Caleb #2
For a long moment she said nothing. The look on her face wasn’t anger — that would’ve been easier to stand in.
It was hurt, the kind that had settled deep and stayed there.
When she finally spoke, her voice was calm in that way it got when she was trying to find the source of a wound.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Then I get a question.”
I nodded. “Anything.”
She looked down at the two cups sitting between us, her thumb tracing once around the cardboard sleeve before she lifted her eyes back to mine.
“You’ve told me what you did. You’ve told me why you did it.
You’ve told me about the club and my family and all the ways you got it wrong.
” Her voice never rose. “But you still haven’t told me anything about yourself that cost you to say.
” The words landed harder than they should have.
“I sat right here and handed you the worst night of my life. Every ugly piece of it. Every part I was ashamed of. And for a long time, I thought we were doing the same thing.” Her fingers tightened around the cup. “I thought I knew you.”
I felt that one all the way through me. Sophia held my gaze. “So, that’s my question. Not the club. Not my family. You.” She swallowed. “Tell me something true that hurts.”
For a second, every instinct I had reached for cover. I could feel my mind searching for something real but survivable—my mother, the photograph, the things I let people know because they were easier than the things I didn’t. I felt myself reach for them. Then I let them go.
I sat there a long moment after she asked it.
The answer was already there; the second the words left her mouth, I knew where she’d gone.
Not the club. Not my father. Not the things I’d done.
Me. The thing that hurt—the thing I’d carried around since I was eighteen without ever finding a place to set it down.
My eyes dropped to the coffee table between us, to the cups sitting where we’d left them, forgotten now.
The first light of morning had crept all the way into the room, turning the wood pale gold beneath them.
Somewhere down the street a dog barked and then everything went quiet again.
When I finally spoke, my voice came out rough.
“You remember the tattoo.”
Sophia nodded slowly, and the skin across my shoulders felt tight.
“I told you his name was Jace. That part was true.” I rubbed a hand across the back of my neck and stared out toward the window for a second before looking back at her.
“What I didn’t tell you was that he wasn’t just my friend.
We grew up together. My father had us both underfoot from the time we were kids.
We spent half our lives in that garage — building things, taking things apart, getting yelled at for tracking grease through the house.
If I was somewhere, chances were Jace was too.
” A small smile tried to appear and disappeared just as quick. “He practically lived at our place.”
Sophia didn’t interrupt. She just listened, the way she always did when something mattered.
“My mother was still alive then. Things were different.” I looked down at my hands.
“People talk like grief is sadness, but that wasn’t what happened to my father.
Not really. When my mom died, it was like something inside him collapsed.
He got angry. Hard. The club changed with him, and I don’t even know if any of us saw it happening while we were standing in it. ”
The memory sat heavy. “We weren’t running drugs.
We weren’t moving guns. Not us. We were just kids doing jobs for people we trusted — running parts, delivering things, helping out, the kind of stuff sons and nephews and kids who grew up around a place do every day.
” I paused, because this was the part that still tasted wrong.
“The problem was that by then the lines had already started moving. The club had gotten involved with people it never should’ve touched.
People my father would’ve thrown out on their ass ten years earlier. ”
Sophia’s fingers tightened around her cup, and I noticed because I noticed everything she did, always had.
“Jace and I thought we understood the world. We were eighteen and stupid enough to think we were invincible. We knew some things weren’t right — we just didn’t know how wrong it all was.
” The room felt smaller, and the years between then and now didn’t feel like much at all.
“There was a man who wanted to send a message.” I swallowed, my throat tight. “The message wasn’t meant for Jace.”
The words hung there. I stared at the grain in the wood floor because looking anywhere else felt impossible.
“He was standing beside me one minute, talking, laughing about something I can’t even remember now.
Then a gun came out and everything changed so fast I never caught up to it.
” The ache hit exactly where it always did—not sharp anymore, worse than sharp, old and permanent.
“There are moments in your life you keep replaying because some part of you still believes you’ll get a different ending if you watch them enough times.
” My laugh came out hollow. “I’ve spent half my life replaying that parking lot. ”
Sophia’s eyes had gone bright, and she didn’t look away, and neither did I.
“I buried him, and inside the year I’d packed a bag and left town.
” The words scraped coming out. “I couldn’t be in a place that had Jace in the ground and my father’s hands all over how he got there.
The last thing I told him was that I didn’t know the man he’d turned into, and I wasn’t going to stand around and watch him be it. ”
The memory of standing in front of my father felt as clear as if it had happened yesterday.
“And he changed — not because I made him, but because Jace’s death finally got through where nothing else had.
Took him years. Cost him damn near everything.
” I exhaled slowly. “I spent those years in the Teams telling myself I was running toward something, when mostly I was running away. By the time I came home, the club was clean and the man running it wasn’t the one I’d left.
I’d been angry so long I almost missed that he’d become the man I’d wanted back. ”
For a moment neither of us spoke, the morning light climbing all the way across the room.
“Not everything gets fixed,” I said. “Jace is still dead. My mother is still gone. There are things my father will carry the rest of his life. But I learned something in all of it — I learned that fear makes a man start deciding things for other people, makes him think he can manage the outcome if he just holds tight enough. My father did it after my mother died. And years later, I did it to you.” The room went still.
“I loved you so much I got scared of losing you, so I started deciding what you could handle, what you should know, when you should know it. And by the time I understood what I was doing, I’d already turned into the thing I hated most about all of it.
” The silence that followed was honest — not comfortable, not easy, just honest. “I think that’s the thing that hurts, Soph.
Not losing Jace. Knowing I learned the wrong lesson from it. ”
She moved before I could say anything else — not toward the coffee, toward me.
The couch gave a soft sigh as she pushed up off it, and I watched her cross the room, watched the hem of Liam’s shirt brush her thighs, watched the morning light catch in her hair, and then she sat on the edge of the low table directly in front of me, close enough that her knees pressed lightly against mine, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her.
My breath caught somewhere in the middle of my chest.