty except you.”
I had no response for that. I stared at the seam in the countertop where the laminate curled up at the corner, and tried to imagine any scenario where I was the solution, not the problem.
Hooper waited, not impatient, just still in a way I’d never been able to match. The mug steamed between his hands. “Liam, she’s not coming for you. She’s coming for the story she wants to tell. But we get to write the next chapter.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I nodded, eyes on the wood-grain, the baby’s weight an anchor.
We stood like that for a while—me at the counter, Emilio going slack in my arms, Hooper a silent boulder at the table. Outside, the snow blurred everything into nothing. The world was white, then whiter, then gone.
I took a slow breath, held it, let it out. “I don’t know how to win against people who never lose.”
Hooper shrugged. “Then we teach her what losing feels like.” He said it with a certainty that scared me more than any lawyer ever could.
