4. Cali #2
Then I hear little feet in the hall behind me. I turn to see Isabella hurtling onto the scene, still in her nightgown, Doctor Fuzz clutched to her chest.
"Mr. Ronan!" she says, delighted.
"Good morning, brave girl," Ronan says in that buttery-smooth purr he saves just for her. "How's our little doctor friend today?"
"He's tired. He had a lot of dreams." Isabella plops down on the step right next to Ronan, ignoring me completely, and holds out the shoebox for inspection. "See? He's very cozy."
"Very cozy," Ronan agrees, peering in with appropriate gravity. "That's a well-cared-for caterpillar. You're doing an excellent job. I bet he's ready to make a cocoon soon and take a nice, long nap."
Hayden appears behind her, hair sticking straight up identically to his sister's, squinting in the light. He takes in the whole scene—Ronan on the steps, me above him, the missing front door—with a kind of scientific squint that must be hard-wired into our shared DNA.
"Where's the door?" he asks.
"It, uh… broke," I say vaguely. "We're getting a new one."
"How does a door break?"
"It just does sometimes, buddy. Doors are more fragile than you'd think."
He accepts that, albeit with visible skepticism, and then he sits down on the other side of Ronan. So now, I've got both my children flanking the man I told to get out of my life, all three of them on my stoop, and me hovering above them like some kind of confused chaperone.
This is not how this was supposed to go.
None of this is how anything was supposed to go.
"Mr. Ronan," Isabella says, in the tone she uses when she has already decided what's going to happen and is simply informing everyone else of the outcome, "will you make pancakes?"
"Isabella," I warn.
"But he makes the best ones!" she reminds me, that backstabbing little tramp. "The ones with the crispy edges. Your pancakes are okay, but Mr. Ronan's are the good ones."
"Isabella!"
"It's true, though."
Ronan looks up at me. At least he's courteous enough not to grin, because if he so much as revealed one smiling tooth, I'd slap him sideways with a shoe.
But no, he doesn't. He's just waiting, giving me the room to decide what to do next.
It irritates me to no end that he knows when to do that: exactly when I'm at my weakest.
But saying "no" remains an option. Maybe even the best one.
Letting him in the house to cook breakfast is the exact opposite of getting him out of my life.
It's a slippery, stupid, terrible idea, and I know it even as I begin to sigh and nod, acknowledging the lost cause that, if we're being honest, I lost a long time ago.
"Fine," I say. "Pancakes. But you're gone the second the plates are cleared. And you're not allowed to touch anything except the stove. Definitely not me."
"Deal," Ronan says immediately, before I can change my mind. He stands up off the step with a groan that tells me exactly how his back feels after six hours on concrete.
Isabella lets out a whoop and grabs his hand and hauls him toward the door like she's afraid he'll evaporate if she doesn't keep a very, very close eye on him.
I follow along because I also intend to keep a close eye on Ronan Akov, although for quite different reasons than my daughter.
It's the only way I can justify this to myself—that I'm watching closely, I haven't forgiven anything, and I'm simply too tired to fight two children and a Russian mob boss before breakfast.
Ronan finds his way around my kitchen like he's cooked here a hundred times. He knows which drawer the whisk is in. He knows the burner on the left runs hot. He knows Hayden likes his pancakes small and Isabella likes hers enormous with Minnie Mouse ears.
Ronan Akov is always, always listening.
I try very hard not to find that endearing.
We all know that I fail.
The kids are happily situated at the island next to me, Hayden explaining something to Isabella about how caterpillars turn to soup inside the cocoon before they become butterflies, which Isabella finds both fascinating and deeply upsetting on Doctor Fuzz's behalf.
Ronan pours batter, and the whole kitchen fills up with the smell and the feel of it, warm and buttery and normal, and for a minute—but only one, because I can't let myself get carried away—I just let myself be here.
In it. Not fighting.
I'll go back to fighting after breakfast. I promise myself that. Just… not yet, okay? A girl needs a moment to decompress sometimes.
Then there's a knock at the door.
Well, that's a bit of a misnomer. Due to last night's events, there is no door, so it's more of a knock on the frame where the door should be, a knuckle rapping against the splintered wood. It's still sudden and jarring enough to make all four of us freeze.
Ronan sets down the spatula. His whole body goes taut. I know what it means: that he's stopped being the pancake man and started being the other thing.
"I'll get it!" Hayden announces, sliding off his stool too abruptly for me to regather my bearings and stop him.
I try anyway. "Hayden—!"
But he's fast, that kid, always has been, and he's down the hall before I can grab him.
Ronan charges after him, quick and silent, and I'm right behind them both, my heart climbing into my throat, because we just did this, we just had a man in this house who came through a door, and I am not, I am not emotionally prepared to go through another—
Hayden skids to a stop in the front hall and looks out at whoever's standing there.
"Mom," he calls back, and his voice isn't scared, it's impressed, which somehow makes it worse and better all at once. "It's a lady. She's got a badge. Like a real one. It's actually really cool."
Ronan goes white.
I've seen this man be a lot of things. Calm. Cold. Amused. Dangerous. I watched him shoot a man on my stairs without his hand so much as shaking.
I have never once seen him look like this.
He looks at me, and there's a whole sentence in his eyes that he doesn't say out loud in front of my son.
"I've got it," I tell him in a hoarse rasp. "Take the kids in the kitchen. Watch the pancakes."
He hesitates. He wants to control. But we both know that the optics of him being here, now, like this, with whoever is waiting for us… It is just less suspicious if I put on the stay-at-home-SuperMom mask and hope this person goes away easily.
Resigned, he puts a hand on Hayden's shoulder and steers him back toward the smell of breakfast. "This way, chief.
I need your help to flip your sister's pancake.
I don't think I'm strong enough to turn that thing over without your muscles getting involved.
" It's so gentle, easy, like nothing's wrong at all.
The speed with which he changes personalities scares me sometimes.
"But I wanna talk to the—"
"Come on, my man," Ronan says, forcing himself back into the Pancake Man voice. "I know you don't wanna hear Bella throw a fit if we burn one of Minnie's ears off."
Hayden keeps mumbling protests, bewitched by the new arrival's badge, whatever that means, but he lets himself be led away.
Just like that, the hall is empty except for me and the open doorway.
I take slow, nervous steps down it like I'm walking a pirate's plank.
Then I turn a corner and see what I'm facing.
There's a woman standing on my stoop. Stern and serious, dark hair pulled back tight. A gray blazer that means business, sensible shoes, and a small leather wallet held open in her hand with a badge in it and a photo ID that says a lot of things in official-looking print.
Among those things are three undeniable letters.
FBI.
"Mrs. Bradshaw?" she says.
"It's Meadows," I say automatically. "Bradshaw was my married name."
"Right." Her tight face draws even tighter. She closes the wallet and tucks it into her jacket. "Well, Ms. Meadows, it's about time we crossed paths. There are some things that you and I need to discuss."