33. Caroline
CAROLINE
The next week, after finally getting Alaina to give me a definitive answer about her schedule, I pack the boys’ things. I go slowly, folding tiny shirts with hands that can’t stop shaking. I try to sell it as a sleepover, an adventure, something exciting that doesn’t carry the weight of a goodbye.
“How long will we be gone?” Isaac asks, his eyes round and trusting. He’s trying to be brave, but his thumb keeps drifting toward his mouth like it did when he was younger. He knows something’s off. They both do.
“Just a few nights,” I tell them. It’s not a lie, but it’s not not a lie either, something gray like an untruth maybe?
It’s that I don’t know how long it will be.
It’s that my plan might mean I die, and it’s forever.
After all, we’re not just fighting a man.
We’re challenging an empire of rot built on bones and blood.
I don’t know if any of us are walking away from this.
They could lose their mother and their father all in one night.
If I die, the only thing that matters is that they live.
My boys. My heart outside of my body in two fragile, loud, beautiful pieces.
I try to smile. I don’t know if I pull it off. But I kiss the tops of their heads anyway, breathing in the smell of their shampoo like I can memorize it. I want to believe I’ll be here to tuck them in again. That I’ll still be someone’s mother in a week. But I’m also not stupid.
I zip up the little suitcases that Alaina brought them to me with, suitcases with dinosaurs on rocket ships on them.
It chokes me up to think of how worried she must have been and how she still didn’t buy the cheapest suitcases—she bought ones that would make the boys smile.
That’s the kind of woman she is, the kind of friend she is.
The kind of person I thought I was not so long ago.
“You’re going to stay with Miss Alaina again, okay?
With Juniper and Aspen. Was that fun before? ”
Joshua balances on one foot, his other foot splayed out in the air for seemingly no reason. Just because he’s a kid. “Why?”
The why is too much, and it’s moments like these I wish I was the kind of parent who says, “because I said so.”
Instead, I crouch in front of them. “Listen,” I say, smoothing down Isaac’s cowlick. “It’s complicated grown-up stuff, okay? But whatever Miss Alaina says, you do. You listen to her really good, okay? Whenever I see you again, you know that I’ll love you the whole time before I do.”
Isaac frowns, biting his lip. Joshua wraps his arms around my neck so hard it almost cuts off my breathing. And I let it. I let it bruise. I let it etch into my skin so I can still feel it if I don’t make it home.
“Hey, but guess what?” I mumble into them, inhaling the scent of their kids’ watermelon shampoo.
“What?” Isaac asks, his voice thick with undropped tears.
“You’re going to get to ride in a private jet.” I widen my eyes and tug on the front of his shirt, and he widens his eyes back.
“Really?” Joshua asks, and I nod, suppressing a smile.
They high five, and I laugh out loud, dropping to the floor completely and sitting crisscross. It’s easy now that they’re still young. I won’t have to answer the harder questions until they’re older. Right now, I’m just glad all it takes is a jet.
The drive to the runway is quiet. Not tense, just…still.
Joshua has fallen asleep in his booster, mouth open, head tilted toward the window. Isaac is half-asleep beside him, arms crossed tightly over his chest like he’s bracing for turbulence that hasn’t come yet.
The sun’s low on the horizon, slanting gold over the dashboard. Declan drives like he does everything else—focused, measured, careful. He doesn’t try to fill the silence, and I’m grateful for that.
I watch the boys in the rearview mirror and keep thinking, This is it. This could be the last time I see their sleeping faces. The last time I brush hair out of their eyes or whisper promises I don’t know if I can keep. The ache behind my ribs pulses louder with every mile we get closer to the jet.
I thought I could do this. I thought I could hand them off, kiss them goodbye, and drive away. But when we reach the runway and I see the jet waiting—sleek, bright, too clean against the sky—I can’t breathe.
I unbuckle my seat belt and open the door before Declan’s even shifted into park. The gravel crunches beneath my boots. The breeze stings my face.
