Chapter Five
~ Hooper ~
The barn had a way of amplifying silence, especially in the hour after lunch when the world outside lost its appetite for noise.
The wind chased itself in lazy circles through the gap under the rolling door, and every so often a disinterested moo would float in from the far pasture, but mostly what you heard was the echo of your own thoughts, stretched out to fill the cathedral of empty space.
I liked it. The barn was the one place on the property where my mind could shuck the last of its armor and just be.
I could spread a flatbed’s worth of tools across the workbench, sing any ugly tune I pleased, or just stand with my hands in my pockets and watch the way the sun changed color as it fell through the high windows.
If I had a church, this was it.
Emilio was propped in a sling on my chest, snoring soft through his nose, the wisps of his breath fogging the canvas in lazy bursts.
I’d wedged the sling under my jacket, so he rode high and close, a little astronaut in a pod of battered denim and thrift store flannel.
Every few minutes, he’d flex his hands or jerk his head, then slide right back under, never more than a tick away from full REM.
It was almost three when Jasper showed, sneakers echoing on the packed earth, his medical bag tucked close at his side. He paused at the threshold, eyes adjusting from snow-glare to the amber gloom inside, and for a second I thought maybe he’d changed his mind and gone back to the house.
But then he stepped forward, walking with the careful, inward focus of a man who’d spent his life in the company of colicky infants and worse. He raised a hand in a wave, the other already going for the zipper of his coat.
“Hey,” he called. “Sorry I’m late. Jojo kept me busy with—” he made a vague gesture, “—whatever it is he obsesses about on Fridays.”
“Probably the apocalypse,” I said, deadpan. “Or the garden.”
He grinned, then let the smile fall away as he closed the distance. He glanced at the workbench, then at the flatbed, then finally at the baby in the sling, and the hard edges of his face went soft.
“Mind if I…?” He gestured, not quite sure if he was asking to touch or to remove the kid.
I unclipped the sling, easing Emilio out with one hand under his head and the other bracing his diapered ass. “He’s all yours,” I said, but my hands didn’t fully let go until Jasper had him.
Jasper cradled the baby like a borrowed violin, elbows locked close, eyes searching the newborn’s face for signs of disaster. He touched Emilio’s cheek, then his fingers, then pinched a fold of skin above the wrist as if testing for secret messages.
“He’s a little chunkier than yesterday,” Jasper murmured, more to himself than to me. “I see you’re not skimping on the formula.”
I shrugged, trying not to look as proud as I felt. “He’s got my metabolism.”
Jasper snorted. “God help us all.”
He set the medical bag on the scale—a cast iron number from the nineteen-fifties, polished to a dull gray from years of neglect and then five minutes of my half-assed restoration—and opened it with the mechanical precision of a man who once packed for a war zone.
He extracted a baby blanket, spread it on the scale’s tray, then carefully deposited Emilio, who immediately rolled a fist and whacked himself in the chin.
“Good,” Jasper said, as if the baby had performed a trick. He adjusted the weights, squinted at the needle, and frowned. “Nine pounds, ten ounces. That can’t be right.”
He looked at me, almost accusing.
I raised my hands. “I just feed him, Doc.”
Jasper shrugged, wrote the number on a dog-eared notepad, and then left the pen poised above the page for a moment, like he was waiting for something more important to arrive.
The wind picked up outside, shoving a draft under the rolling door and riffling the edge of the baby blanket. The smell of diesel and old hay pressed in. Emilio let out a soft, questioning grunt, and I leaned in to reset his pacifier, thumb circling slow on his belly.
Jasper didn’t say anything, just watched, his lips pressed thin and flat. He waited until I looked up, then finally spoke: “He’s healthy,” Jasper said. “You’re doing a good job.”
I let the compliment bounce off me, not sure where to put it. “Is that why you’re here?” I asked, careful not to sound like I was pushing.
He shook his head, a single, deliberate motion. “No. I’m here because…”
He trailed off, then started arranging his medical bag. The performance was so exaggerated it would have been funny, if I didn’t know the move myself—when you needed to talk but hadn’t worked out how to start.
I took mercy. “You wanna go outside and get it off your chest or just spill in here?”
He didn’t look up, just snapped the latch shut. “Here’s fine,” he said. “I was thinking about the note. And about Liam.”
I nodded, a lump forming in my throat.
