Chapter 3 #2
"You found the place okay," she said finally, which was such a mundane thing to say that it almost made me laugh, if the moment hadn't been so heavy.
"Diesel gave me directions. Very detailed. Included a warning about your neighbor's dog."
"Bruno. He's all bark. Mostly." A ghost of a smile crossed her face and disappeared just as fast.
"Mostly?"
"He bit the mailman once. Everyone agrees the mailman probably deserved it.
Long story involving a very aggressive delivery schedule and a squirrel.
" She shook her head, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders for just a second before the weight of the morning settled back over her face. "Come in."
Her kitchen was warm, lived-in, sunlight falling across a table with two coffee cups already set out. A child's drawings covered most of the refrigerator door — sailboats, a lopsided sun, a dog that might have been Bruno from next door — a whole gallery of a small life I wasn't part of yet.
I sat where she gestured, and she poured coffee neither of us drank, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all.
"You wanted to tell me something," I said finally, when the silence stretched past what either of us could stand.
"I did." She wrapped both hands around her cup like it was the only warm thing in the room. "I still do. I just — I don't know how to start."
"Start anywhere. I'm not going anywhere until you do."
She looked up at that, something raw moving behind her eyes, and for a second I thought she was going to say it, whatever it was, right there with the morning light falling across the table between us. Her mouth opened.
Then a car door slammed outside, and footsteps came up the front walk, and a woman's voice called through the screen door before either of us could stop it.
"Lena? It's just me, I brought back the—" The voice cut off abruptly. A woman I didn't recognize stood frozen in the doorway, dark-eyed, sharp, clocking the two of us at the table with the instant, assessing look of someone who knew exactly what she'd just walked into. "Oh. I'm — I can come back."
"Sienna, it's fine," Lena said, too fast, the moment already slipping away from us both. "This is Hawk. Hawk, this is Sienna, she runs the flower shop by the church."
"Elio's Sienna," I said, placing the name. "Heard about you two. Congratulations."
"Thank you." Sienna's eyes flicked between us, reading something in the air she wasn't saying out loud, the kind of quick, assessing look that told me she'd already guessed exactly who I was without needing an introduction. "You're the one who's been gone. Six years, right?"
"That's me."
"Elio mentioned you. Said you were the club's ghost story. The one who vanished." She winced, immediately regretting the phrasing. "Sorry. That came out worse than I meant it."
"It's accurate, though."
"Still. Bad manners, showing up and insulting a man before I've even said a proper hello.
" She held out the small potted plant she'd been carrying, an olive branch in the most literal sense, a little rosemary plant with a ribbon tied around the pot.
"This was actually for Lena. Belated thank-you for watching the shop while Elio and I were in Naples. I really can come back another time."
"It's fine," Lena said again, and something in her voice had gone brittle, the opening closed as surely as if she'd shut a door on it. "We were just finishing up."
We weren't. We both knew we weren't. But Sienna set a small potted plant on the counter with an apologetic look and made a hasty exit, and whatever Lena had been about to say dissolved into the space where interruption had let her retreat.
"Lena."
"Not today," she said quietly, and there was something in her face — not refusal exactly, more like a woman standing at the edge of something too big to jump into on command. "I'm sorry. I thought I was ready and I'm — I'm not. Not yet."
I wanted to push. Every instinct in me wanted to push, wanted to sit at that table until whatever she was carrying came out into the light.
But I'd spent six years learning the hard way what happened when you pushed people past what they could give you, and something told me this needed to come on her terms, not mine.
"Okay," I said instead, standing, though everything in me resisted it. "But Lena — I saw the way you looked just then. Whatever this is, it's bigger than an awkward reunion. I'm not stupid, and I'm not going to stop noticing."
"I know."
"Whenever you're ready. I'll be here."
She walked me to the door, and just as I stepped onto the porch, my eyes caught on that bicycle again, training wheels still attached, a scuffed helmet hanging off one handlebar with a name written on the strap in permanent marker, block letters worn soft at the edges from years of handling.
NICO.
Something about the shape of that name settled into my chest and didn't leave, a low hum of certainty I couldn't yet explain and wasn't ready to name.
"Lena," I said, turning back. "That boy on the harbor path yesterday. With you. Was that—"
"I have to get to the market before it closes," she said, too quickly, already retreating back through the doorway. "Thank you for coming, Hawk."
The door shut, gently but firmly, and I stood on her porch a long moment, staring at that small scuffed helmet, feeling the pieces of something enormous shifting into place just out of reach, close enough to touch if I only had one more piece to make it click.
I rode back to the garage slower than I needed to, turning it all over — the drawings on the fridge, the helmet with the boy's name, the way she'd gone pale in the doorway of a fish market at the mere sight of me, the way not yet had sounded less like a delay and more like a woman standing at the edge of a cliff, gathering the courage to jump.
Diesel was waiting when I pulled in, leaning against the garage doors with an expression that told me he'd already guessed how the morning had gone before I said a word.
"That well, huh."
"She almost told me something. Got interrupted. Then shut the door on it."
"Interrupted by who?"
"Sienna. Flower shop."
"Ah, terrible timing, Sienna." He shook his head, though there wasn't much humor behind it. "You look like a man who saw something he can't unsee, though. What was it?"
"A kid's helmet. Had a name on it." I didn't say the name out loud, not yet, like saying it would make the half-formed thought in my head too real to take back.
"You said it's not your story to tell. Fine.
I'm not asking you to tell it. But tell me this much, Diesel — am I about to hear something that changes everything? "
He was quiet a long moment, weighing something, loyalty to Lena warring visibly with whatever he owed me as a brother who'd just ridden six years of hell to get back to this exact town.
"Yeah," he said finally, quiet, careful. "I think you are."
That was all he gave me. It was enough.
Whatever it was, I was close now. Close enough that some old, sharp instinct from years of hunting men who didn't want to be found had already started doing the math in the back of my mind, quietly, insistently, refusing to be ignored.
I just wasn't ready yet to let myself finish the sum.