Chapter 2 #2
"The straight ones are better. They're more — " he searched for the word, brow furrowed in concentration, "— efficient."
"Efficient," Esme repeated, delighted. "Where does he get that vocabulary?"
"I read to him. A lot."
"Clearly." She ruffled Nico's hair on her way out an hour later, promised him a boat trip to see the dolphins soon, and paused at the door to look back at me with something softer in her expression.
"You don't have to decide everything tonight, Lena.
But you're not going to be able to keep this contained forever.
Not in a town this small. Not with him staying. "
"I know."
"I love you. Call me if you need me. Any hour.
" She paused at the threshold, one hand on the doorframe, and looked back at me with a small, crooked smile.
"And for what it's worth — that little boy in there is lucky.
Whatever happens with Hawk, whatever's hard about the next part, that kid has never once doubted for a single day that he's loved.
You did that. Nobody can take that away from you, not even complicated timing. "
My throat tightened too fast for a reply, so I just nodded, and she squeezed my hand once before heading down the porch steps into the dark.
She left, and I stood in my kitchen a long time after the door closed, listening to Nico narrate an elaborate battle between two action figures in the next room, his voice rising and falling with total absorption, oblivious to the storm gathering right outside the walls of his small, safe world.
"Mama, come be the bad guy!" he called.
"I'm always the bad guy."
"You're good at it."
"I'm going to choose to take that as a compliment." I wandered in and dropped onto the floor beside him, letting him hand me a small plastic dragon with one wing bent at an unfortunate angle. "What did the dragon do this time?"
"He stole the treasure. Obviously."
"Obviously. Dragons are notorious for it."
"You have to make an evil laugh."
I did my best evil laugh, which made him collapse into the particular full-body giggling that only six-year-olds seem capable of, and for ten whole minutes I let myself just be there, on the floor, being the villain in a battle over plastic treasure, instead of a woman with an impossible decision sitting like a stone in her chest.
It didn't last. Nothing that good ever seemed to, lately.
But I held onto it anyway, filed it away next to all the other small, ordinary, precious minutes I'd built this life out of, because whatever came next, I wanted to remember that this — right here, dragon in hand, my son's laugh filling the room — had been worth every single hard choice that got us to it.
"Okay," I said finally, setting the dragon down. "Bath, then bed. Don't argue."
"I wasn't going to argue."
"You were absolutely going to argue."
"Maybe a little."
I put him to bed an hour later. He fought sleep the way he always did, negotiating for one more page, one more glass of water, one more everything, until finally his eyes lost the battle and his breathing evened out into the deep, unguarded rhythm of a child who trusted completely that tomorrow would look exactly like today.
I sat on the edge of his bed a long time after he'd fallen asleep, watching him.
He had Hawk's jaw. He'd always had Hawk's jaw, that same stubborn line even in sleep, and his eyebrows did the exact same thing Hawk's did when he was thinking hard about something, drawing together just slightly, and it had never once been a secret from me, not for one single day of his life, whose son he was.
"I'm sorry," I whispered to him, though he couldn't hear me. "I don't know what I'm going to do. But I'm sorry."
Downstairs, my phone buzzed one more time. Not Esme this time.
An unknown number, a Cala Sirena area code I didn't recognize, one line of text that made my stomach drop straight through the floor.
Unknown: It's Hawk. Diesel gave me your number. I know something's going on. I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what it is.
I stared at the screen until the words blurred, my thumb hovering over the reply button.
I typed three different responses and deleted every one.
Nothing's going on was a lie so thin it insulted us both.
Leave me alone was a lie of a different kind, because some cowardly, traitorous part of me didn't want him to leave me alone at all.
We need to talk was too close to the truth, and truth was exactly the thing I wasn't ready to hand him yet, not at eleven o'clock at night with Nico asleep down the hall and my hands still not entirely steady.
In the end I typed four words and made myself send them before I could talk myself out of it.
Me: Not tonight. Please.
The reply came back faster than I expected, and something about the speed of it — like he'd been sitting there with his phone in his hand, waiting — undid a little more of my composure.
Hawk: Okay. But soon. I'm not leaving again, Lena. Whatever this is.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand like that might somehow contain it, and lay back against my pillows, staring at the ceiling, at the water stain in the corner I'd been meaning to fix for two years, at anything that wasn't the enormous, unavoidable fact taking shape in the dark.
He wasn't going anywhere. I'd have to tell him. Not tonight, but soon, the way he'd said, and once I did, there would be no more careful walls, no more small mercies of a town that knew how to leave a woman alone with her secrets.
There would just be the truth, standing in my kitchen with Hawk's exact jaw and Hawk's exact eyebrows, six years old and utterly unaware that his whole world was about to change.
I didn't sleep much that night. Somewhere around three in the morning I gave up trying, and went and stood in Nico's doorway instead, watching the slow, even rise and fall of his small chest, memorizing the shape of the world as it existed in that last quiet hour before everything shifted.
"Whatever happens," I whispered again, "I've got you. That hasn't changed. That's never going to change."
It wasn't quite a lie. But it wasn't quite the whole comfort I wanted it to be either, because for the first time in six years, I honestly didn't know what came next, and not knowing was its own particular kind of terror — the kind that doesn't announce itself with panic, just sits quietly in your chest at three in the morning, keeping you company until the sun comes up.
By the time it did, gray light creeping in around the edges of the curtains, I still hadn't landed on an answer. But I'd landed on one certainty, at least, small and hard and non-negotiable.
Whatever happened next, I would be the one to tell Hawk about his son. Not the town. Not the club. Not some careless slip that let him piece it together on his own, the way he very nearly had already.
Me. On my terms. Before this town's small mercies ran out entirely.