Bruiser’s head comes up off Caleb’s shoulder. “Mom, you’re hissister? Why didn’t you say so?”
I close my eyes briefly. The embarrassment is almost a relief, really. At least it’s a small and manageable feeling in the middle of every other enormous one.
Caleb goes still beside me, not reacting or signaling anything to his friend. But I’ve been attuned to the frequency of Caleb Graham’s body since I was seventeen years old, and I feel the stillness the way you feel a room change temperature.
He’s standing here holding our son and giving me the space to set the terms here. I don’t know if that’s generosity or strategy or just Caleb being Caleb—patient in ways that feel almost unbearable sometimes. In the past, it would’ve made me want to do something reckless just to get a reaction.
“Come in, come in!” says a woman behind Domhnall. She’s warm and pretty and carrying a gurgling, fat baby in the crook of her arm like a little football. The baby’s legs kick happily. “Hi! I’m Anna. We met briefly at the memorial—my friends were being super rude grilling you, so you might not remember me in the background. We have a whole private wing prepared for you—you won’t even know we’re here.”
I laugh a little at her introduction and give the baby’s foot a squeeze as we follow her into the house.
I can’t help clocking that she seems new to this level of wealth. As she gives us the tour, she looks around with the mild awe and bewilderment of someone still waiting to wake up. Itmakes her a little more relatable, especially since she also pauses to blow strawberries on the baby’s belly.
Bruiser wriggles out of Caleb’s arms and immediately begins cataloging the expensive objects on the mantel with the thoroughness of a small claims case assessor.
“Do you have a pool?” he asks, without looking up from a crystal object he is definitely going to knock over.
“Bruiser,” I start.
“We do,” Anna says, dropping to his level with the ease of someone used to small people. She perches the baby on her knee, bouncing him there. “Indoor and outdoor. Hot tub, too—but no going in without your mom or dad.”
“My dad’s a bad guy,” Bruiser says. The conversational tone he uses for this particular piece of information splits me in two.
Anna doesn’t flinch, though. “So is mine.” She says it simply, more as a fact than a wound. “But now I have the best people around me. It gets better. I promise, kiddo.”
Bruiser considers this with the same gravity he gives to serious information. Then he looks back at Caleb.
“Cabe is the best,” he says.
And he reaches back without looking—the absolute animal trust of a child who has decided someone’s trustworthy, and Caleb takes his searching hand immediately. Like he’s been oriented toward that reach since we got out of the car. Like there was never any question.
I have to look away so I don’t lose my shit.
Caleb’s other hand finds the small of my back as we follow Anna down the hall, and the touch is so familiar and so precisely placed—the exact spot he always used to find when we were teenagers, that simple, sneaking comfort—and my throat closes up again.
I want to put Bruiser to bed and press my face into Caleb’s chest until I’ve figured out how to say all the things I didn’t get to say in the shower.
I want to finish the conversation. I want to know what his face was doing in the moment before the gunshot, in those few seconds betweenyou’re Bruiser’s fatherandwait, what?
But I’m a mother first.
Everything else comes second. So I direct Bruiser’s questions about whether the pool is heated and whether there will be macaroni and cheese. And I try to pick at the lasagna that Domhnall’s three-Michelin-star chef sends down, and I watch Caleb make Bruiser laugh three times at lunch with a competence that looks effortless and probably isn’t.
And I think:this is what Z kept from both of them.
Not just from Caleb. From Bruiser too, who deserved to know from the beginning what kind of man he came from.
Domhnall walks me to the security room before Caleb takes Bruiser swimming, and after ten minutes of looking at the screens covering every hallway, every perimeter point, along with the multiple guards stationed around the property—I’m finally satisfied enough to let Bruiser out of my direct line of sight for the first time since yesterday.
Caleb stops beside me before they go.
His hand comes to my shoulder in the careful, questioning way he always touches me now. It’s a Caleb touch, so it’s still electrifying, but so strange now, feeling him as a man touching me in concern, checking in on me—that all my pieces are still in the right configuration.
Because heseesme.
I haven’t been so fully seen in a whole decade.
And the unfinished conversation sits between us like a physical object. We are six inches away from the thing we’re not saying.