"That's not what I'm doing."
"It's exactly what you're doing! You're making arrangements. You're calling Georgia. You're getting me out. You're doing what you've always done—you see a fire and you grab me and you run." I set the washcloth down on the nightstand. My hands are shaking now too. "And I love you for it. I love you so much for it, Mom. You saved my life doing that. More than once. But I'm not on fire. I'm not in danger. I'm not being hurt by the people in that house. Ichosethem. Ichosethis."
"You're twenty years old—"
"I know how old I am!
"—and they are grown men, Max, they are Richard's sons, they are your stepbrothers—"
"Iknowwho they are."
"Do you?" She looks at me then. Finally. Her eyes are red and swollen and her mascara is smudged under her left eye and she looks ten years older than she did six hours ago. "Do you really know who they are? Because I have spent the last nine months watching you change, Max. Watching you come alive. I thought—I thought it was the house. I thought it was stability. I thought it was me." Her voice goes thin. "I thought I was finally getting it right."
"You were."
"Then what is this?"
"This is me getting it right too. In a way you didn't plan for."
She closes her eyes. Presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose. The same gesture she made on the phone. The same gesture she makes when the world is too much and she needs to compress it into something she can carry.
"Wisconsin," she says. Flat. Decided. "We're going to Georgia's. We're going to take some space. You're going to talk to someone—a professional, Max, not me, someone who can—"
"I'm not going to Wisconsin."
"Max—"
"Mom." I stand. My cheek and lip throbs. The bond in my chest is so tight I can feel it in my teeth—Atlas's thread, dark and worried; Bane's, heavy and braced; Zero's, raw and bright and terrified. They're in that house right now. They're reading my letters. They're looking at the space where my shoes were and the space where my jacket was and the space where I am supposed to be, and they're not here, and I'm not there, and every second I sit on this hotel bed listening to Margot bookflights to Wisconsin is a second I'm not doing the thing I came out of that house to do.
"I need to use the phone."
"To call them? Max, absolutely not—"
"Not them." I look at her. Steady. "Wren."
She blinks.
"I need to call Wren. And then I need to leave."
"You're not leaving this room—"
"Mom." I say it the way Atlas says things. Quiet. Final. I think I learned it from him. "I love you. I love you more than I know how to say. You gave me a life. You gave methislife—the one where I can stand in front of you and argue with you instead of hiding in a closet hoping you don't find me. You did that. Nobody else."
Her chin trembles.
"But you don't get to take it back. You don't get to decide where I go and who I'm near and what I'm allowed to feel. Linda did that. Every foster parent I ever had did that. Every social worker who moved me from one house to another did that—decided what I could handle and then handled it for me. You've never been like them. Please don't start now."
She is crying. She is crying and I am crying and the hotel room is small and bright with the first grey light of dawn pushing through the curtains, and my lip is throbbing and my chest is being pulled in four directions and I am standing in front of the woman who saved me, telling her I am about to save myself.
And the three alphas I love.
"Where are you going?" she whispers.
"To the police."
The word lands between us like a dropped glass.
Her face changes. I watch it happen—the horror reorganizing itself, clicking into a new shape. A shape that makes sense to her. A shape she has a playbook for.
