Chapter 23
TILDA
By the time I decide to let Bron see Jesse properly, I have already argued with myself about it so many times that the debate has gone from moral dilemma to background noise.
The questions keep circling anyway. Is this selfish.
Is it overdue. Is it crueler to delay it now that the truth is out than it was to hide it in the first place.
I turn those thoughts over while I lie awake, while I walk to training, while I stand in the shower letting compound-hot water strike the back of my neck hard enough to sting.
Every answer I arrive at comes with an equal and opposite answer attached to it, and I am tired in the marrow of my bones from being the only person who has had to carry this decision for so long.
The thing that finally settles it is not logic, though I would prefer it to be.
It is memory. Bron in the canyon, listening when I said wait.
Bron on the climbing wall, following my sequence without trying to rewrite it into something flashier.
Bron in that corridor after I told him the truth, going pale and quiet instead of cruel.
None of that erases what he was. None of it magically heals the years that are gone.
But it does something worse to my certainty.
It dents it. And once certainty is dented, it stops fitting in the place where you stored it.
The next visitation period opens in the late afternoon, right after a compact but vicious strategy session with production and a light recovery block the trainers insist on calling “restorative mobility” as if stretching in public can ever be restorative.
I spend the hour beforehand acting like a woman who is perfectly composed and absolutely not preparing for one of the most consequential moments of her life.
I answer questions. I review the next challenge packet.
I make a note about hydration and sleep cycles and audience metrics because apparently my brain thinks clerical behavior can hold back emotional collapse if I perform it with enough rigor.
It cannot. By the time I reach the family wing, the air in my lungs feels thin.
The corridor smells faintly of child-safe sanitizer, warmed formula, and the sugar-bright scent of fruit chews.
Somewhere nearby, a little voice is singing to itself with great seriousness.
A caretaker laughs softly. The whole wing is still offensively gentle, a padded pocket of ordinary life bolted onto the side of a machine built to wring spectacle out of people, and today that contrast nearly undoes me.
Jesse is in the commons floor area near the low activity tables, kneeling with his feet tucked under him in the exact compact way Vakutan children do when they are focused.
He has a cluster of objects in front of him: two smooth stones from the sensory bin, a magnetic block, a plastic shuttle wing, and the small fossil-shaped rock he has decided is one of the great treasures of civilization.
He is sorting them with intense concentration, brow furrowed, golden eyes narrowed.
When he sees me, his whole face changes. The solemnity breaks. Light comes in.
“Mama!”
He gets up too fast, nearly loses his balance, catches himself with one little hand on the table, and barrels into my legs anyway.
I crouch and gather him up, pressing my mouth to the warm side of his head.
He smells like baby shampoo, graham crackers, and the faint mineral sweetness that clings to his scales after a nap.
“Hi, baby.”
“You came back.”
“I always come back.”
“I made a pile,” he informs me, as if this is the opening matter of state I need briefed on immediately.
“I can see that.”
He pats my cheek and peers at me with unsettling perception. “You weird.”
That gets me despite everything. I laugh once, low and helpless. “Excellent diagnosis.”
He considers me another beat, then nods with the grave satisfaction of a tiny doctor whose concerns have been acknowledged. “Okay.”
I sit with him on the padded mat and let him show me the pile. The fossil rock is, unsurprisingly, the centerpiece. He places it in my palm with ceremony.
“Best one,” he says.
“It’s a very good one.”
“Mine.”
“Yes, sweetheart. Yours.”
The words come out easy. The rest does not.
I keep glancing toward the entrance without meaning to.
Every time the outer door slides open for another parent or caretaker, my heart lurches stupidly and then has to recover.
I have arranged this with all the precision of a woman planning a controlled detonation.
I told Bron the visitation window. I told him if he came, he was to come alone, and he was not to crowd Jesse, not to perform, not to push, not to ask questions that turned a first meeting into a crime scene.
He took the instructions with a quietness that worried me more than argument would have.
“Okay,” he said. Just that. No grin. No flirtation.
