Chapter Eleven #2
The next day didn’t so much dawn as stumble into being, the sun dragging itself over the rim of the butte with the hung over reluctance of a man who had promised he’d quit.
I woke up the way I always did: mouth dry, head full of static, and the dull ache in my shoulder that tracked the weather more faithfully than the ten-day ever could.
Emilio was already crying, a wet, full-throated protest that rattled the old air vent and bounced off every wall between my room and his.
I got up, feet on cold wood, and shuffled down the hallway. Jojo was already there, moving soft and efficient, with the kind of speed that made it look like he’d always been awake and was just waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
He handed me the baby with a quick report—“two ounces in, half a diaper out, mild case of grump”—and a look that said, “You owe me again.” I grunted my gratitude and took over, settling Emilio on my forearm and jostling him just enough to shush the worst of it.
The morning followed its own predictable rhythm: bottle, burp, change, bounce, repeat.
Somewhere in the middle, Jojo made toast and left half a pot of coffee to burn on the warmer.
I poured myself a mug and drank it black, standing at the sink and watching the thin winter sunlight struggle in through the crusted glass.
Liam came down the stairs just after seven, hair wild and eyes swollen from sleep.
He moved through the kitchen like a man walking on a frozen lake, every step measured against a thousand possible disasters.
He offered to take the baby, but I could see the hesitation in his hands, so I kept hold of Emilio and let Liam handle breakfast instead.
He found the cereal, two bowls, spoons. He poured milk with the precision of a man who’d never been allowed to spill.
We ate in silence, the kind that fills a room with its own gravitational pull.
Emilio was the only one not participating, eyes locked on the light fixture as if it contained the answer to his problems.
When the cereal was gone, and the baby had been changed again, I looked at Liam. “You good?” I asked.
He nodded, not looking up. “Yeah. I’m good.”
We went through the rest of the day as if it were a drill: chores, feed, shovel snow, make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen in the night.
Emilio rotated between us and the bouncy seat, sometimes content, sometimes incandescent with need.
Every hour or so, we swapped out—one of us inside with the baby, the other outside pretending that something couldn’t wait another minute.
Around noon, the wind picked up, and a new snow started, just enough to dust the windows and make the house go a little darker. I stoked the fire in the fireplace, added a log, and watched the flames curl orange and blue through the warped glass.
Liam sat on the couch, baby asleep on his chest, arms cradled around him in a protective arch. He didn’t notice me watching, or maybe he did and didn’t mind. I liked the look of it, the way their two heads mirrored each other, one fair and one dark, both with the same stubborn set to the jaw.
Just before sunset, Rawley showed up. He then let himself in, bringing with him a plume of cold air and a scatter of snow that settled in the entry like a dare.
He paused in the mudroom, boots planted, and looked at me for a long second. The look was full of things he wouldn’t say in front of Liam—a post-mortem on the courthouse, a calculation of risk, maybe even a rare note of approval.
He nodded at me, then at the baby, then at Liam, who had stood up when the door opened.
Rawley said, “All good?”
“Yeah,” I said. “All good.”
He seemed to accept that. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Supposed to get ugly tonight. Watch the pipes.”
I grinned. “Already on it.”
He nodded again, lingered just long enough to make it weird, then left. For a few seconds, the house was silent except for the faint, receding clunk of Rawley’s boots on the stairs.
We did dinner the way we’d done breakfast—quiet, almost ritualized, the only interruption coming when Emilio decided he’d been ignored for long enough and launched into a fresh round of complaints.
By eight, the baby was down. Not sleeping, but at least not actively plotting against us. The woodstove filled the kitchen with a soft, ticking heat, and the dark outside the windows was absolute, so black it seemed to pull at the edges of the house.
I made tea, two mugs, and brought them to the kitchen table. Liam sat at the far end, elbows on the wood, hands folded in front of him. He looked up as I set the mug down.
“Thanks,” he said.
I sat, the chair closer than I’d planned, and for a minute we just watched the steam rise.
He said, “I used to think tea was a scam.”
I snorted. “You’re not wrong.”
He smiled, the first real one all day, and I felt the pull in my chest like a muscle that had just remembered how to work.
We drank in silence for a while, the warmth settling into my bones.
