2 YEARS LATER — THE REED LAND, NORTH CAROLINA
Now playing: exile - Taylor Swift, Bon Iver
The silence of a house in the dead of winter has a weight to it. It’s different from the quiet of the road or the hollow echo of an empty arena. It’s thick, laced with the breathing of the people you’ve sworn your life to protect, insulated by walls we built with our own hands.
It was nearly three in the morning when the stillness fractured.
A sharp, metallic clatter echoed from the front of the house, the distinct sound of something small and heavy tipping over onto the hardwood of the living room floor.
In a fraction of a second, the hyper-vigilant adrenaline hardwired into my central nervous system booted online. My eyes snapped open in the dark.
Beside me, Silas didn’t stir. He was dead to the world, sprawled flat on his stomach with one massive arm thrown over the edge of the mattress. His soft, rhythmic breaths puffed against the sheets. He had spent the last two days running intense training, and his body was spent.
I slid out from beneath the duvet, moving with the practiced fluidity of a ghost. I pulled on a faded black hoodie, stepped into the cool air of the hallway, and padded barefoot toward the living room.
The space was washed in the pale, blue-grey light of a winter moon cutting through the windows. I stopped at the edge of the corridor, my brow furrowing as my eyes tracked the shadow standing near the front door.
She was standing frozen in the center of the room, a heavy winter coat pulled tight over her frame, staring down at a brass coaster she accidentally knocked off the side table. But it wasn’t the coaster that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
It was the two massive, packed suitcases sitting directly by her shoes.
“Josie?” I asked, my voice a low, gravelly rumble that cut through the quiet like a blade.
She jumped, a sharp, terrified gasp escaping her lips as she snapped her head around. Her long strawberry-blonde hair was falling out of a messy knot, and her eyes, those bright, stark blue eyes, were violently bloodshot, ringed by thick, dark circles of exhaustion.
“Cal,” she whispered, her voice a fragile, trembling wreck.
I stepped into the room, my eyes darting toward the short hallway that led to the nursery wing. “Where’s Ian?”
“He’s…he’s asleep,” she choked out, a stray tear tracking down her freckled cheek. Her fingers dug frantically into the fabric of her coat. “He’s in his bed. He took his bottle an hour ago. He’s out cold.”
I looked from the hallway back to the suitcases, the pieces of the puzzle slamming together in my brain.
“Where the hell are you going, Josie? It’s three in the morning.”
The question broke whatever fragile dam was holding her together.
Her shoulders caved inward, a ragged, breathless sob tearing out of her chest as she buried her face in her hands.
She didn’t look like a mother. She looked exactly like the terrified, overwhelmed eighteen-year-old kid who had collapsed onto my sofa on Christmas Eve two years ago.
“I can’t do it,” she confessed, the words tumbling out in a desperate, suffocating rush.
“I can’t be a mom. I don’t want to be. I was too young.
I thought I could force myself to want this life.
I thought if I stayed here on the land, it would just click, but it isn’t clicking.
Every morning I wake up and I feel like I’m suffocating.
I look at him and… I just want to run. This isn’t the life I want. I can’t do it anymore.”
The words hit me like a sledgehammer, the impact tearing the air straight from my lungs.
I stood there, completely gutted, a cold, paralyzing wave of my own childhood horror rushing up the back of my neck like an unholy tide.
The room spun. The blue moonlight faded, replaced by the phantom image of Fiona walking out the front door, her suitcases clicking while a young version of me begged her from the hallway not to go.
“You don’t get to just stop being a mom, Josie!” I snapped at her, my voice a harsh, furious explosion that I couldn’t check. My hands clenched into tight fists at my sides, my split knuckles throbbing. “You don’t get to just turn the switch off because it’s hard! He’s a baby. He’s your baby.”
Josie didn’t flinch. She didn’t argue back. And that was the most terrifying part of it all. She was already detached. The panic had drained out of her, leaving behind a hollow, empty shell.
“I know,” she whispered, her voice flat as she stared at the floorboards.
“I’m not trying to fight with you. I can’t.
I don’t have the strength to. But I know…
I know you and Silas will be better parents to him than I could ever dream of being.
You love him. You already take care of him more than I do when you’re home. ”
She lifted her eyes, looking at me with a pathetic, desperate plea that made my stomach turn.
“Just promise me,” she choked out. “Please, Cal. Promise me you won’t let my dad raise him.
Don’t let Scott take him back to his house.
He’ll just look at Ian and see my failure every single day.
Keep him here. Keep him with you and Si. ”
The fury in my gut reached a volcanic, blinding peak. I took two steps into her space, my frame casting a dark, terrifying shadow over her.
“Listen to me very carefully, Josie,” I hissed, my voice dropping into a lethal, trembling whisper that vibrated.
“If you walk out that fucking door tonight… If you make this call and decide that this boy isn’t what you want anymore, you do not get to come back when you’ve got this out of your system.
You don’t get to wander back onto this property when you’re lonely and expect him to know who the hell you are.
I am not putting that baby through that unstable, back-and-forth bullshit for the rest of his childhood.
Do you understand me? You leave tonight, and he is ours. Permanently.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t even blink. She just looked at me with a sad, empty finality, reached down, and grabbed the handles of her suitcases.