I walk to the back of the car and pop the trunk. The boys stir as the engine shuts off, and Declan comes around to help me pull the bags out. He stops beside me and studies my face, reading something there I haven’t said yet.
“You alright?” he asks, voice low.
I shake my head. “I can’t…I can’t just load them onto a plane like cargo. I thought I could. I thought I was doing the right thing. But I’m still their mother. I’m still selfish about them. They’re mine, you know? I can’t let anything happen to them because of me.”
He nods, patient. Not arguing. Just waiting.
“I need to go with them,” I say. “Just to settle them in. Just to make sure—God, I don’t even know.”
Declan tilts his head, regarding me carefully. “Do you want me to come with you?”
The question catches me off guard. “What?”
“If you’re not ready to do it alone, I’ll go. But if you’d rather just be with them…” He pauses. “It’s your call.”
I stare at him, stunned. “I can just go? You’d let me?”
He shrugs one shoulder. “We said you weren’t a captive anymore. We meant it. This isn’t a trick, Caroline. If you want to go with them, you go. If you don’t come back…” He trails off, then looks at me dead-on. “We’ll handle it. We’ll protect them. We’ll clean up what needs cleaning up.”
The wind rustles his hair. There’s a tightness in his jaw, but his voice stays steady. “If you want to run,” he says, “we’ll help you.”
Tears sting my eyes before I can stop them. “And you’d just…let me disappear?”
He exhales through his nose, gaze drifting out over the tarmac. “It would kill us,” he says simply. “I mean, it would kill me. But if it meant you and the boys were safe…yeah. We’d let you go.”
I look down at the little dinosaur suitcase in my hand, then back at the jet, gleaming in the sun.
“But you’d let me go,” I say quietly, like I’m tasting the words, moving them around on my tongue and between my teeth.
“You may not be able to see us again,” he says, trying not to imbue too much emotion into the sentiment.
“If you ran. You’d have to disappear completely, at least for a while.
But yes, I’d let you go. And you’d be alive.
They’d be alive. And maybe, when it’s all over, when the dust settles… you could find your way back.”
My chest aches. It’s the kind of pain that feels like growing.
I glance at him. “You’d wait for me?”
“I already am,” he says simply, looking behind him as though gesturing to the emptiness, like he’s saying, Is there anyone else here?
I nod, throat too tight for words. Then I turn and open the back door, reaching for my boys.
Joshua blinks sleepily as I lift him out. “Are we here?”
“Yeah, baby. Time to go.”
Isaac hops out on his own, grabbing the handle of his suitcase and looking around like he’s half expecting a dragon to pop out of the hangar. To him, it’s an adventure. He has no idea about the dragons we’ll be slaying in his absence.
I guide them to the stairs, Declan standing by the bottom. He waves at us before the door closes, calling out, “ Slán! Slán, a bhuachaillí !”
“Bye, Declan!” Joshua calls out, waving.
Every part of me is buzzing, unsure, terrified, but I climb with them. I follow them into the belly of the plane, into the clean leather seats and humming quiet and climate-controlled calm.
I settle Joshua in and ask him, “How did you know what that meant? What Declan said?”
He shrugs and chirps, “I just knew, I guess, I don’t know. It felt like goodbye.”
I buckle Isaac’s belt, a lump in my throat. I run my hand through the hair on each of their tiny heads, smiling through tears at the copper strands they get from their Irish ancestry.
I press my forehead to Joshua’s and then to Isaac’s. I sit between them, cradling their hands in mine as the engines begin to hum and the jet prepares for takeoff. Their giggles go dead in the loud screaming of the engine rumbling.
And then I realize that no one is stopping me.
No one is watching the door. No one is waiting to drag me back.
The Crowley brothers trust me. They would really let me go.
For the first time, I consider believing that they love me, not just possessively or obsessively.
But real, true love, with trust and choice.
Declan would grieve me, but he would let me go.
He wouldn’t chase me. This is the proof I’ve been looking for.
What we have is real , even if it’s messy.
I’m not running. Not today. But I could. I look out the window at Declan and see him still waving. Joshua’s right. It feels like goodbye.