Chapter 36
?
— Lilac —
The night Colt came back, he slept for fourteen hours.I woke before him in the quiet and lay still beside him, listening to his breathing. Steady. Deep. I could feel the difference. This was a man finally putting something down.
I got up without waking him and found my way to the kitchen. Coffee was already made. Handful had texted at seven—he was taking the boys out on the bikes again, giving us as long as we needed.
I poured a cup and sat at the table in the still of the clubhouse and let myself go quiet in a way I’d been avoiding for a week.
Knox was wrong about memory. He had said once, with his particular six-year-old certainty, that you either remember something or you don’t.
He was wrong. Some things come back in pieces.
Some pieces are light. Some are heavy. Some you hold for a long time before you’re ready to look at what’s inside.
There was one I still hadn’t touched.
Eight weeks.
I would have known. The fatigue, the specific tenderness, the way certain smells had started to land wrong.
I paid attention to my body. I would have bought a test. I would have seen those two lines and stood in our bathroom holding a small plastic stick that meant everything was about to change, and I would have been terrified and excited all at once.
And then I would have gone to tell him.
The memory hit me as I was drinking my coffee. Not a full memory. Just bits and pieces.
A ceiling I didn’t recognize. Bright lights. The particular smell of antiseptic.
I had fainted—I understood that without being told, the same way you understand things in the strange calm that follows your own body going wrong. Someone was moving around me. Cold gel pressed against my stomach. A wand. A screen angled so I could see it.
Two separate flickers. Tiny and fast, like candle flames.
The man reading the screen was Doc French.
A Death’s Head brother. He’d patched Colt up after bar fights; I’d seen him at the clubhouse dozens of times.
He told me what I was looking at in the steady voice of someone accustomed to delivering news, and I lay there staring at those two heartbeats and thought Colt isn’t here.
That was the first clear thought. He should have been there for it. He wasn’t.
He was due back from a run. He would go to the clubhouse first.
I was in a car. Evening. The light was going gold and warm through the window, and I was buzzing with it—two heartbeats inside me, news too large to hold alone, the specific joy of someone running toward the one person they need to tell first.
A door handle, cold under my palm. The sound of my own footsteps. Voices somewhere. I was thinking about them. About him.
Colt.
He’s going to be so—
And then nothing.
Not darkness with edges. Not pain. The memory just ended. A wall so complete it didn’t even present itself as a wall.
I sat with it. Long enough for the coffee to go cold. Long enough for the light outside the window to shift from gray to pale gold.
I never got to tell him.
Seven years ago, I had walked into that clubhouse carrying the best news of my life, and I never got to say it out loud. Not to him. I never got to see his face when I told him.
I knew that but now I had seen snatches of that day. Of that memory.
I heard a car door. Two. Then Handful’s laugh carrying across the parking lot—loud, unhurried. Boots on gravel. Multiple sets. And underneath all of that, just barely distinguishable: my boys.
The clubhouse shifted in an instant—from still to loud, from empty to full.
Luca came in first, still in his helmet, talking fast about something involving a ramp and the technical specifics of what Handful had done wrong.
Knox was right behind him, cheeks red, one knee of his jeans grass-stained, holding a small rock like it was important.
Handful appeared in the doorway behind them with his arms spread wide, appealing to some invisible jury.
A couple of brothers filed in after him, still arguing about whatever the boys had talked them into watching.
Knox saw me first. He held up the rock.
“I found this for you,” he said, completely serious. “It’s got sparkles in it.”
I crouched down and took it with both hands, turned it over, found the tiny flecks of mica catching the light. “It’s perfect,” I said. “Where’d you find it?”
“By the second fence post.” He studied my face for a moment the way he sometimes did, quiet and careful, measuring something he didn’t have a name for yet. Then he stepped forward and put his arms around my neck.
I held him. Over his shoulder I could see Luca still arguing his case to Handful, who was shaking his head with enormous theatrical patience. I could feel Knox’s heartbeat against mine, fast from the ride and settling down now, slowing to match the quiet between us.
The grief from this morning was still there. I didn’t expect it to be gone. But it had settled into something that could be held alongside everything else—the rock in my hand, the weight of my son, the noise of people who loved us filling every room.
I stood up when Knox finally let go.
Luca looked over at me, mid-sentence. He stopped. He went still—some quick private assessment he’d been making without knowing it. Then he looked at me. “Is Dad here?”
The question landed simply. No accusation in it, no held breath. Just Luca, cutting to the thing that mattered.
“He’s here,” I said. “He got in last night. He’s still sleeping.”
Luca’s face settled. He nodded once, the way Colt nodded when information landed right—filed, confirmed, accounted for. Then he switched gears. “Hi, mama.”
“Hi, baby.” I opened my arm. “Come here.”
He threw himself into it—full weight, no hesitation, the way only Luca could, like he’d been waiting the whole ride home for exactly this.