Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
My daughters are upstairs, their mother is sitting at my kitchen table, and I'm standing between them like a wall made of flesh and bone and a decade of fury I've never let myself feel.
Leah is here.
That helps more than it should—her presence in the room, steady and solid, sitting in Sadie Jo's chair like she belongs there.
Because she does.
She belongs there more than the woman across from her, and everybody in this kitchen knows it, including the woman across from her.
Angelica hasn't stopped crying since Leah sat down.
Quiet tears, the kind she always used—not hysterical, not loud.
She used to call. Not often. Once, maybe twice a year, always when she needed money.
And she'd cry on the phone, and I used to fall for it.
Used to send whatever I could scrape together because some part of me still believed the tears meant she was trying.
I stopped falling for it around the time Sadie Jo asked me why she didn't have a mommy at the Mother's Day breakfast at school.
She was five.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot afterward and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white so I wouldn't put my fist through the windshield.
That was the last time I sent Angelica a fucking dime.
"I need to see them," Angelica says again.
It's the third time now.
Her hands are wrapped around the glass of water I gave her because I was raised to offer guests something to drink, even guests who've destroyed your life from a thousand miles away. "Colton, please. I'm their mother."
"You're the woman who gave birth to them," I say. "That's not the same thing."
It hits her hard.
I watch it land—the way her face crumbles, the way her shoulders curve inward, the way she looks down at the table like she's been slapped.
Good. She should feel it. She should feel one fraction of what Wrenleigh felt at five years old, standing at the window every night for a month waiting for headlights that never came.
Leah is watching me.
I can feel her eyes on the side of my face, and I know what she's seeing—the cold version of me.
The one that doesn't raise his voice because he doesn't need to.
The one that scares people who know me well enough to understand that my silence is where the danger lives.
"Here's what's going to happen," I say. "You can stay in Morgantown. You're not safe on your own—the people you owe money to are already here, and if they find you before we deal with this, that's a problem for everyone. So, you can stay but I’ll be damned if you're staying in this house."
"Where am I supposed to—"
"I don't care. A motel. A hotel. The clubhouse can put you somewhere if Ruger agrees to it. But not here. Not where my girls sleep."
"Our girls."
"Don't." The word comes out quiet enough that Leah shifts in her chair. "Don't call them that. You don't get to call them that. Not after what you did."
Angelica's chin lifts.
The tears are still there but something harder moves behind them—defiance, or desperation wearing the same mask. "I made a mistake, Colton. I know that. I know what I did was—"
"A mistake is forgetting to pay a bill. A mistake is bouncing a check.
You gambled away two hundred thousand dollars and when the men you owed it to came looking, you handed them our daughters' names.
You gave them to strangers like collateral on a car loan.
" My voice hasn't changed. Not a single degree.
But my hands are shaking under my crossed arms, and I press them tighter against my ribs to keep it hidden.
"They sent men to my house. They took photographs of our girls at school.
They broke into this house and sat at this table—this table, Angelica, where your daughters eat breakfast—and left a glass of water to prove they could.
That's not a mistake. That's a choice. And you made it. "
The kitchen is silent. Angelica stares at me. Leah stares at me.
Somewhere upstairs, I hear the low murmur of Garrett's voice—talking to the girls, keeping them calm, keeping them away from this until I say otherwise.
Angelica breaks first. She always does.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know they'd actually come here. I thought—I thought if I gave them your name, they'd leave me alone long enough for me to figure something out. I was scared. I was desperate. I wasn't thinking about—"
"About them. You weren't thinking about them. You were thinking about yourself. The way you always think about yourself."
She flinches again.
The tears fall harder. And I feel something..
I wish I felt nothing.
Nothing would be easier.
But somewhere underneath the ice and the fury, there's a twenty-year-old kid who loved this woman.
Who married her at nineteen because she smiled at him like he was the only person in the room.
Who held her hand in the delivery room when Wrenleigh came screaming into the world, and again a little over two years later when Sadie Jo arrived quiet and small and perfect.
That kid is still in there.
He's just buried under a decade of raising two girls alone and learning to stop missing someone who chose slot machines over her own children.
"You can see them," I say.
Leah's head turns toward me. Angelica's eyes go wide.
