Hooper stepped into the room, walked over, and crouched down so he was eye level with me. He looked at Emilio, then at me. “You don’t have to,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”
He set a hand on my knee, warm and steady.
I felt something loosen, not all at once, but enough that I could draw a breath without feeling like I was about to shatter.
Emilio let out a single, high-pitched giggle, and the three of us just stared at him, as if he’d solved the problem nobody else could.
Jojo smiled, real and bright. “He’s going to be a handful,” he said.
Hooper grinned. “Runs in the family.”
The house felt different then, like the worst was over and the only thing left was the slow, careful build of a real life.
I sat back, watched the steam rise from my mug, and let myself think about tomorrow. Not the big, terrifying future, just the next day, the one where nobody came up the drive, nobody told me what I owed, nobody made a threat that wasn’t followed by coffee and a half smile.
It would be enough.
For now.
Hooper put his hand back on my shoulder, and I leaned into it, just a little. For the first time in years, I wasn’t running themath on what I had to do to survive. For the first time, I wanted to see what came next.
I looked at Emilio, then at Hooper, then at the house, and realized I finally believed it could be mine.
All of it.
Later, when the house was quiet and the only sound was the wind curling around the eaves, I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the stacks of paper left over from my attempt at organizing the ledgers. My name was on one of them, in Rawley’s all-caps handwriting: “JAMES, LIAM—legal/priority.”
I read it over, the ink sunk deep into the grain of the page, the edges already curling from use.
I thought about the way my mother had said “You don’t have a family. You have a situation,” and how for the first time, the words landed, but didn’t stick.
I ran my finger over the name, tracing the letters, then folded the paper in half and set it under the mug.
The next day, and the one after, and every day after that, would be exactly as real as I wanted it to be.
For the first time, I wanted it all.
Chapter Nineteen
~ Hooper ~
It was always the same: you thought you’d remember the first or the last, but the only alarm that ever stuck in your brain was the one that went off in the middle of the morning, on a day so nothing you could swear you’d already lived it a hundred times before.
I had the transmission pan off the flatbed, socket set balanced on my sternum, the phone face-down on the workbench so the world couldn’t find me, and still, when the safe-room alert howled through the barn, it took less than half a second for my brain to catch up to what my body already knew.
The sound was a relic from my old job, the kind that made grown men piss themselves if they were soft, or get laser-calm if they were not. I felt it in my teeth, in the base of my skull, and I was moving before the ring cycle completed, knees scraping concrete, socket wrench going clattering across the slab like a dropped rifle bolt.
The world telescoped. Out of the barn, sprinting the fifty yards to the equipment shed with the wind knifing under my jacket and turning the air sharp as glass.
Ahead, the main house sat low and quiet in the early sun, but across the side yard, Rawley was already moving, jacket unzipped, radio in one hand and something else—looked like a service pistol—in the other.
Burke rounded the front of the farmhouse, his hat already gone, hair wild in the wind, legs chewing up distance like the ground owed him money. From the south field, Macon’s truck kicked up a rooster tail of powdered snow and dirt, swinging wide to block the access road.
I hit the porch at the exact same time as Rawley, both of us scanning the yard, hands up and empty, not because we weren’tarmed, but because the show was always for the second set of eyes—the ones watching from somewhere they shouldn’t be.
The screen door was wide, one hinge blown and creaking, and inside, the first thing I saw was the kitchen chair toppled on its side, a full mug of coffee spreading black across the linoleum, the heat still throwing steam into the cold morning air. Whatever had happened was fresh—seconds, not minutes.
Rawley said nothing. He checked left, I went right, moving fast and low down the hallway with the muscle memory of too many house-clears in two dozen less friendly countries.
