Knox sits at the head. I take my chair to his left, ledger open, reading glasses on. The print gets smaller every year. I refuse to acknowledge why.Lily's in the common room with her book with the old ladies and the other kids.
Bruiser takes the end of the table with a stack of printed satellite images and a laptop connected to the wall-mounted screen. Six months ago, the brothers gave him grief about the conspiracy boards in his apartment, the corkboard and string setup that made him look like a man preparing to brief a congressional committee on aliens. Nobody gives him grief anymore. His boards have saved this club twice.
"Bloodstone scouts." He taps the screen. Aerial images of the highway shoulder three miles north of the compound. "Same two. Same vehicle. Different schedule." He flips to a spreadsheet of timestamps, arrival windows, departure patterns. "They haven't pulled back since the Holly incident. They've shiftedfocus. Mapping patrol routes, timing guard rotations, tracking individual members." His finger moves to a highlighted column. "They know when Colt drops Lily at school. They know when Rex runs the coast road. They know Jess's clinic hours."
The table goes quiet. Finn, across from me, leans back and his expression hardens.
"They're not watching to learn," Bruiser says. "They already know our layout. They're confirming we haven't changed it."
Knox turns to me. I open the ledger. Lockdown means doubled guard shifts, fuel for extra patrols, overtime for the brothers who work day jobs and would lose income. It means pulling Rex off the coast road, cutting Finn's shop hours, and eating the lost revenue from the garage.
I run the calculations in my head. Pull the emergency fund line from the ledger, cross-reference with the quarterly reserve. Tight. Not impossible.
"I can cover six weeks of lockdown protocol," I say. "Eight if we defer the shop expansion."
Knox nods. "Then we change it. New routes, new schedules, new rotations. Nobody runs the same pattern twice."
"The personal tracking is the problem," Bruiser says. "They've got Colt's schedule. Lily's school run." He looks at me, and I see it. The apology buried under the delivery. He doesn't want to say this. He says it because it's his job. "Your family."
I don't move. The part of me that runs numbers, finds loopholes and keeps this club funded goes quiet, what's left underneath is older and less patient.
"Noted," I say. My voice stays level. The number I wrote twice this morning doesn't feel like a mistake anymore. It feels like a warning.
In the corner, a television plays on mute. A local news segment, a reporter standing outside Betty's Diner with a microphone and a smile. The chyron readsNIGHTFALL COVE: A MODEL FOR MONSTER-HUMAN INTEGRATION.Bruiser's focus slides to the screen. He watches for five seconds, his expression unreadable, then picks up the remote and changes the channel to static. Nobody asks why.
Church ends at two-fifteen. The brothers file out. Rex catches me in the hall, a manila envelope in one hand and his phone in the other.
"Security assessment for the north perimeter." He hands me the envelope. "Holly put together the photos from the kids' workshop. There's a stack in there for Lily."
I flip through the envelope. Below Rex's handwritten patrol notes, a set of 4x6 prints. Lily's photographs from Holly's workshop last month. The harbor at low tide. A row of crab pots stacked on the dock. A close-up of rain on a fire escape, the droplets catching afternoon light. The shots are steady and framed with an instinct for composition that I can't take credit for.
"Your kid's got an eye," Rex says.
The pride lands before I'm ready for it. "Yeah. She does."
Rex nods and heads for the lot. Through the window I watch him cross to his bike where Holly leans against the saddlebag, camera strap slung across her chest. He hooks an arm around her waist and she tilts her head back to say something, he grins, the easy, settled expression of a man who stopped running. Fourmonths ago he couldn't sit through a full conversation. Now he's the guy who delivers security reports and shows off his girlfriend's photographs.
I tuck Lily's prints into my bag.Lily's waiting by the truck, the Butler pressed to her chest.
"Can we get pizza for dinner?" she asks before I've got the key in the ignition.
"I'll think about it."
"That means yes."
"That means I'll think about it."
She grins and opens her book.
Lily's light is still on at eleven.
Her door sits half-open.
She's asleep on her stomach, one arm hanging off the bed, theOctavia Butlertented face-down on the pillow. Dark hair spread across the sheets. She has Maren's jaw—broad, stubborn, set at an angle that promises a fight. Maren used to fall asleep the same way, mid-page, bookmark forgotten, the book left open to whatever sentence knocked her out.
Lily argues about books the way Ellie Frost argues about books. She uses the same phrasing—thematic stakes,earned endings—and I don't know when that started. Sometime betweenSeptember and now, between the first Saturday pickup and the twentieth, my daughter started sounding like the librarian, and the librarian started mattering, and I leaned against the circulation desk yesterday and talked about George Eliot for fifteen minutes because the woman in the green dress asked a follow-up question and I couldn't make myself walk away.
I cross the room and close the book, marking her page with the receipt from her library holds. Turn off the reading lamp. Pull the blanket up over her shoulder. She shifts and murmurs and settles, her breathing evening out.