She turned, pushed the front door open, and walked out into the freezing, dark North Carolina night. The latch clicked shut behind her with a sharp, definitive snap.
I stood in the center of the quiet living room for a long time, my chest heaving, hot tears of rage and grief finally breaking past my eyes and tracking down through the script on my neck. The silence of the house had returned, but it felt mutated now. Heavy. Permanent.
I wiped my face aggressively with the back of my hand, turned on my heel, and walked down the short corridor to the nursery wing. I pushed the small white door open, the hinges silent.
The room was bathed in the soft, warm green glow of a turtle nightlight sitting on the dresser. I walked over to the small ,wooden bed and looked down.
Ian was peacefully asleep.
He was two-years-old his small body curled into a tight ball beneath his fuzzy blue blanket.
He had a thick, beautiful mess of dark, pin-straight hair that was currently a chaotic disaster across the mattress, a direct, gorgeous marker of his biological father’s Japanese heritage.
But beneath those long, dark lashes were a pair of eyes that I knew, when awake, carried stark, brilliant blue clarity.
He was a perfect, innocent blend of worlds he didn’t understand yet.
My heart broke in my chest as I stared down at him.
The parallel was too precise. It was a vicious, cruel joke from the universe. This beautiful, sweet little boy’s mother just walked out on him in the dead of night, leaving him stranded in the dark, exactly like Fiona had done to me. He was a ghost of my own childhood, staring me right in the face.
The grief hardened into iron. Not him, I thought fiercely to myself, the vow sealing itself into my marrow. He is never going to feel cold. He is never going to wonder why he wasn’t enough to make someone stay.
I reached into the bed, my arms sliding beneath his small frame with a practiced gentleness.
I scooped him up against my chest. He didn’t wake up.
He just let out a soft, milk-scented sigh into the dark, his small head rolling over to rest perfectly in the crook of my neck, his tiny fist instinctively bunching into the fabric of my black hoodie.
I held him tight, anchoring his weight against my ribs, and walked back down the hallway to the master bedroom.
I pushed our bedroom door open with my shoulder, the sliver of hall light cutting across the mattress.
I didn’t try to be quiet this time. I stepped up to Silas’s side of the bed, my breathing ragged, the tears still hot on my cheeks. “Silas. Si, wake up.”
He shot up instantly. His athletic instinct responding to the raw panic in my voice jump started his brain in a fraction of a second. He threw the covers off his torso, his chest heaving as he squinted through the dim light, his eyes wide with a frantic concern.
“Cal? What’s wrong? Is—”
His eyes dropped to my chest, zeroing in on the small, dark-haired boy tucked securely into my arms. Then, he looked up at my face, at the raw, tear-streaked ruin of my expression behind my reading glasses.
“Cal…” Silas whispered as he slid to the edge of the mattress. “Why do you have Ian? Where’s Josie?”
“She’s gone, Si,” I choked out, the words cracking in my throat as I stepped closer to the bed. “She just packed her shit and walked out the front door. She said she can’t be a mom.”
Silas stared at me, the words hitting his black-and-white, organized mind like an explosion. “What? No… no, that’s a mistake. She’s just stressed. We need to go get her, we need to call Scott—”
“No!” I snapped, my voice a fierce command that stopped his brain from calculating.
“We are not calling anyone. I gave her an ultimatum. I told her if she walked out that door tonight, she was finished. She doesn’t get to come back and mess with this kid’s head when she’s bored.
She didn’t even answer me. She just left. ”
I walked around to my side of the bed, carefully climbing onto the mattress while keeping Ian securely cradled against me. I slid down until I was lying flat on my back, and gently, with a reverence that felt like a sacrament, I laid Ian down directly in the center of the bed between us.
The small boy shifted, let out another soft hum, and curled his body toward my warmth, oblivious to the fact that his entire universe had just been dismantled and rebuilt in the span of twenty minutes.
Si watched the movement, the shock in his eyes finally fracturing into a soul-shattering grief. He reached out, his shaking fingers gently brushing a strand of dark hair away from Ian’s sleeping forehead..
“She doesn’t get him back,” Silas whispered fiercely through his tears, his jaw locking as he looked across the baby’s form to meet my eyes. “She doesn’t get to come back and put his life in shambles.”
A heavy, stuttering breath rattled in his throat as he looked down at the tiny fist resting on the sheets.
“God, Cal…” He choked out, the raw reality of the responsibility hitting his system. “This is going to be so hard. How the hell are we going to do this? How do we help him adjust to her being gone?”
I reached across Ian’s sleeping form, my fingers tangling firmly with Silas’s, squeezing with an ironclad, unbreakable strength that carried the entire weight of our marriage.
“We’re going to do it together. We’ll change the travel schedules. We’ll bring him on the road. We’ll buy a house near the PC. I don’t give a fuck what it takes.”
I leaned down, pressing a soft kiss to the top of Ian’s dark head before leaning up to press my lips against Silas’s forehead.
I pulled the duvet up, covering all three of us, and held the small boy against my side, my hand resting flat against his back to feel the steady, safe rhythm of his heart.
The End.