Page 99 of Tracking Safety

His heart softened. “Always. Grab that box of screws.”

Liam fetched the box and crouched beside him.

For a while they worked in the easy quiet. Liam held the casing steady while Luke drove the screws. The boy had been doing jobs like this since he was four. His patience made him a natural.

“Dad.” Liam kept his eyes on the screw Luke was setting. “Is Mom staying?”

Luke’s hands went still for half a second before he made them keep moving.

He’d been waiting for the question all week. He still didn’t have a clean answer.

“I don’t know yet, Bud,” he said honestly. “There’s a lot we’re still figuring out.”

Liam nodded as if turning that answer over. “Cora thinks she’s staying forever. She told Jonah.”

“Cora thinks a lot of things.”

“Yeah.” Liam adjusted his grip on the casing. “I hope she’s right.”

Luke stopped.

His son wasn’t looking at him. He’d said the words to the doorframe, not to his father.

But he’d said them.

Luke looked at the top of his boy’s head, and his throat went tight. “So do I.”

He hadn’t meant to say the words. He’d meant something careful and parental, something that didn’t promise what he couldn’t deliver. Instead the truth came out plain and unguarded, the same way it had in the kitchen the other night when he’d called Jenna his wife.

Liam glanced up.

For a second, something passed between them—an understanding, father to son, that neither of them had words for and neither of them needed.

Then Liam looked back at the casing. “This one’s crooked.”

They went back to being two people fixing a door again.

Luke checked it. The boy was right. It was crooked.

He loosened the screw and set it true.

It was a good morning. Maybe the best one he’d had in two years.

He just couldn’t make himself believe it would last—and he hated that he couldn’t.

Luke kept working anyway.

A little after noon, a county truck stopped at the gate.

Jenna caught sight of it from the porch, where she’d been watching Cora and Jonah build something indistinguishable out of clothespins at her feet.

Freya had taken to lying near her now. Not against her. Not yet. Just near—an arm’s length off, wherever Jenna settled, like a sentry who’d assigned herself the post.

Cora claimed full credit for the dog coming around, and Jenna let her have it.

But she’d caught the dog watching her in the quiet hours too, those amber eyes steady on her face. She understood the look better than she wanted to. She knew what it was to keep your distance from a thing you wanted. To circle it for weeks before you let yourself believe it might be safe.

She didn’t push. She just left the door open, the way someone had once left it open for her.