Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Madison
The pharmacy took ten minutes. I moved through it on autopilot—children's Tylenol, the right dosage for her weight, a bottle of Pedialyte because it was there and it made sense. I stood at the self-checkout and didn't let myself think about where I was going.
Clement Street was quiet. I parked behind a rental car I didn't recognize and sat for a moment with the engine off.
I knew this street. Knew the house—the porch with the step that dipped in the middle, the gutter above the door that rattled every time the wind picked up.
I'd been here more times than I could count, back when this address meant something different.
Back when coming here meant Jack's jacket on the hook and Cassie's laugh carrying from the kitchen and the unthinking ease of a place where you were expected.
It looked exactly the same. That was the disorienting thing. Twelve years and the house hadn't moved an inch.
I got out.
Jack answered before I’d finished knocking.
He looked like he’d been awake for a long time.
The hall light was behind him, casting his shadow long across the wet porch, and for a second I just stood there in the rain taking in the weight of him.
He was broader than I remembered, his jaw dark with several days of growth, his shoulders holding a tension that hadn't been there a decade ago. But the eyes were the same.
His gaze dropped to the pharmacy bag in my hand.
"You didn't have to—"
"I know," I said, cutting him off before he could turn it into a debt.
I stepped inside.
The house stopped me for a second. Not the layout—I knew the layout, could have walked it blind—but the smell of it, that stale, familiar warmth, and the coat hooks by the door with a child's purple jacket on them now where there used to be nothing.
I knew this hallway. I'd stood in it a hundred times.
It had just never felt like the past was something you could actually step into.
"How's she been?" I said, keeping my voice low. The silence of the house felt fragile, like a thin sheet of glass.
"Hasn't moved."
"Okay. Let's go up."
We took the stairs quietly, Jack ahead, me behind. I watched the way his boots hit the wood—heavy, but careful. He pushed the door open and stood back, and I went in.
She was on her side, facing the wall, one arm thrown out.
I knelt next to the bed and put my hand to her forehead.
She was still burning, the heat dry and heavy, but no worse than what Jack had described on the phone.
Her breathing was even, a rhythmic puff against the pillow.
I checked the glands in her neck, her color, the steady rise and fall of her chest. Everything where it should be.
I reached for her shoulder, just a light touch to the fabric of her pajamas. "Lily." My voice was barely a whisper, a sound I hadn't used in years. "Hey, sweetheart."
She stirred, turning toward me with the slow, underwater movement of a child submerged in sleep.
Her eyes didn't quite open, just fluttered against the weight of the fever.
I kept my hand on her forehead, smoothing her hair back from her face, and she made a small, broken sound.
Then her hand came up, searching the air, and found mine.
She held it.
Just that. Her small, hot fingers closing around my thumb in the dark, not knowing who I was, just reaching for the only solid thing in the room.
I stayed completely still. My skin was still cool from the rain outside, and I could feel her fever pulsing against my palm.
She had Cassie’s hands. The same long, tapered fingers, the same curve of the nail.
Five years old and she’d lost everything, and now she was holding onto a stranger in the dark because I was the only thing there.
I didn't move. I didn't look at Jack, though I could feel him like a physical weight in the doorway.
After a moment, her grip loosened, her fingers sliding away as she slipped back under the surface of the fever.
I moved into the light of the hallway lamp to dose the Tylenol.
I was careful, precise, getting the liquid into her without fully breaking her sleep.
She took it without protest—a small, instinctive swallow that told me she’d done this before.
She’d had a mother who knew how to sit in the dark and do this.
I set the bottle on the nightstand with a quiet click.
In the doorway, Jack watched. He didn't offer to help; he didn't say a word. He just stood there, shadowed and silent, witnessing the part of Lily's life he hadn't been there for.
I pulled the blanket up to her shoulder, smoothing the edge, then stood. My knees protested the movement. Without looking at him, I walked toward the door, and we went downstairs.
* * *
He put the kettle on without asking. I sat at the kitchen table and looked past him into the living room.
