I felt that one all the way through me. Sophia held my gaze. “So, that’s my question. Not the club. Not my family. You.” She swallowed. “Tell me something true that hurts.”
For a second, every instinct I had reached for cover. I could feel my mind searching for something real but survivable—mymother, the photograph, the things I let people know because they were easier than the things I didn’t. I felt myself reach for them. Then I let them go.
I sat there a long moment after she asked it. The answer was already there; the second the words left her mouth, I knew where she’d gone. Not the club. Not my father. Not the things I’d done. Me. The thing that hurt—the thing I’d carried around since I was eighteen without ever finding a place to set it down.
My eyes dropped to the coffee table between us, to the cups sitting where we’d left them, forgotten now. The first light of morning had crept all the way into the room, turning the wood pale gold beneath them. Somewhere down the street a dog barked and then everything went quiet again. When I finally spoke, my voice came out rough.
“You remember the tattoo.”
Sophia nodded slowly, and the skin across my shoulders felt tight.
“I told you his name was Jace. That part was true.” I rubbed a hand across the back of my neck and stared out toward the window for a second before looking back at her. “What I didn’t tell you was that he wasn’t just my friend. We grew up together. My father had us both underfoot from the time we were kids. We spent half our lives in that garage — building things, taking things apart, getting yelled at for tracking grease through the house. If I was somewhere, chances were Jace was too.” A small smile tried to appear and disappeared just as quick. “He practically lived at our place.”
Sophia didn’t interrupt. She just listened, the way she always did when something mattered.
“My mother was still alive then. Things were different.” I looked down at my hands. “People talk like grief is sadness, but that wasn’t what happened to my father. Not really. When my mom died, it was like something inside him collapsed. He gotangry. Hard. The club changed with him, and I don’t even know if any of us saw it happening while we were standing in it.”
The memory sat heavy. “We weren’t running drugs. We weren’t moving guns. Not us. We were just kids doing jobs for people we trusted — running parts, delivering things, helping out, the kind of stuff sons and nephews and kids who grew up around a place do every day.” I paused, because this was the part that still tasted wrong. “The problem was that by then the lines had already started moving. The club had gotten involved with people it never should’ve touched. People my father would’ve thrown out on their ass ten years earlier.”
Sophia’s fingers tightened around her cup, and I noticed because I noticed everything she did, always had.
“Jace and I thought we understood the world. We were eighteen and stupid enough to think we were invincible. We knew some things weren’t right — we just didn’t know how wrong it all was.” The room felt smaller, and the years between then and now didn’t feel like much at all. “There was a man who wanted to send a message.” I swallowed, my throat tight. “The message wasn’t meant for Jace.”
The words hung there. I stared at the grain in the wood floor because looking anywhere else felt impossible. “He was standing beside me one minute, talking, laughing about something I can’t even remember now. Then a gun came out and everything changed so fast I never caught up to it.” The ache hit exactly where it always did—not sharp anymore, worse than sharp, old and permanent. “There are moments in your life you keep replaying because some part of you still believes you’ll get a different ending if you watch them enough times.” My laugh came out hollow. “I’ve spent half my life replaying that parking lot.”
Sophia’s eyes had gone bright, and she didn’t look away, and neither did I.
“I buried him, and inside the year I’d packed a bag and left town.” The words scraped coming out. “I couldn’t be in a place that had Jace in the ground and my father’s hands all over how he got there. The last thing I told him was that I didn’t know the man he’d turned into, and I wasn’t going to stand around and watch him be it.”
The memory of standing in front of my father felt as clear as if it had happened yesterday. “And he changed — not because I made him, but because Jace’s death finally got through where nothing else had. Took him years. Cost him damn near everything.” I exhaled slowly. “I spent those years in the Teams telling myself I was running toward something, when mostly I was running away. By the time I came home, the club was clean and the man running it wasn’t the one I’d left. I’d been angry so long I almost missed that he’d become the man I’d wanted back.”
For a moment neither of us spoke, the morning light climbing all the way across the room. “Not everything gets fixed,” I said. “Jace is still dead. My mother is still gone. There are things my father will carry the rest of his life. But I learned something in all of it — I learned that fear makes a man start deciding things for other people, makes him think he can manage the outcome if he just holds tight enough. My father did it after my mother died. And years later, I did it to you.” The room went still. “I loved you so much I got scared of losing you, so I started deciding what you could handle, what you should know, when you should know it. And by the time I understood what I was doing, I’d already turned into the thing I hated most about all of it.” The silence that followed was honest — not comfortable, not easy, just honest. “I think that’s the thing that hurts, Soph. Not losing Jace. Knowing I learned the wrong lesson from it.”
She moved before I could say anything else — not toward the coffee, toward me. The couch gave a soft sigh as she pushed upoff it, and I watched her cross the room, watched the hem of Liam’s shirt brush her thighs, watched the morning light catch in her hair, and then she sat on the edge of the low table directly in front of me, close enough that her knees pressed lightly against mine, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her. My breath caught somewhere in the middle of my chest.
Sophia reached for my arm — not tentative, not careful, certain — and her thumb stopped over the name. I felt it the second she found the raised letters beneath the bandage. The skin there had been marked for years; most people never paid it much attention. Sophia had traced that tattoo more than once without knowing what she was touching, her fingers wandering over it while we sat on the porch or watched a movie, filing it away the way she filed away everything about the people she loved. Now she knew.
Neither of us spoke. The room had gone so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen and the distant rattle of a truck somewhere on Sycamore Row. Her hand stayed where it was, resting over Jace’s name as though she understood instinctively that moving it too quickly might break something. My chest felt tight, not because I was ashamed of him, not because I regretted saying it, but because for all those years I’d carried his memory alone. Most days, it felt like the whole town had quietly agreed to step around the shape of him. And here sat Sophia with her hand over the letters beneath my skin, holding the truth of him without looking away.
When I finally lifted my eyes to hers, I found tears gathering there, not pity. For weeks I’d stood across roads and parking lots and hospital windows, watching her from a distance that felt measured in miles. I’d imagined touching her more times than I cared to admit—holding her hand, brushing her hair back, feeling her tucked against my side on the couch while we watched some terrible movie she’d picked because she knew itannoyed me. Now she was right in front of me with her hand on my arm, and I didn’t move. I didn’t reach for her, didn’t take anything she hadn’t offered.
Sophia looked up at me, her eyes bright — not with tears exactly, with understanding. “You crossed the road,” she said quietly.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
For a second she looked down at her hand resting over Jace’s name, then back at me. “Two weeks you stood on the other side of it. You brought coffee. You watched my lights. You made sure I got home safe.” The corner of her mouth softened. “But you stayed over there.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
Her thumb moved once across the bandage, a tiny movement, enough to send awareness shooting all the way through me. “This isn’t about the coffee, Caleb.” The words came gently —not accusing, just true. “It’s about the fact that you’re sitting here with nothing left hidden.”
Something tightened in my throat, because that was it; not the apology, not the confession, not even Jace. Just this. No exits left, no locked doors, no room in the house she couldn’t walk into. I let out a breath. “There isn’t anything left.”
Sophia held my gaze. The dawn had fully broken behind her now, gold light spilling across the floorboards and wrapping itself around the room. For a long moment neither of us spoke. Then she said softly, “Say it.”
My heart kicked once against my ribs. “Say what?”
A sad little smile touched her mouth. “The thing you’ve spent months hiding behind everything else.”