"Not tonight. Not now. When I decide they're ready, and on my terms. You don't get to show up and blow through their lives like a storm and leave wreckage for me to clean up.
Again." I pause. "Wrenleigh remembers you.
She's angry enough to burn this house down.
Sadie Jo doesn't remember you at all, and I won't let you hurt her by trying to be something you haven't been since she was three. "
"I can be better. I can—"
"Maybe. But you don't get to practice being a mother to my daughters. If you want to see them, you do it on my schedule, in my presence, and the second—the fucking second—either one of them tells me they're done, you walk away. No arguments. No tears. No guilt trips. You walk away."
She nods. Small, shaky. Like a woman who expected to be told no and got something she doesn't know what to do with instead.
"Leah," I say, without looking away from Angelica. "Can you ask Garrett to bring the girls down?"
"Are you sure?" Leah asks. Not challenging—checking. Making sure.
"No. But they're going to find out she's here one way or another, and I'd rather it be with me in the room."
Leah stands. Squeezes my arm as she passes—quick, subtle, a touch that Angelica clocks immediately.
I see her eyes follow Leah's hand, see the calculation happening behind the tears.
She's figuring out who Leah is to me.
Let her. I don't care anymore.
Wrenleigh comes down the stairs first.
She's always first. That's who she is.
The one who walks into the room before she knows what's in it, the one who faces things head-on because turning away isn't in her wiring.
She comes around the corner into the kitchen with her jaw set and her blue eyes blazing, and I know Garrett told her.
He told her who's down here.
He had to—Wrenleigh would have come down regardless, and it was better she knew than walked in blind.
She stops in the doorway and looks at Angelica.
The resemblance is a living thing in the room.
Two faces, twenty years apart, mirrored in the overhead kitchen light.
Same blonde hair. Same jaw. Same mouth.
Angelica sees it too. I watch her hand fly to her own face, like she's looking at a reflection she's been running from.
"Wrenleigh," Angelica breathes. "Baby, you're so—"
"Don't." Wrenleigh's voice is flat. Hard. Sixteen years old and sharp enough to draw blood. "Don't you call me that."
"I'm your mother."
"No. You're not." Wrenleigh steps into the kitchen. She doesn't sit. She stands, because standing is a position of power and Wrenleigh knows that instinctively. "A mother stays. A mother shows up. A mother doesn't disappear for ten years and walk back in like nothing happened."
"Wrenleigh, I know you're angry—"
"Angry? I'm not angry. Angry is what I was at five, standing at the front window every night for a month because you promised you were coming back.
" Her voice cracks. Just once. She stitches it back together so fast that anyone who doesn't know her would miss it.
But I know her. And the sound of that crack goes through me like a bullet.
"I'm not angry anymore. I'm done. You left. We survived. That's the whole story."
Angelica is crying openly now.
The tears she used on me aren't working on her daughter, and she doesn't know what to do without them.
Her hands are shaking on the table. Her mouth opens and closes. She looks at me for help.
She's not going to find it.
Sadie Jo appears in the doorway behind Wrenleigh.
My dark-haired girl. My mirror.
She's pressed against the wall, partially hidden behind her sister, her blue-gray eyes moving between me and the blonde woman at the table with the kind of careful assessment that makes her seem so much older than thirteen.
She doesn't say anything. Doesn't move. Just watches—the way she watches everything, with those quiet eyes that see more than they should.
Angelica sees her and makes a sound. She gets up from the chair.
Something raw and wounded that comes from the part of a mother that never fully dies, no matter how badly she's failed. She stands from the chair.
"Sadie Jo. Oh, honey, look at you. You look just like your—"
Sadie Jo takes a step back.
One step, but it says everything.
She presses closer to Wrenleigh, and Wrenleigh—fierce, angry, combustible Wrenleigh—shifts her body between her sister and their mother without thinking.
Protecting. The way I've protected them. The way Leah stepped between them and the danger she didn't even know about that first night at the hospital.
My girls. Wrenleigh the shield. Sadie Jo the quiet heart behind it.
"That's enough," I say. "Angelica, sit down."
She sits. She doesn't have a choice—my voice doesn't leave room for one.