Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Leah
I'm making pancakes.
Not well, if I'm being honest.
There's batter on the counter, batter on the stove, and a concerning amount of batter on the ceiling—don't ask—but I'm standing at Coin's stove at seven in the morning flipping pancakes for two girls who aren't mine and a man who is.
Wrenleigh is at the table in a Morgantown High hoodie, her boot propped on the chair next to her, scrolling through her phone with the intensity of a girl who processes the world through a screen before she's ready to face it in person.
She hasn't said good morning.
Like most hormonal teenagers, she doesn't do mornings.
I've learned not to take it personally.
Sadie Jo is next to her.
Dark hair in a braid she did herself—crooked, coming loose on one side, the kind of braid that breaks your heart because she learned how to do it from YouTube and not from a mother.
She's got her homework open in front of her even though it's Saturday, because Sadie Jo does homework on Saturday mornings the way other kids watch cartoons.
It's her safe space. Numbers and problems with answers that make sense.
Coin is on the porch with Maddox, talking low about something I can't hear.
Probably the debt. Probably the loan sharks. Probably the hundred things that live behind the locked door in his head that he's slowly, painfully learning to open for me but hasn't opened all the way yet.
That's okay. I'm patient.
You don't work in emergency medicine without learning how to wait for people to be ready.
I flip a pancake. It lands mostly in the pan. Progress.
"Those are lumpy," Wrenleigh says without looking up from her phone.
"Thank you for the constructive feedback."
"I'm just saying. Dad's are better."
"Your dad’s better at everything. That's been well established."
The corner of her mouth twitches.
Not a smile—not yet.
But the crack in the armor that means she heard me and she didn't hate it.
With Wrenleigh, that's a win.
I slide plates in front of both of them.
Lumpy pancakes, sliced strawberries, and syrup that I found in the pantry behind a box of Pop-Tarts that I'm pretending I didn't see because I refuse to judge this man's grocery choices.
Sadie Jo eats quietly. Three bites in, she looks up at me.
"Leah?"
"Yeah, honey."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Always."
She sets her fork down.
Those blue-gray eyes, too old for thirteen, carrying things no kid should have to carry, fix on me and I think she's been thinking about this for a while and has finally decided I'm safe enough to ask.
"Your scar," she says. "The one on your forehead. How'd you get it?"
I touch it without thinking.
The raised line above my eyebrow, running up into my hairline.
I've told this story before—to Coin on the porch, to patients who ask, to the occasional kid at school career day who has no filter.
But Sadie Jo asking feels different.
Heavier. Like she's not really asking about my scar.
"There was a fire," I say. "When I was four. Our house burned down. My brother pulled me out. A beam fell on me and that's where it hit."
"Did it hurt?"
"I don't really remember. I was pretty little. I remember being scared, and I remember Garrett's arms, and then I remember being at Aunt Ellie's kitchen with bandages on my head. But the actual pain? No. I think I was in shock."
Sadie Jo processes that.
I can see her turning it over, the way Coin turns the coin—carefully, from every angle, looking for the piece she actually wants.
"Did your mom get out?" she asks.
My chest tightens. "No, honey. She didn't. Neither did my dad."
"So, your brother raised you."
"Yeah and Aunt Ellie."
She's quiet for a long time.
Wrenleigh has stopped scrolling. She's watching us from behind her phone screen, pretending she isn't.
I can see her eyes above the phone case, blue and sharp and fixed on her sister.
"Do you think..." Sadie Jo starts. Stops. Starts again. "Do you think our mom ever thinks about us?"
The question lands in the kitchen like a grenade with no pin.
I set down the spatula.
I move around the counter and I sit down at the table across from her, because this question deserves eye contact and not the back of my head.
"I think she does," I say. "I think she thinks about you all the time."
"How do you know?"
"Because I saw her face when she looked at you. In the kitchen, that night. Whatever else is true about your mom, and I know there's a lot of complicated stuff there, the way she looked at you wasn't fake. That was real."
Sadie Jo's chin does the thing.
The trembling thing that she inherited from Coin, the one that happens right before the wall goes up. "Then, why did she leave?"
I have thought about this question.
I've thought about it since the night Angelica sat at this table, and I've thought about it from every angle I know—nurse, sister, woman, the almost-something I'm becoming to these girls.
And the truth is ugly and complicated and has no answer that will make a thirteen-year-old feel better.