From here, I could see the coffee table and the coloring book still spread out across it.
It was a shock of bright, aggressive color in a house that felt otherwise drained—half a garden filled in with jagged strokes of pink and yellow.
A few crayons had rolled onto the rug, left exactly where they’d fallen.
It looked like a crime scene of a normal afternoon. He was living around the mess like it was a memorial he didn't have the permission to dismantle.
He set a mug in front of me and sat across the table. For a moment, neither of us said anything. The only sound was the rising hiss of the kettle and the rain against the window over the sink—the one Cassie had always meant to replace.
"Coming back here," he said, nodding toward the window. "After Baltimore. Was it what you expected?"
"I… I suppose." The truth was, I had expected nothing. I'd come to work, and work was what I did.
He nodded. His hands were around the mug—broader than I remembered, roughed up from years of whatever work he’d been doing. I noticed a scar on the back of one knuckle I didn’t recognize.
"You like it?"
"I do. Good hospital." I paused, looking into the steam of my drink. "Quiet enough."
He turned the mug in his hands, a slow, deliberate circle. It was the same restless habit he’d had at nineteen, but his hands were different now—calloused, the skin etched with the kind of deep-set grit that doesn't wash off in one go.
"Cassie mentioned you’d done it," he said. "The surgeon thing." He didn't look up, but his voice had a rough edge to it. "She was proud of you."
I stared into my mug, the steam dampening my face.
"Talked about you more than you’d think," he added.
The guilt hit me, sharp and familiar. I thought of the unreturned calls and the coffee shop curb.
The photo of Lily I’d tucked into a drawer and eventually buried under hospital paperwork.
I’d spent years convincing myself that staying away was a form of moving on, but sitting across from him, it just felt like a long-running cowardice.
"What happens now?" I asked. I needed to move the conversation away from Cassie before my throat closed up. "For you."
"Find work. Get the guardianship sorted." He glanced toward the ceiling, his focus shifting to the room upstairs. "Figure out the rest as it comes."
"She's lucky to have you here," I said.
Something tightened in his jaw. "Yeah," he said, the word flat and final. He was shutting down again, compressing the weight of his situation into that short, blunt exchange.
I looked at him—really looked at him. He looked like a man who had spent a decade bracing for impact and had finally hit the ground.
"Last time I saw her, she said maybe four words the whole visit," he said. He was looking at his hands now, not the mug. "A year ago. She hid behind Cassie's leg the second I walked in."
A year ago Lily would have been four. Now she was upstairs in a house he’d been in for three days, and he was the only thing standing between her and the system.
He turned his mug, the ceramic scraping quietly against the table.
"You came to see her," he said. It wasn't a question. "Before I got here. The social worker mentioned it. Deb."
It wasn't an accusation. It was just a fact he was placing on the table, the way a mechanic might lay out a part he couldn't identify.
"I knew Cassie," I said. My voice sounded too loud in the quiet kitchen. "I saw the name on the chart and I... I just wanted to make sure someone was with her."
He nodded slowly. He didn't ask why I hadn't stayed. He didn't ask why I’d waited for him to show up before I came back. He just accepted the data.
"Thank you," he said. "For that too."
The rain tapped at the window. Somewhere outside a car passed and was gone.
I wrapped both hands around the mug and looked past him into the living room, at the coloring book on the coffee table.
I thought about Lily's fingers closing around mine in the dark and the fact that my name was still in a notebook in this kitchen, and I didn't say any of what was sitting in my chest.
"She's going to be okay," I said. "Tonight. Keep an eye on the temperature, but she should come down by morning."
"Okay."
"Call the pediatrician first thing. Get her seen."
"I will."
I pushed back from the table.
"Maddie." His voice was quiet.
I looked at him. He was still sitting there, framed by the yellow light of the kitchen, looking like he’d been carved out of the same heavy wood as the chair. He seemed to think better of whatever it was he wanted to say. He just shook his head once, barely.
"Drive safe," he said.
I picked up my coat and went.