The bakery’s back door opens from the inside. The steel frame catches the streetlight.
Tyra is in the doorway.
Grey wolf in both arms. Hair in every direction. Pajamas with the small stars. She is squinting against the light and she has not seen the street. Tiffany is behind her, one hand on her shoulder, positioned between the child and the scene outside. The OldLadies are there. Savannah in the doorway behind Tiffany. Avery and Courtney flanking.
Tyra looks past all of them. Her dark eyes, Jude’s eyes, scan the parking lot and land on me.
“Rafe,” she says. “You have something on your hands.”
I look down. My right hand. The blade. The blood. Ferraro’s blood on my knuckles and between my fingers and across the scarred skin that has held a grey wolf and a woman and a future I did not know I was building until a four-year-old handed me a stuffed animal and told me I was brave.
I wipe the blade on my jeans. Slide it into the sheath. Put both hands behind my back.
“Paint,” I say.
Tyra considers this. The grey wolf stares at me with its one remaining glass eye.
“You should wash your hands,” she says. “Before you touch the cake.”
I cross the parking lot. Ten steps. The longest steps of my life because each one takes me further from what I did in the street and closer to what I am doing here and the distance between those two things is the entire span of who I used to be and who I have become.
I pick her up. The grey wolf gets jammed between us. Her arms go around my neck. Her dark curls press against my jaw. She is warm and she smells like flour and chocolate and the clean soap from this morning and the weight of her against my chest is the specific, grounding weight of something I have decided to protect for the rest of my life.
I hold her.
Lucia is in the street.
She has not come to Tyra yet. She is standing twenty feet away. The comms unit is in one hand. The weapon is in the other. She is looking at me. At Tyra in my arms. At the grey wolf jammed between us. At the blood on my jeans that her daughter decided is paint.
Her face does something I can read from twenty feet in the dark.
Not gratitude. Not relief.
Recognition.
The same look she gave me the first night in the cabin when I stood in a doorway and said nothing and she understood everything. The look that tells me she has been watching me the way I have been watching her. With the patience that is not patience at all but certainty wearing a quiet face.
She puts the weapon down. She puts the comms unit down.
She walks toward me and Tyra. Three people in a parking lot in Pine Valley. A woman. A child. A man with blood on his hands and flour on his shirt from a grey wolf that has spent the night surrounded by chocolate cake.
Lucia reaches us. Her hand finds the back of my neck. She pulls my forehead against hers. Tyra is between us. The grey wolf is between us. The flour and the blood and the cold mountain air and the entire weight of every perimeter I have ever walked are between us.
She does not say thank you. She does not say I love you.
She says: “Come inside. The cake is almost done.”
The bakery door is open. The light spills out. Warm. Amber. The smell of chocolate and flour.
I carry Tyra through the door. Lucia walks beside me. Her hand stays on my neck.
Behind us, the Broken Halos hold the street.
24
LUCIA
My hands are still carrying the fight.