The math where a man who had spent twenty years building walls looked at the framed studs of a house he hadn’t helped build and decided it was someone else’s problem.
I was still running it when Mitch walked in. Boots on the hardwood, the heavy stride I could identify blindfolded and concussed, and then he stopped.
Just stopped.
I didn’t look up. I didn’t need to. I could feel him looking at me the way he’d been looking at me since we were five years old and sharing a twin bed in a foster home where the wallpaper peeled at the corners—the look that said he’d taken one glance at my face and had already made several decisions about what came next.
He sat down without a word. Pulled me in against his chest, one arm around my shoulders, his hand warm through my flannel, and waited. He was good at waiting. Mitch Pruitt waiting was its own kind of language, patient and certain and entirely without performance.
After a while I said, “He’s not coming back.”
Mitch’s chest moved under my cheek. One breath, steady. “He’s coming back.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually.”
“How?” I asked.
“Because he said home, and Sterling Callahan does not say words he doesn’t mean. The man barely says words he does mean. Every syllable is load-bearing.”
I laughed. Short and wet and involuntary, the kind that lived in the space between something breaking and something holding, and I hated myself a little for how much better it made me feel. The sound of it bounced off the low ceiling and died there, irrelevant to the brother holding me and the wood stove counting seconds.
I told him everything. The call. The extended timeline. The quiet terror that home had been a momentary concession and the mission was Sterling’s real language, the one he’d been fluent in for years and had no reason to abandon.
Mitch listened to all of it. His hand stayed warm on my shoulder, his thumb tracing small circles against the fabric of my flannel, and he didn’t interrupt once, which from Mitch was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing poetry.
When I finished, he said, “I’m holding his favorite hat hostage.”
I pulled back enough to look at him. “Mitch.”
“I’m serious. It’s in my closet. He cannot leave permanently without the hat. It’s his whole personality.”
“That is not a hostage situation, that’s just theft.”
“It’s leverage.”
“It’s a cowboy hat.”
“It’s a very specific cowboy hat and he knows it and I know it and now you know it.”
I laughed again. The real kind this time, the kind that came from somewhere behind my sternum and didn’t apologize for taking up space, and Mitch grinned down at the top of my headlike he’d won something significant and was extremely pleased with both of us for arriving at this conclusion.
Then both babies kicked at once. A rolling double impact that knocked the breath out of me mid-laugh, sharp and unmistakable, and my hand found Mitch’s and pressed it flat against my belly before my brain had fully caught up with the urgency.
Mitch went completely still. His hand was warm and big against the curve of my stomach, his fingers splayed, and I felt his whole body lock into the attention of a man who had just been introduced to something he couldn’t name.
He made a sound. Low. Awed. Barely a word, more vibration than language, and I filed it somewhere permanent, the way I filed the sound of Sterling’s voice on the phone.
We sat like that for a long moment. Mitch’s hand on my stomach, neither of us speaking, and the wood stove kept ticking behind us, counting seconds the way it counted everything.
“Hey,” Mitch said. Barely audible. Just that. Like he was introducing himself.
I had to look at the ceiling for a second. The pine boards absorbed my gaze the way they absorbed everything, steady and patient, and I swallowed hard and looked back at my brother’s face.
“Sterling’s going to lose his mind,” Mitch said.
“He already lost his mind. On a road. With zip ties on the ground.”
