Chapter 18 #2
"Are we having breakfast?" she asks, addressing the room generally with the confidence of someone who has assessed the situation and identified the most important outstanding issue.
"We are," Brooks says, with the decisive tone of a man who has just been handed a direction he's grateful for.
Within thirty seconds he's moving around the kitchen with the quiet efficiency that seems to be a McCallister trait, like competence in a crisis is something that got passed down through the bloodline along with the cheekbones and the stubbornness.
I watch all of it from my place at the end of the island.
I feel the fear sitting in me the way it has been sitting since I looked at those trail camera images.
Steady and present and not going anywhere, but alongside it something else has taken up residence that I didn't plan for and can't quite name yet.
I could still leave.
The thought moves through me the same way it has every time things have escalated, quiet and logical. The exit route my mind keeps mapping out of habit because habit is what you fall back on when everything around you is uncertain.
But I look at Hadley on Jace's hip laughing at something Wade just said, and something shifts in me that is less feeling and more simple undeniable fact.
There are four McCallister brothers in this kitchen right now, and not one of them would let anything happen to Hadley or to me while there was breath left in their bodies to prevent it.
I can see it in the way Brooks is already thinking three moves ahead to protect everyone in this room. In the way Wade's anger this morning wasn't really anger at all but fear wearing a louder coat.
In the way Luke asked the questions that needed asking, in the way Jace looks at my daughter like she is already the thing he would burn everything else down to keep safe.
I have spent five years believing the only person I could count on was myself, building that belief into something solid and dependable because it had to be. There was no one else and Hadley needed me to be enough.
Standing in this kitchen right now, I don't know what to do with the fact that I was wrong.
Breakfast settles the room in the way that food always does, something practical and grounding to organize the morning.
For a stretch of time that feels both ordinary and entirely surreal, we sit around the table in Jace's kitchen like this is something we do.
Like the six of us have been finding our places at this table for years instead of hours.
Hadley sits between Jace and Wade, which she apparently decided on her own was the correct arrangement. Wade accepts this with the resignation of a man who has learned that arguing with small children is a battle with no favorable outcome.
She talks through most of breakfast, filling the quiet spaces with the particular stream of consciousness that five year olds produce when they feel safe enough to just be themselves.
Moving from questions about the horses to an observation about the color of the kitchen walls to a detailed account of a dream she had that involved a purple dog and a very large sandwich.
Nobody tells her to be quiet.
Nobody looks impatient or distracted or like they'd rather be anywhere else.
And I sit at the end of the table watching all of it with my coffee warming my hands.
Something is growing in my chest that I have been carefully tending the borders of for weeks now.
Something I stopped trying to talk myself out of last night and am only now beginning to understand the full size of.
This is what I want.
Not the danger or the investigation or the uncertainty of the weeks ahead.
This, the table and the morning light and the people around it and the man at the other end who keeps glancing at me in that quiet way he has.
He's not demanding anything, not pushing, just checking, just making sure I'm still here and still okay and still with him.
I am still here.
I am still with him.
After breakfast the brothers move back into the business of the morning.
The conversation pulling toward next steps and what to do with what they know.
How to handle the name Jace still hasn't said out loud.
I get Hadley settled in the living room with her drawing pad and her colored pencils and the particular focused silence she falls into when she's creating something.
I stand in the hallway between the two rooms feeling the shape of the life that is forming around me and letting myself want it without immediately looking for the exit.
That's when Jace's phone lights up on the kitchen counter.
He picks it up, reads it once, and the change in him is immediate. A stillness that is different from his usual stillness. Tighter, something draining out of his expression that leaves something harder in its place.
Brooks sees it first. "What?"
Jace sets the phone down on the counter and turns it so they can all see the message on the screen, and the room goes very quiet very fast.
The evidence from the Miller land. The gear and the records, the physical proof that ties everything back to someone other than Jace. Every piece of it that had been secured and documented and stored somewhere safe.
It's gone.
All of it.
And whoever took it knew exactly where to look.