Jasper finally looked at me, eyes sharp as a linoleum blade. “When I left Nebraska, it wasn’t because I was scared. Or, I mean—I was, but not in the way most people think.”
He glanced at the far end of the barn, where the late light was already going gold. “Sometimes you spend so long learning how to read people, how to make yourself invisible or nonthreatening or whatever, that you start to believe that your safety is a variable someone else gets to set.”
He waited to see if I was following. I was. Too well, maybe.
“So, when I finally left, it wasn’t a panic thing. It was a calculation. I sat there and made a list of what would happen if I stayed, and what would happen if I didn’t, and who else might get hurt if I guessed wrong. I did the math.”
He pressed a palm to the scale, then took it off, watching the dial wobble back and forth before settling at zero.
“Point is, sometimes leaving isn’t running. Sometimes it’s the most precise, careful thing you can do.”
He looked at me then, full on, like he was waiting for me to disagree. But I didn’t. I just stared at my hands, now empty, the skin around my knuckles already stained with engine grease again.
I picked up Emilio, tucking him back into the sling, and rested my chin on the top of his head. My thumb made slow, lazy circles on the soft spot above his spine.
“I always figured Liam just spooked,” I said, voice low. “That he got a look at what was coming for him and ran blind, but you’re saying he planned it.”
Jasper shrugged, small and precise. “Maybe not planned, but he didn’t just fold. He put the kid where he’d be safe.”
I let that settle in. The wind had picked up again, rattling the barn’s loose tin, and for a second I wondered if maybe the whole building would just shake itself apart and save us all a lot of trouble.
“So where is he now?” I asked, more to the universe than to Jasper.
He paused, like he hadn’t expected the question.
“I don’t know,” Jasper said. “If I were him, I’d keep moving. Or I’d find a hole deep enough that no one could smell it, but either way—”
He reached over, not touching the baby, but close enough that Emilio’s foot landed on his hand. He gave it a gentle squeeze, then let go.
“Either way,” Jasper finished, “he did the right thing.”
He stood, slung the medical bag over his shoulder, and headed for the door, shoes quiet as apology. Just before he left, he looked back over his shoulder.
“If you need anything, day or night. You know.”
I nodded, the words caught behind my teeth. Jasper didn’t need to hear them anyway.
The barn went back to silence as the door clicked shut. I stood for a minute, feeling the warm, slow rise and fall of Emilio’s breath against my chest. I thought about all the ways a man could run, and all the ways he could stay.
I hummed an old, stupid tune, off-key and slow, and waited for the wind to die down.
* * * *
The kitchen at dusk was a fluorescent little temple, the only room in the house where the thermostat seemed to have any real authority.
The rest of the place could be gutted by drafts, but the kitchen kept its heat—moist, urgent, a little bit chemical, like the inside of a Laundromat three loads into a twelve-hour shift.
Even with the light off, the yellow from the bottle-warmer station lit the countertop like an interrogation room.
I was standing over the warmer, waiting for the little container of formula to hiss and click, when I caught my own reflection in the blacked-out window above the sink.
The glass was fogged with condensation, but you could still see the smudge of my jaw, the way the scar on my cheek went gray in the bad light.
I made a face at myself, something between a threat and a joke, then flicked the bottle with my thumb and watched a single perfect bubble race to the top.
I’d never liked kitchens. Not even in my own house, back when I had one. But this one was a kind of command post, the only place you could count on seeing the whole crew—burly alphas, damp-eyed omegas, a couple of farmhands I never learned the names of—all in one hour or less.
Now, with everyone else scattered, the space had a different gravity. Even Emilio felt it. He was slotted into his bouncer by the pantry, two rubber animals in a death grip, eyes half-lidded, but still alert to the world of smells and sounds and bullshit that orbited the kitchen.
Jojo came in so soft I almost didn’t register him at first. He wore a sweater that was more patch than fabric, sleeves chewed to ribbons at the wrists, and his hair was a silvery haystack of static and anxiety.
He walked past the stove, past the fridge, then stopped dead at the counter and placed a folded piece of paper beside the bottle-warmer. He didn’t look at me, just flattened the paper with one hand and then stepped back as if waiting to be dismissed.
I looked at the paper. The edges were crisp, the fold surgical. Whatever was inside, it wasn’t a grocery list.
I finished prepping the bottle, capped it, then picked up the paper and unfolded it in one motion.