"You're thinking too loud," he says.
"I'm always thinking too loud."
"Come down here."
"I'm writing."
"You're staring at Atlas and pretending to write. Come down here."
I put the notebook on the arm of the couch. I slide down to the floor beside him. He pulls me into his lap in one motion and his mouth finds my neck and I tip my head back and let him.
"Get a room," Bane calls from the kitchen.
"Get over yourself, Ramsay," Zero calls back, his lips against my throat.
"I heard that."
"You were meant to."
Atlas turns a page. Doesn't look up. "He's making the lemon tart again. Be nice or he won't save you a slice."
"He'll save me a slice," Zero says. "He always saves me a slice."
From the kitchen, quieter: "No I don't."
He does.
I laugh. Zero's arms tighten around me. Bane swears from the kitchen. Atlas smiles behind his book.
My phone buzzes. Zero groans but lets me reach for it over his head.
Wren: new kid at group tomorrow. 14. Just a damn baby.
I type back:be gentle.
Wren: always am. you bringing the good coffee or the shit coffee tomorrow?
the good.
Wren: that's why you're my favorite.
I set the phone down. Zero's mouth is still at my neck. His hand is under my shirt, flat against my stomach, warm. The bond between the four of us hums low and wide and full—no thread pulled tight, no distance, no one missing, no one hiding.
I think about the boy who showed up at the Graves estate with two duffel bags and a bottle of suppressants and a plan to disappear. Who counted the days until he could leave. Who swallowed pills every morning to make himself smaller, quieter, less. Who had never been touched without flinching. Who had never been looked at without calculating the cost.
That boy is gone.
I still carry him with me the way I carry the facility and the foster homes and Linda and the bathtub and every locked room I've ever been inside. He's part of the story. But he's not the ending.
Later, after dinner—Bane's garlic butter chicken, which is perfect like everything he makes now, which Zero acknowledges only by eating twice as much as everyone else—I go back to my room. The nest. The east-facing window, dark now. The desk.
The notebook is almost full. One page left.
I open it. I pick up the pen.
I think about what to write. The last line of the last page of the book that started withI shouldn't be hereand ended with me here. In a house with three men who love me. In a life I chose. In a body I stopped hiding in.
I write one line. Close the notebook.
