I thoughtwe were just going to a safehouse, but Caleb’s directions lead us to a veritable mansion.
“This can’t be right,” I say, peering up through the windshield.
I was expecting something like the last Airbnb—something beige, anonymous, with good deadbolts, in a neighborhood where nobody looks out their windows.
Instead we just drove up a private, tree-lined driveway that I thought was aroad. Yeah, there was a gate we had to pass through, but I just thought that meant we were entering a gated neighborhood. Not that it was the gated entrance to asingle house.
“Whatisthis?” I ask.
“My best friend, Domhnall, lives here. Isaak was smart to send us here. This place has state-of-the-art security.”
“Even against the Lonestar Kings?” I ask nervously, eyes flicking back and forth at the expensively landscaped yard.
“Domhnall’s wife, Mads, took it to a level that makes professionally paranoid people feel under-prepared. They had a little trouble with…er…well, some international drug lords, so Mads took extra precautions.”
“Internationalwhat?” I turn to look over my shoulder into the back seat.
Caleb shakes his head in a way that means the story is genuinely insane and he doesn’t have time to tell it. “Also Mads sometimes goes by Anna. She uses the names interchangeably. It’s—” He waves a hand. “Another long story.”
I decide not to push. I have used up my capacity for insane stories today.
I park and am quickly out of the car and around to open Bruiser’s door. It’s killed me being so far away from him the whole drive up when I know he’s been so stressed and freaked out.
I’m about to heft him up into my arms, but Caleb’s already on it. Bruiser’s head drops onto his shoulder like it’s something he’s done every day of his life.
My throat closes up. That was going to be my move. Bruiser’s technically too big for it, but on a day like today I would have carried him, anyway.
Instead, I stand beside the car and watch Caleb carry my son toward the mansion as if it’s something he does all the time, and my chest does something I don’t have a clean word for.
The resemblance between the two of them is staggering.
I don’t know how I missed it for nine years, except that I never even had a photo of Caleb. And I refused to let myself picture his face because picturing him meant wanting him. And wanting him meant admitting the life I’d chosen was built on a substitution. That didn’t seem fair to Z.
Of course, now that thought makes me furious, even as Caleb’s features—so blurred in my memory the way things dowhen you’re actively trying to erase them—stand out so starkly now, echoed on our son’s face.
The particular line of his jaw. The way his brow sets when he’s concentrating.
Bruiser has that brow.
Seeing them together in the flat mid-morning light, I understand that I told myself a great many stories to deny what was right in front of me.
The two of them are unmistakable for anything other than father and son.
I swallow hard as we walk up to the entrance of the mansion all together. I fall into step beside Caleb, close enough to touch without everactuallytouching, which is the only way I know how to exist around him right now.
There’s too much in that three-inch gulf between us. The conversation we never got to finish. His voice in the shower going completely quiet and then—wait, what?—before the gunshot and the twelve minutes of running for our lives.
Then four hours of highway silence with his hand occasionally squeezing my shoulder, neither of us saying a word.
Now here we are walking up this driveway, still not talking about it, and the silence has weight. I can’t tell yet whether it’s protective or structural, or whether it’s about to become a big, big problem. I just know I’m too afraid to be the first one to break it.
The man who opens the front door is tall and dark-haired, with the specific stillness of someone who has dealt with things and learned to be calm about it afterward. His eyes go to Bruiser first—a brief, significant look that tells me he doesn’t miss the resemblance between him and Caleb either—and then to me.
It’s clear he recognizes me from the memorial, but I’m not sure we ever got directly introduced. The women kept flocking around me at the time.
“Harper.” I hold out my hand. “Caleb’s—” I hesitate one beat too long, and what comes out is: “Stepsister.”
I cringe the next second. Jesus Christ. He just recognized the boy is Caleb’s son, and I’m sure Isaak told him I was coming withmyson, and then I just saidstepsister? What the fuck was I thinking?