Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Adalynn
The mattress dips under my weight, and Carter's already sitting up before I've even settled, back against the headboard, knees drawn up. He hasn't slept. I can tell by the way his eyes catch the little bit of light from the hallway, too sharp, too awake.
“Where's Dodge?” Carter asks, no preamble.
“Handling something,” I tell him.
“That's not an answer, Adalynn,” Carter presses.
I narrow my eyes. “It's the one I've got right now.”
Carter shifts, careful not to jostle Amelia, who's curled against the wall with one arm slung over her stuffed rabbit, breathing slow and even.
Noah's somewhere between asleep and not, his small body warm against my side.
“You said Dodge would tell me stuff,” Carter says.
“You said I wouldn't get kept in the dark anymore.”
“I'm not keeping you in the dark. I'm telling you what I know,” I remark.
“Then tell me,” Carter demands.
I look at him a second, at the tight set of his jaw, and decide there's no version of tonight where I get to keep him soft. “There's a book. The one Amelia was coloring in a couple weeks back, remember? Black cover, no pictures, just numbers and writing.”
“The ugly one?” Carter asks.
“That one. It belongs to a man who's been hunting us. It's got things in it he doesn't want anybody to see. Dodge and the others went to deal with him tonight,” I explain.
“Deal with him how, Adalynn?” Carter presses.
“I don't know the specifics, Carter.”
“You're lying,” Carter accuses.
“I'm not telling you everything. That's different.”
Carter stares at me, working his jaw the way he does when he's deciding whether to push harder, and Amelia stirs, murmurs something into her rabbit's ear, and that seems to take some of the fight out of him.
He doesn't want to wake her into this either.
“Is he coming back tonight?” Carter's voice has dropped, quieter now.
“I don't know,” I murmur.
“You don't know, or you don't want to say,” Carter presses.
“Both,” I admit. “I don't have a way to reach him. He doesn't have a way to reach us. We wait.”
Carter lies back down but keeps his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, jaw tight.
I know that look. It's the one he wore in the car outside Colorado, back when he decided he was the one responsible for keeping the rest of us alive.
“He gave me a gun,” Carter says after a while.
“Told me if anyone comes through that door who isn't supposed to be there, I use it.”
“Nobody's coming through that door,” I say.
“You don't know that,” Carter mutters.
“Hulk's patrolling,” I remind him.
That gets a small, grudging nod from Carter. Hulk carries weight in this house that even Carter respects, the kind that doesn't need explaining twice. “Just him?” Carter asks.
“Just him. Everybody else went with Dodge,” I say.
“That's not a lot of people,” Carter grumbles.
Sighing in frustration, I state, “It's enough.” I don't know if I believe that, but I say it anyway, because some nights the only thing you can offer a fourteen-year-old is conviction you don't actually have.
“I hate this,” Carter mutters, not looking at me. “I hate not knowing anything. I hate having to pretend I'm fine so Amelia and Noah don't fall apart.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“Do you?” Carter challenges.
“Carter, I've been doing the same thing since Colorado.”
That quiets him. Noah's hand finds mine under the blanket, small fingers wrapping around two of mine, and I squeeze back without looking at him. “Is Dodge gonna die?” Noah whispers, and so much for pretending he was asleep.
“No,” I say, too fast, too certain, hating how easily the lie comes out when I don't actually know.
“You don't sound sure,” Noah says.
“I'm sure. He's careful. He's got people watching his back,” I insist.
“Like Hulk?” Noah asks.
“Men like Hulk,” I confirm. “A bunch of big scary men who know what they're doing.”
Noah considers that, thumb rubbing the edge of his rabbit's ear, a habit he picked up somewhere around week two of us running.
“Okay,” Noah finally says, and some of the tension goes out of his small body.
Amelia never stirs through any of it, snoring lightly against the wall, mouth open.
None of us sleep much after that. I lie there listening to the house, the settle and creak of old wood, the wind picking at the shutters.
Miranda's down the hall, has been all night, and I don't wake her. She's earned a few more hours before the house asks anything else of her. Sometime later, I get up and pad downstairs in socks. Carter follows without asking, gun tucked in the waistband of his sweatpants like Dodge taught him. He must’ve found where I hid it after taking it away from him and stashed it where he’d be able to get to it in a flash.
Neither of us says anything about it. Hulk's in the front room, planted in the armchair by the window with a shotgun across his knees, watching the yard through a gap in the curtain.
“Can't sleep?” Hulk asks without turning his head.
“None of us can,” I respond. Carter drops onto the floor near the window, back against the wall, knees pulled to his chest. Hulk glances at Carter once, but doesn't tell him to go back to bed. “Noah asked me if Dodge is going to die,” I say.
Hulk's jaw tightens, just slightly. “He ain't gonna die.”
“You don't know that,” I press.
“No,” Hulk agrees. “But saying it out loud helps some. You should try it.”
I sit on the arm of the couch, close enough to see the yard myself, the porch light throwing a weak yellow glow across the gravel drive. Nothing moves out there. No headlights. No engines. “How long's it been?” I ask.
Hulk checks his watch, the numbers glowing faint green in the dark. “About four hours since they rolled out from their first stop.”
“Feels longer,” I murmur.
“Always does,” Hulk replies.
We sit for a while without talking. Carter's quiet too, knees still drawn up, eyes fixed on the same gap in the curtain Hulk's watching.
I like that about Hulk, that he doesn't feel the need to fill every silence with reassurance he doesn't actually feel.
“You ever done this before?” I ask him. “Waited like this?”
“More times than I care to count,” Hulk answers.
“Does it get easier?” I ask.
Hulk thinks about that, and for a second something old and heavy passes behind his eyes, something he doesn't offer up. “No,” Hulk says finally. “You just get better at hiding it.”
By five the sky outside starts to lighten at the edges, gray creeping in around the black, and there's still no sound of engines on the drive.
Carter hasn't moved from his spot on the floor, hasn't closed his eyes once that I've seen.
Amelia and Noah are still upstairs, hopefully still asleep.
Hulk gets up around six, stretches his back with a low groan, and starts a pot of coffee in Miranda's kitchen without being asked.
The smell of it drifts through the house, ordinary in a way that almost feels wrong considering everything.
“They'll come back,” Hulk says, setting a mug down in front of me at the table. “Might not be this hour. Might not even be today. But they'll come back.”
“You keep saying that like it'll make it true,” I say.
“Sometimes that's all you got,” Hulk replies.
I wrap my hands around the mug and don't drink from it, just let the heat sit in my palms. Carter's still at the window, watching the drive like he can will Dodge into appearing on it.
I think about running. It crosses my mind the way it always does when things get quiet and heavy like this, some old part of me that says grab the kids and go, don't wait to find out what the morning brings.
But I don't move from the table. I stay right where I am, coffee going cold in my hands, waiting for the sound of a motorcycle engine that hasn't come yet.