My thumb traces the scar on my forearm. Wrist past elbow, the familiar ridge of tissue.
Control is survival. That's the equation I've been solving since I was old enough to read the look on my father's face in the doorway. Keep the variables contained. Limit exposure. Don't hand anyone a weapon.
Kari isn't a weapon.
She's a crumbling Victorian with a chipped garden gnome, a bed that smells like coconut, a deadbolt I installed with my own hands. She's banana bread at the neighbors'. Conversations with plumbing. She's the woman who sat on the hallway floor outside her own bedroom because a man put a dead woman's photo on her pillow, and her hands shook but her voice didn't.
She's every variable I can't contain.
I can't control whether she leaves. Can't calculate the risk, can't mitigate the exposure, can't plan for the specific way it would feel if she decided I wasn't worth the trouble. My father would call that weakness. He'd say I was handing her the knife.
Maybe.
But his version of safety was a locked house where nobody was safe at all. A controlled environment where the only variable he didn't account for was himself.
I'm not him.
The thought lands clean, without drama. Just a fact. The way Vance delivers facts — flat, undeniable, already true before you catch up to it. I am not my father. Staying doesn't make me weak. It makes me the man who fixes porch steps in the dark because she shouldn't have to worry about the one on the left. The man who brings banana bread to a retired middleweight because that's what you do when someone feeds you pot roast. The man who reads thrillers on a back porch because a woman sat down next to him uninvited and he didn't move away.
I stand up. Not a decision, not a calculation. Something closer to the thing that happened when Kari called from the Foxglove with the gravestone photo — my body already moving before the call disconnected.
The bag is in the closet. I pull it out — the same one I kept in the corner of her bedroom for weeks, zipped but never packed, a prop I used to pretend I still had an exit strategy. Less than two minutes to fill. Shaving kit. Clean clothes. The paperback I never finished on her back porch.
I pick up the gas station magnet from the kitchen counter. A lighthouse from a town I've never visited. My mother bought it at a Texaco outside of Annapolis — the only one I kept out. The rest are in a shoebox on the closet shelf, where they've been since I packed up her apartment.
I put it in the bag.
The zipper closes.
I pick up my keys.
The drive is nothing.
Streetlights. Other people's houses. Lawns I don't care about, mailboxes I don't catalog, streets that don't lead to Sycamore Lane until they do. The steering wheel is smooth under my hands. My jaw is tight. My pulse is doing something I don't want to examine.
I pass a gas station on the corner. The fluorescent lights buzz through my closed window. A rack of magnets by the register — the little wire carousel catching the light. Lighthouses, palm trees, state outlines. My mother would've stopped. She always stopped.
Every word I might say when I get there runs through my head and gets discarded. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I shouldn't have left. You make me — I can't — the apartment is —
None of them work. None of them are big enough, or precise enough, or honest enough. I've defused situations in four languages. Talked down a man with a knife in a hotel stairwell without raising my voice. But the thought of standing on that porch with nothing between us except the truth makes my hands tighten on the wheel until my knuckles go white.
Sycamore Lane is dark except for the porch lights. Oren's, two doors down. Nina's shop, closed for the night. Gary in the front garden, chipped grin catching my headlights before I kill the engine.
The third porch board from the left creaks under my weight. I know this because I've been meaning to fix it for weeks. Haven't yet. Will tomorrow, if she lets me through the door.
I don't knock.
The door opens anyway.
Kari stands in the threshold. Bare feet on the hardwood. Her own shirt — not the henley. Hair loose. Eyes that have the specific look of someone who hasn't been sleeping, which I recognize because I see it in the mirror every morning.
Three days. Three days of silence, and she doesn't look surprised. She looks like she's been standing at this door since I left, waiting to see which version of me would come back.
The words I rehearsed in the car — all of them, every variation, every honest inadequate thing — dissolve. I have nothing. I have a bag with a gas station magnet in it and a throat that won't produce sound.
She looks at the bag. Then at me.
"You're an idiot," she says.