But I'm not going to lie to her. Coin doesn't lie to his girls, and I won't either.
"I think your mom was broken," I say carefully.
"Not in the way that excuses what she did.
But in the way that makes people hurt the people they love.
Some people, when they're hurting, they run.
They don't run because they don't love you.
They run because they don't know how to love you and be broken at the same time.
" I pause. "That doesn't make it okay. What she did—leaving you, leaving your sister, leaving your dad—that wasn't okay.
But I don't think it means she doesn't think about you. "
Sadie Jo stares at me.
Those blue-gray eyes, swimming but not spilling.
Holding it together the Adkins way, the same way her father holds it together.
Jaw tight, chin up, everything locked behind a door that only opens when she decides it's safe.
"You didn't leave," she says quietly. "You're here every day. You help me with my homework and you do Wrenleigh's PT and you make pancakes that are—" She glances at her plate. "—not great. But you make them."
I almost laugh. Almost cry. Settle for something in between.
"I'm not going anywhere, Sadie Jo."
"Promise?"
The word hits me like a freight train.
Promise.
A thirteen-year-old girl asking a woman who isn't her mother to promise she won't disappear.
The weight of that—the trust required to even ask it—is so enormous I can feel it pressing against my ribs.
"I promise," I say. And I mean it the way I've only meant a few things in my life.
Completely, permanently, with the understanding that breaking this promise would be worse than breaking a bone.
Worse than anything.
Wrenleigh puts her phone down.
She doesn't say anything.
Doesn't need to.
But she looks at me across the table, and something in her face shifts.
Not the softening I see in Coin, not the opening. Something harder. Like she's testing a wall and finding it doesn't move.
She picks up her fork and eats a pancake.
The whole thing, without complaint.
From Wrenleigh, that's practically a declaration of love.
Coin comes inside after the girls have gone upstairs.
He stands in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame the way he does, and I know from the look on his face that he heard at least part of it.
The house carries sound. These walls are thin and Coin hears everything.
"She asked about Angelica," I say.
"I know."
"She asked me to promise I wouldn't leave."
Something moves across his face. Something raw and painful and grateful all at once.
"What did you say?"
"I promised."
He crosses the kitchen, takes my face in his hands and kisses me—not heated, not urgent.
Just deep.
The kind of kiss that says thank you and I'm sorry you had to answer that question and I love you all at once, even though neither of us has said those last three words out loud yet.
We will. I know we will.
But not today.
Today there are pancakes on the ceiling and a thirteen-year-old upstairs who just trusted me with the biggest question of her life.
The call comes at noon.
Coin's phone goes off first—the burner, the one he keeps in his back pocket that I've never heard ring before.
He answers it, and I watch the color drain from his face the way it drained in the ER when he saw Wrenleigh's leg.
Fast. Complete. Like someone pulled a plug.
"When?" he says. "Is she—" A pause. "We're on our way."
He hangs up and looks at me.
"Backroads," he says. "Someone firebombed it. Tildie was inside."
We get there in fifteen minutes.
The bar is gutted.
That's the first thing I see—the front windows blown out, smoke still rising from the interior, the neon sign that used to say BACKROADS hanging by one corner like a broken jaw.
Fire trucks are parked at angles across the lot, hoses running, firefighters moving through the rubble in heavy gear.
The air smells like char and chemicals and the specific acrid stink of a building that burned hot and fast.
And Tildie.
She's sitting on the back of an ambulance, a shock blanket around her shoulders, an oxygen mask hanging loose around her neck.
Her chocolate brown hair is singed on one side.
There's soot on her face, on her arms, on the freckles across her nose that are barely visible under the gray.
She's holding a cup of something and her hands are shaking.
I'm at her side before the truck is fully parked.
"Tildie." I'm in nurse mode before I even think about it. Hands on her shoulders, checking her pupils, her breathing, the singed hair for signs of scalp burns. "Look at me. Are you hurt? Did you inhale smoke?"
"I'm fine." Her voice is raw. Scratchy. She inhaled something whether she admits it or not. "I got out. I was in the back doing inventory when I smelled it. Grabbed my phone and went out the service door." Her eyes fill. "Leah, the bar. Ellie's bar. It's—"
"I know. I see it. But you're alive and that's what matters right now."
Ruger's bike roars into the parking lot.