No attempt to negotiate terms. Since then I have had enough time to wonder whether he will come at all.
Jesse has begun lining the stones along the edge of my knee by color value, which is either adorable or mildly terrifying depending on how much sleep one has had. “Green-gray,” he says, placing one carefully. “Dark-gray. Space-rock. Not-food.”
“That last category seems important.”
He nods. “Very.”
The outer door opens.
Bron steps in.
The first thing I notice is what he is not doing.
He is not breezing in like he owns the room.
He is not smiling for invisible cameras.
He is not wrapped in any of that easy, bright swagger he used to wear like a second skin.
He looks almost cautious, which on Bron reads as something perilously close to reverence.
He has changed into a dark shirt and clean utility trousers, simple enough that nothing about him feels staged.
His hair is still damp from a shower, pushed back from his face.
His hands are empty. Good. No gifts. No gimmicks.
Just him, standing just inside the threshold of the commons with the expression of a man who has finally reached the edge of something he has wanted and feared.
Jesse notices the shift in my attention before he follows it. His small body goes still against my side. He looks up. Then he turns.
For a moment neither of them moves.
Bron is the first to break the stillness, but only just. He comes forward one slow step and stops several feet away, far enough not to loom. His voice, when he speaks, is gentler than I have ever heard it.
“Hey, little man.”
Jesse studies him in complete silence.
Not shy.
Not frightened.
Assessing.
He has my stillness when he is uncertain, but that gaze—direct, old for his age, quietly unblinking—is all Bron’s line.
I feel it then in a way I have resisted feeling before: the unbearable visual truth of them.
Not just scales and eyes, but something more elusive.
An angle of attention. A way of occupying space without flailing in it.
Jesse grips the fossil rock in one hand and leans a little more firmly into my hip.
Bron glances at me briefly, asking without words whether he should come closer.
I nod once.
He kneels down rather than approaching at full height. The movement is careful enough that it tightens my throat. This man has kicked down the doors of his own life for years and now he is treating three feet of padded flooring like sacred ground.
“I’m Bron,” he says.
Jesse says nothing.
Bron nods as if silence is a reasonable answer, because for Jesse it often is. “Right. Fair. Big day. Lot of pressure. I also hate introductions sometimes.”
A tiny huff leaves Jesse’s nose. Not a laugh, not quite, but the first crack in the stillness.
Encouraged, Bron keeps his tone soft. “Your mama tells me you like rocks.”
I did not tell him that. Which means he noticed the fossil the other day, filed it away, and remembered. I hate how much that detail affects me.
Jesse looks down at the rock in his fist, then back up at Bron. “Best one.”
Bron places a hand dramatically to his chest. “An expert opinion. I respect that.”
Still no smile from Jesse, but the suspicion in his gaze has thinned into concentration. Bron stays exactly where he is, grounded on one knee, forearms relaxed over his thighs, making himself available rather than insistent. I realize I have been holding my breath.
“Mama says no eat rocks,” Jesse says finally.
Bron’s mouth twitches. “Wise policy.”
“You eat dumb stuff?”
“All the time,” Bron says gravely. “Historically, I’ve made many poor decisions.”
That one almost gets me. I look away quickly, pretending interest in the foam blocks stacked by the activity wall.
Jesse absorbs this information with due seriousness.
Then he shifts, sliding off my lap onto the mat.
He keeps one hand on my knee for balance and takes two small steps closer to Bron, though not close enough to touch.
The room seems to narrow around that distance.
I am aware of the soft whirr of the ceiling air system, the squeak of a toy wheel somewhere across the commons, the faint lavender-clean scent of the blanket stack on the nearby shelf.
Every little sound and smell sharpens while my body waits.
Bron doesn’t move toward him.
Good.
Very good.
“You buildin’ something?” he asks.
“Pile.”
“Excellent project. Strong concept. Very advanced.”
Jesse glances back at his arrangement on the mat, then at the fossil in his hand. He looks at Bron again, golden eyes intent, weighing something private. The pause stretches. Bron remains still enough that I can almost feel the effort it costs him.