Chapter 23
The first wave hit at breakfast.
The eggs were scrambled. Jack's scrambled eggs were different from Nate's, rougher, less precise, cooked with aggressive confidence, like breakfast was something to be subdued. They were also, inexplicably, perfect. Golden and soft and seasoned with something Seth couldn't identify.
"Smoked paprika," Jack said, reading the question on Seth's face. "And a little bit of cream cheese. Don't tell Nate. He thinks cream cheese in eggs is an abomination."
"It is an abomination," Nate called from the hallway.
"It's delicious and you know it."
"I know nothing of the sort."
Seth ate. The food was warm and the kitchen was warm and Jack's casual banter was warm, and the warmth was doing something to the cold place inside Seth's chest, the place where the memory of Levi's body hitting the wet ground lived, where the recoil still vibrated in his wrist, where the sound of the shot still echoed with flat finality. Something that couldn't be taken back.
Jack sat across from him. Didn't say anything for a while.
Just drank his coffee and existed in the same space, offering the gift of presence without demand, the same thing Nate had offered on Seth's first morning, the same thing this whole crew seemed to understand instinctively, that sometimes what a broken person needed wasn't words or wisdom or advice but simply another human body in the room, breathing, being alive, providing proof that the world continued and that you were still in it.
Two days after Levi. Seth was sitting at the kitchen island with his coffee, same spot, same mug, same bitter black that Nate brewed strong enough to strip paint, and Jack was making eggs.
Scrambled, with cheese and hot sauce, the way Jack made everything.
The normalcy of it was the problem. The eggs hissing in the pan.
The scrape of the spatula. The smell of butter browning.
Levi had loved scrambled eggs. Made them on the hot plate they'd stolen from a Goodwill, back when they were sixteen and sleeping in the back of an abandoned Chrysler plant on the east side.
Levi couldn't cook anything else, but he made eggs like they were the only thing between him and the end of the world.
The memory surfaced without warning, and with it came the sound.
Not the gunshot, he'd expected the gunshot, had been bracing for it like a punch he could see coming. What came instead was the sound Levi had made right before. A small sound. A breath that was half a word. Seth.
Just his name. Not even the whole thing. Just the beginning of it, cut off.
The coffee mug slipped.
It hit the counter instead of the floor, and the sound, ceramic on granite, sharp and hard, went through Seth like a bullet through paper. His hands were shaking. His vision had gone narrow, the edges dissolving into something gray and cottony, and he couldn't feel his legs.
"Seth."
Jack's voice. Calm. Grounded. The spatula was down and Jack was standing at the island, not crowding him, just present in the way that big men who understood violence could be present without being threatening.
"I'm fine," Seth said.
"You're not. That's okay."
"I just. " His hands. He stared at his hands. Steady for the past three days, steady through the cleanup and the debrief and the sex and the morning after, and now they were shaking like they belonged to someone else. "I need a minute."
"Take all the minutes you need. Eggs'll keep."
Seth pressed his palms flat against the cool granite. Focused on the temperature. The texture. The solidity of a surface that didn't move, didn't bleed, didn't make sounds when it,
"Breathe," Jack said. "In through your nose. You know the drill."
He knew the drill. Zain had taught him. Count of four in, hold for four, out for four. A soldier's trick for when the body decided to process what the mind had shelved.
He breathed.
The kitchen reassembled itself around him. The eggs. The coffee. Jack's broad, patient face. The morning light through the dirty window, turning dust motes into tiny suspended universes.
"That happen to you?" Seth asked when he could talk again. "After your first?"
Jack was quiet for a moment. Then he plated the eggs. Set one in front of Seth. Sat down across from him with his own plate.
"I was twenty-three," Jack said. "Underground fight in Hamtramck.
Guy came at me outside the ring. Knife. I didn't mean to kill him, just hit him, one hit, but he went down wrong.
Back of his head on the curb." He took a bite.
Chewed. "Threw up every morning for two weeks.
Couldn't eat red meat for a month. My hands did that thing yours are doing right now, and no amount of telling myself he'd have killed me first made it stop. "
"What made it stop?"
"Time. And Nate, actually. He showed up one day with a bottle of bourbon and said, 'The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Let it remember. Don't fight the shaking. Let it move through you.'" Jack shrugged. "Sounded like hippie bullshit. It worked."
Nate looked at him. That warm, implacable look. "You know what the difference is between damage and destruction? Damage can be repaired. Destruction is permanent. Every person in this house is damaged. None of them are destroyed. That's not luck. That's choice."
Seth looked at his hands. Still trembling. He set them flat again. Let them shake.
"It gets quieter," Jack said. "Not gone. Quieter."
"How long?"
"Depends on how much you fight it. Months, if you let it process. Years, if you shove it down." He pointed his fork at Seth. "Don't shove it down. We've all tried that. It doesn't end well."
Footsteps on the stairs. Zain appeared, hair damp, dressed for the day. His eyes went to Seth immediately, always, now, and his expression shifted when he saw the shaking hands.
He didn't ask. Didn't hover. Just poured himself coffee, sat on the stool next to Seth, and let his knee press against Seth's under the counter. A single point of contact. Warm and steady and there.
Seth's hands slowed.
Jack caught Zain's eye. A look passed between them, the look of men who'd seen the same darkness and recognized it in others. Then Jack went back to his eggs, and Zain went back to his coffee, and Seth sat between them and felt the wave recede.
Not gone. Never gone.
But quieter