4 #2
“You said that last time, then Chloe talked you into a sleepover.”
“Mom, I was fourteen.”
“You were fifteen.”
“Same difference.”
“It literally isn’t.”
She groaned. “Yes, Mom. I know, Mom. I am good, Mom.”
There she was.
My girl. Sarcasm layered over sweetness, impatience protecting a heart that still checked whether I was okay while pretending she hadn’t noticed anything at all.
“Love you,” I said.
Her answer came without hesitation, warm and automatic beneath the attitude. “Love you too, Mom. Drive safe.”
Because she was sixteen and physically incapable of allowing sincerity to remain uncovered for long, she added, “And try not to let Aunt Blue and Guncle Evan turn dinner into a support group slash crime podcast.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You won’t.”
“Probably not.”
“Night, Mom.”
“Night, baby.”
I remained in the car after the call ended, my phone resting in my hand while the silence pressed around me more gently than before. Eventually, I set it down, pulled in a long breath, and started the engine.
I reached Blue’s apartment mostly under control. Mostly.
She opened the door before I could knock a second time and needed only one look at me before she wrapped her arms around me. I let her. I had nothing left to hold myself upright with anyway.
Her apartment smelled like garlic, warm bread, and something sweet underneath it. The soft domestic warmth was so far removed from the hospital that it almost cracked me open again.
“Hey,” she murmured against my hair.
“Hey.”
Evan’s voice carried from the kitchen. “Welcome to Operation Unpack Today’s Chaos. I’m the morale officer.”
A laugh escaped me, or something close enough to pass, and that seemed to satisfy him.
Dinner helped.
None of us had much appetite, though Evan made enough noise about pasta and emotional-support garlic bread that Blue and I both ate more than we might have without him. Mostly, it helped because the evening carried the shape of normal life.
Plates scraped against the table. Silverware clinked.
Evan talked with his hands while complaining about the vending machine options and the inability of straight men to communicate as though both were part of the same personal crusade.
Blue rolled her eyes while stirring sauce, one hand occasionally drifting to the small of her back.
The familiar rhythm settled something inside me.
Later, we gathered on the couch beneath blankets and mismatched pillows, wearing softer clothes and looking frayed around the edges. I tucked myself between Evan and Blue, allowing their warmth to press against both sides of me.
Evan looked from one of us to the other, then clapped his hands once. “All right. We unpack the chaos now.”
Blue pointed at him. “You’re insufferable.”
“And yet indispensable.”
I pulled my feet beneath me and stared at the coffee table. The words already felt strange before I forced them out. “Okay. So. Jackson.”
Blue winced. “Deacon.”
I turned my head toward her. “You see the problem?”
A quiet huff of laughter escaped Evan, but his expression softened when he looked at me.
So, I told them.
Not every detail. Some were still too raw to drag all the way into the light, but I gave them enough.
I told them about the gurney bursting through the ambulance bay, how I looked down, and my body recognized him before my mind caught up.
I tried to explain what hearing Blue call him Deacon had done to me, how the floor seemed to shift beneath my feet while my hands continued working.
Saving him had felt like doing my job with one hand while the other fought to hold seventeen years of anger and heartbreak behind my ribs.
“I didn’t recognize him all at once,” I said. “It came in pieces. The shape of him first, then his face.”
Blue nodded slowly. “That’s how it happened for me too.”
Maybe she understood better than anyone else could.
Evan listened with unusual stillness, his eyes soft. “Okay,” he said, the humor stripped from his voice. “That’s a lot.”
“It gets worse,” Blue added.
We both turned toward her.
She told us what happened in the hallway with Priest.
Somewhere around the part where he grabbed her and kissed her, my hand found hers without any conscious decision to move. Blue squeezed hard enough to say everything she kept out of the story.
Evan naturally managed to horrify and delight both of us by reenacting his performance in the employee parking lot as Blue’s fake baby daddy, complete with a lowered voice and swagger so ridiculous that laughter tore out of me before I could stop it.
Blue folded forward beside me, wheezing into the blanket. I tried to tell him to stop, but the words dissolved, and soon my chest hurt while tears gathered in the corners of my eyes for a reason I could survive explaining.
It felt good.
That was the strange part. It felt good in a way almost nothing had all day. My ribs ached and my face hurt, but for a few minutes the fear loosened enough to allow something warmer inside.
Eventually, the laughter faded, leaving us pressed together beneath the blanket while quiet settled across the room.
The conversation was always going to circle back.
Blue looked at me. “Did you see him before you came here?”
I stared at our joined hands. “Yeah.”
Neither of them pushed immediately. That was one of the reasons I loved them. They understood how to let silence do its work.
Evan was the one who finally asked, his voice softer than usual. “How was it?”
I breathed out through my nose and leaned into the couch. “Awful. And somehow not awful.” My throat tightened, forcing me to pause. “I don’t know. He looked so still. I kept waiting for him to do something. Open his eyes. Move. Scowl at me. Anything.”
Blue’s thumb moved across the back of my hand.
“I talked to him,” I admitted.
Evan tilted his head. “What did you say?”
The ceiling was easier to look at than either of them. “I told him he was stubborn. That he didn’t get to come back like this.” My voice caught, but I tightened my grip around Blue’s hand and continued. “And that if he doesn’t know certain things, that isn’t on me.”
Neither of them asked what I meant by certain things.
They weren’t stupid.
They also loved me enough to leave the word buried until I was ready to dig it out myself.
The room grew quiet again. Blue rested her head against the back cushion; exhaustion stamped into the set of her mouth. Evan reached across us and pulled the blanket higher with all the fussy determination of an overdramatic mother hen wearing expensive moisturizer.
Then a motorcycle rumbled outside.
The sound cut through the apartment so distinctly that all of us heard it at once.
Blue went still beside me.
Evan, a man born without the smallest instinct for self-preservation, looked delighted and alarmed in equal measure.
We crossed the room together.
Beneath the streetlight, a black motorcycle idled near the curb with its helmet hanging from the handlebar. Priest leaned against the bike, his broad body held unnaturally still, as though patience and threat had joined forces and built themselves into a man.
Blue muttered something I couldn’t make out.
I studied him through the glass, then caught her reflection. One of her hands had settled protectively over the curve of her stomach without her appearing to realize she had placed it there.
“He found you,” I said.
Blue stepped away from the window.
Evan exhaled like he had reached the final scene of a movie he intended to dissect in exhausting detail later. “Wow. That is unsettlingly hot.”
I left him to his terrible judgment and looked once more at the man waiting below. His engine continued to run, but Priest hadn’t moved. The stubborn set of his shoulders made it clear he had no intention of leaving without whatever he had come for.
“Yeah,” Blue muttered as she turned away. “That tracks.”
She walked deeper into the apartment as though refusing to look at him might keep the past from reaching her door.
I followed.
It had been a long day for ghosts.
I’d had enough of mine for one night.