Harper stomps on the brakes, using three tons of German engineering as a battering ram. The bike crumples on our rear like a recycling can.
Fuck, Harper’s absolutely the most badass woman I have ever witnessed in real life.
Then there’s just silence, and our ragged breathing, and Bruiser’s crying from under the blanket—quieter now, exhausted sounding.
“Is he okay?” Harper’s voice shakes for the first time. “Is Bruiser okay?”
I lift the blanket. Bruiser blinks up at me with wet eyes, like he’s trying very hard to be composed.
“You did so good,” I tell him, and mean it with everything I have. “You were so brave.”
“Can I call you Cabe?” he asks, voice thick. “You’re a badass and that’s a badass nickname.”
My heart breaks and reassembles itself in the same moment.
“Yeah,” I manage. “Yeah, you can call me Cabe.”
He holds out his little fist. I bump it because something in me knows that’s what this requires, and he almost smiles and pulls the blanket back over his head to keep lying down.
I straighten up and look at Harper in the mirror.
Silent tears are running down her face while she drives with white-knuckled hands. I can’t stop watching her—this beautiful woman who crawled across a dark house for her son while gunfire exploded all around and then drove through a firefight without flinching?—
So, okay.
I don’t have all the explanations yet. I don’t know what she was waiting for, or what the last week might have cost her. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel right now.
What I know is this: I have been looking for the missing piece of my life for ten years. I have been running a club that exists to give other people the control and pleasure I can’t find anywhere. I know that counting steps and checking locks and buildingpower structures out of precise little rules are a fool’s way of controlling a too-chaotic world.
I reach forward and squeeze Harper’s shoulder. She looks at me in the mirror.
“Next left,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can offer that’s useful right now. I continue reading Isaac’s text and giving her the directions that will get us to arealsafe house.
We merge onto the highway going north.
I stare at the road unspooling in front of us, headlights cutting through the early morning dark.
I have a son curled up asleep under a ballistic blanket in the footwell beside me.
The woman I’ve loved since I was a teenager is driving us and our son north back toward Dallas with dried tears on her face and white knuckles on the wheel.
And I have no idea what any of this means yet.
I have no idea what I’m allowed to feel or what I’m supposed to say or whether the thing building in my chest right now is joy, rage, grief, or something so large it doesn’t have a name yet. I can’t find the patterns. And the question I didn’t get to ask is sitting in the middle of the car like a fifth passenger, taking up all the air.
Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you realized I was his father? Were you going to run again, without ever letting me know?
Harper doesn’t look at me in the mirror again. She watches the road with her jaw set and her eyes straight ahead, and neither of us says a word.
Bruiser shifts under the blanket and makes a small sound in his sleep that is the most devastating thing I have heard in my entire life.
I put my hand back on him to be a comforting pressure.
Then stare back at the road ahead.
TWENTY-THREE
HARPER