It hadn’t. None of them had.
The social worker had a different name each time. The house had different smells. The rules changed depending on who was holding the lease and how badly they needed the check from the state. Some places wanted you quiet. Some places wanted you helpful. Some places wanted you gone by breakfast, out of sight before the neighbors noticed there were extra kids at the table.
I learned the pattern fast. Useful was better than quiet. Funny was better than helpful. Being the one who fixed the leaky faucet and told the bad joke that made the foster dad laugh despite himself—that was better than being the one who sat in the corner with his head down, waiting to be noticed.
Indispensable was the closest thing to safe I’d ever found. So I built myself into someone indispensable. Someone easy to keep around. Someone who didn’t ask for things, because people who asked for things got reminded how replaceable they were, and I had Caleb to think about, and Caleb needed stability more than he needed whatever I was too scared to ask for.
I looked at him now, sleeping beside me. His face was turned toward the wall, one arm tucked under the pillow, his breathing deep and even. In the dark, with the careful brightness he carried during the day dialed down to something softer, he looked younger.
The lines around his eyes—the ones he got from smiling too much, according to me, and from worrying too much, according to him—had smoothed out. His mouth was slightly open. One copper strand of hair had fallen across his forehead, and myhand moved to brush it back before I remembered he was asleep and didn’t need me fixing his hair at two in the morning.
The old pull. The protectiveness that had been the one constant in my life, the thing that never changed no matter which house we were in or which social worker was driving us there. Caleb sleeping. Me awake. Me making sure.
I looked back at the ceiling. The exposed beams, the knots in the pine, the pattern of shadows that had become as familiar to me as my own hands. And then the recognition landed, heavy and specific, in a place behind my sternum that I did not want to examine.
Sterling wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done. He was just doing it with better posture and a bigger gun.
The thought settled in my chest like something with actual weight. Not the sharp, clean weight of anger or the dull, familiar weight of frustration. Something quieter. Something that felt dangerously close to understanding, and understanding was the last thing I wanted to feel about Sterling Callahan at two in the morning with a leg that was probably keeping him awake.
I wanted to be annoyed. Annoyance was easier. Annoyance had edges. You could hold annoyance in your hand and throw it at something and feel better for having thrown it. Understanding just sat there, looking at you, waiting for you to do something about it.
And the thing was—the thing I couldn’t unsee now that I’d seen it—underneath the flat green stare and the tactical vest and the jaw that could cut glass and the voice that dropped when he was displeased instead of rising, which was considerably more effective than volume would have been—there was a man who had taken Caleb’s coffee like it surprised him.
A man who had sat down when Caleb said sit down, his body making the decision before his brain had finished processing the command.
A man who had looked at both of us, for a half-second too long, with an expression I couldn’t name but recognized anyway, because I’d seen it on my own face in the rearview mirror of enough moving trucks to know what it looked like when someone was trying very hard not to want something they wanted.
That man was lonely.
Not the kind that made a production of itself or asked for sympathy or showed up in the middle of a conversation looking for someone to fix it.
The real kind. The quiet, bone-deep kind that lived so far down you stopped noticing it was there, the kind that came from years of cutting yourself off from things because cutting yourself off was safer than risking the cut coming from somewhere else.
He was lonely in a way he had probably never said out loud. Possibly never even admitted to himself. A man like Sterling didn’t admit to things like that. A man like Sterling filed them under “irrelevant” and moved on to the next mission, because the mission was what he was for, and wanting things beyond that was a luxury he’d trained himself out of a long time ago.
Sound familiar?
I closed my eyes. Opened them. The ceiling hadn’t moved, but something in my chest had, and it wasn’t going back to where it came from.
I wanted to do something about it.
Not eventually. Not when the timing was better or the leg had healed or Sterling had decided, unprompted, that maybe two men with hazel eyes and a flannel shirt were worth the risk of whatever he thought he was risking. Now. With the urgency of someone who had spent too many years watching people walk away from things they wanted because walking away was easier than admitting they wanted them.
The urgency had stopped feeling optional. It had become a fact, the way the draft at the east door was a fact, or the wood stove ticking downstairs was a fact, or the sound of Caleb breathing beside me was a fact.
Sterling Callahan was lonely.
I wanted to fix it.
Those two things existed in the same room now, and I couldn’t unsee the connection between them any more than I could unsee the line of Caleb’s shoulder under the blanket or the red and black plaid of my flannel hanging on the hook by the door.
I turned onto my side, facing the wall now, my back to Caleb, and stared at the pine boards an inch from my nose.
“Well,” I said, very quietly, to the wall. “Shit.”
The wall didn’t answer. The bunkhouse creaked once, from downstairs, and my body went still again without my permission, listening for the second one that didn’t come.
The bunkhouse settled around me like a living thing finding its balance for the night. Another creak from the room next door. Sterling shifting, probably, or the bed frame taking his weight as he finally found a position that didn’t make his leg complain. The wood stove ticked. Caleb exhaled beside me, a long, slow breath that meant he was deep enough not to surface for a while.