Then, without warning, Liam said, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Do what?”
“This.” He gestured to the kitchen, the baby, the entire room. “The whole thing. It doesn’t have to be your problem.”
I looked at him, really looked, and saw the edge of panic under the casual delivery. It was the look of a man who’d been told too many times that nothing good lasts.
I said, “I like the problem.”
He went quiet, processing.
I let the silence stretch, then broke it with a joke: “Besides, he’s already got my jaw. I figure we’re stuck together now.”
The line landed. He laughed, a bright, sudden sound that bounced off the kitchen walls and left a smile hanging there for a few seconds after he stopped. It did things to my composure that I wasn’t proud of.
We talked a little, nothing important, just enough to keep the night from closing in.
He told me about a gas station in Billings where he’d once seen a raccoon steal an entire breakfast sandwich out of a trucker’s hand.
I told him about the time Burke accidentally set the hayloft on fire and tried to put it out with whiskey.
We laughed a lot. We didn’t touch, but the space between us felt charged, like the house was holding its breath.
Around ten, he stood and stretched. “I should get some sleep.”
“Me too,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I’d manage.
He started for the hallway, then stopped and turned. “Thanks. For everything.”
“Anytime,” I said.
He nodded, then slipped down the hall, feet quiet on the old wood.
I sat at the table for a while, just watching the embers die in the stove and listening to the baby’s even breaths on the monitor. My hand went to the ring, twisted it once, and I let myself think about the fact that it was real. All of it.
The house at night was a different animal than in daylight—quieter, more cunning, every board and rafter settling into its own private treaty with gravity.
If you listened, you could hear the war: the expansion and contraction of old wood, the water heater’s faint complaints, the wind taking a run at the gutters every half hour or so.
I made one last round before bed, the kind of patrol that only made sense if you’d spent too many years with no safe place to sleep. Checked all the windows, made sure the porch was clear, ran a thumb over the baby monitor until the static confirmed it was alive and kicking.
The nursery was at the far end of the upstairs, a room that caught no moon, but plenty of cold.
I stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and listened.
Emilio was asleep in the crib, a loose heap of limbs and blanket, mouth open, every inch of him radiating the kind of peace that only comes when you don’t know how to expect trouble.
The room smelled like baby powder and cedar and the faint, ever-present undertone of the ancient floors. I breathed it in, let the quiet press against the inside of my head.
For a long minute, I just stood there and watched the rise and fall of his chest, the slow cycle of inhale, exhale, the hint of drool at the corner of his mouth.
Down the hall, I heard the soft, irregular movements of a man trying to make himself small in an unfamiliar room. Liam was unpacking, or maybe just pacing, the floorboards squeaking their complaints even under his careful weight.
I thought about the way he’d looked at me at the kitchen table, the way the laughter had made his whole face break open, how it was gone in a second but still lingered, an afterimage on the back of my eyelids.
I could have gone to him. Could have made some excuse, asked about a feeding schedule or the temperature or whether the sheets in the guest room were too rough.
But I didn’t. I stayed where I was, hand on the doorframe, and let the space between us be what it was—a promise instead of a challenge, a maybe instead of a demand.
I’d spent a lot of my life moving too fast, looking for the shortcut, trying to fix things before they had a chance to break. But this? This was different. This I wanted to get right.
Emilio shifted in the crib, made a small, satisfied sigh, and went boneless again. The sight of it nearly undid me.
I let my hand drop to my side, stepped back, and pulled the door mostly closed behind me.
In my own room, I stripped down to the t-shirt and sweats I’d scavenged from a box of old gear. The sheets were cold, but I liked it that way—the shock of it, the reminder that I was still alive and not just running on leftover adrenaline.
I lay there in the dark, hand resting on my chest, listening to the sounds of the house and the baby and the man down the hall.
I thought about what I wanted. Not just a legal arrangement, not just a solution to someone else’s problem. I wanted the whole thing—the mess and the work and the impossible luck of waking up in a house where laughter was louder than fear.
I let myself think about it, really think, until the world started to fade at the edges. The last thing I heard before sleep was the baby’s slow, even breathing, and the faint, familiar sound of a man settling in for the night, in a room that was no longer just a guest room.
It was enough to dream on.