It’s the specific stillness of a man whose entire world has just shifted on its axis, and he needs a moment to establish which way is down.
“Wait.” His voice is very quiet. “What?”
I pull back and turn to look at him. He looks raw and younger, somehow, more like the boy I knew before either of us knew what a decade of consequences felt like.
“I’m the—” He stops. His jaw works. He starts again. “And you knew? All this time?”
“No.” I hold up my hands between us, water flying off my wrists. “I found out at the memorial, when I saw the photos of Helen with you when you were a kid—” I swallow hard. “Don’t you see it when you look at Bruiser? He looks just like you when you were his age. Z tricked me. He switched out the paternity results and convinced mehewas the father, but when I saw your childhood photos, I knew?—”
But then suddenly?—
CRACK.
A gunshot splits the air from somewhere outside and we both flinch and duck on instinct at the noise of shattering glass from somewhere very close by.
TWENTY-TWO
CALEB
You’re Bruiser’s father.
Three words. Four syllables. The kind of sentence that requires a lot of hyperventilating and probably a lot of sitting down after you hear it.
Instead it lands in a shower at 5 AM. And then a gunshot erases the next seven seconds of my life.
The weeks of training I did at Isaak’s self-defense classes kick in. My hand finds Harper’s shoulder to pull her down and then I cover her with my weight as we hit the wet tile. I shove the shower door open and drag her out.
Syllables come out of my mouth: “Stay low!”
My mind, meanwhile, is about thirty feet behind all of that, still standing in the steam, still trying to process three words that have rewritten every year since I was eighteen.
You’re Bruiser’s father.
My brain keeps trying to run the numbers backward. He must be closer to nineand a halfthen. Because ten years ago, when she left me, she had to be already?—
When she disappeared and I spent six months trying to track down every lead I had for her and getting nothing back, she was already?—
Another shot explodes in the silence. Glass shatters somewhere in the house. A window?
Focus, Graham.
Harper’s already moving before I can stop her, crawling for the bedroom door in nothing but wet skin and the specific determination of a mother who has just heard a gun go off when she doesn’t have eyes on her child.
I watch her go with my heart in my throat, and for exactly half a second I’m frozen—not by fear, not by tactical assessment—but by the thought that arrives without permission:
That’s his mother.
And he’s my son.
I have a son.
Holy shit, I have a son and there are people somewhere outside with weapons and I’m standing here naked at 5 AM having barely slept, the foundational structure of the last ten years of my life taken apart and reassembled around a fact I didn’t know.
And approximately fifteen seconds from now, I need to be competent enough to get all three of us out of this house alive.
I grab my phone off the nightstand. My hands shake even more as it unlocks and I punch Isaak’s number.
“Isaac.” I keep my voice flat while I yank on sweatpants. “We’re getting hit. What’s out there?”