Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
The walkway groaned under his boots the way it always did—the low, familiar complaint from boards that had been expanding and contracting in the Florida heat for thirty years.
Trent knew every pitch. Every soft spot.
Every plank his father had laid by hand on a Saturday in October because the weather had finally broken enough to work outside without sweating through his shirt in the first ten minutes.
He'd walked this dock a thousand times. Tonight, it felt like the longest hundred yards of his life.
Dove moved beside him, her footsteps near-silent against his, her shoulder close enough that he could feel the warmth of her in the dark.
Neither of them spoke. The night pressed in around the edges of the dock lights, thick and alive with the sound of the Glades settling into itself—frogs, crickets, and the distant splash of large fish moving through the bay.
Then came a thrash from the far edge of the moat.
It was heavy, deliberate, the particular sound of a large animal rolling around in the water and mud like a small child stomping in puddles during a spring rain storm.
And underneath it—a low, guttural noise that wasn’t quite a bellow that he felt more in his chest than heard with his ears.
It wasn’t a gator giving a warning. It was more of a welcoming grunt.
Trent stopped dead in his tracks.
"What—" Dove started.
He raised his hand while his heart shot up to his throat.
He stood still and let his eyes find the dark beyond what little glow was left from the porch lights.
He didn't really need to adjust. He knew this property the way he knew his own heartbeat—every shadow, every shape, every place where the grass met the water and the moat curved out toward the far dock.
He'd been reading this land since he was old enough to walk it alone.
But he stood there anyway, because part of him already knew what moved at the far edge of the moat, where the concrete lip gave way to a wide stretch of grass. Only, it was impossible.
The shadow was tall and broad through the shoulders. He stood at the water's edge with the easy stillness of a person who wasn't afraid of what lived in that water. Not many could come to Mallor’s Landing and do that.
But what really shocked Trent was Dolly.
The twelve-foot alligator, roughly nine-hundred pounds of prehistoric territorial animal, was rolling around like she was a puppy that had been given a new chew toy.
This wasn’t the slow drift she did when she was patrolling.
Nor was it the aggressive display she put on for strangers who got too close.
She rolled, her massive body turning in the shallows, tail sweeping in a wide arc through the water, the way she did when Trent came back from a trip and she heard his boots on the dock before she saw him.
The way she'd done every single time his mother had walked this property in the last twenty years, right up until the month she got too sick to come outside.
The way she'd done, a long time ago, for someone else.
His throat closed. He rubbed his eyes.
Dolly didn't do that for people. She did it for family.
"Trent." Dove's voice was low and close to his ear. "You okay?"
He couldn't answer that.
He squeezed his eyes closed and counted to three before blinking them open again.
The figure was still there. Still standing at the edge of the water, completely unbothered by the twelve-foot alligator performing what Trent could only describe as a greeting at his feet.
The stranger had one hand hung loose at his side.
The other rested, easy and familiar, on the top of Dolly's exposed flank as she rolled.
"Trent." Dove's hand found his arm. Then she went rigid at his side. “What the hell?” She drew her weapon, smooth and clean. "Show your face and keep your hands where I can see them."
The figure raised both hands slowly. Turned. And walked toward them.
He moved into the reach of the distant lights—unhurried, and seemingly unworried that he was on the wrong side of the moat. The light caught his face, and Trent’s heart froze in his chest. His pulse soared. And his mind spun with a million questions.
All Trent could do was stand there with his mouth open and stare.
Stare at this man with the same wide nose. Same high cheek-bones. Same high forehead. Same shaggy hair that was always a little too long and a five-o’clock shadow.
He'd been looking at a version of it in the mirror his entire life.
The man stopped ten feet away, hands still in the air.
"Hello, son."
The air in Trent’s lungs became trapped. He couldn’t release it, nor could he suck in more.
Son.
It was just a word. But staring at this man that he so strongly resembled, the word meant everything Trent had lost. That Trent had buried.
The ground beneath him didn't move. It held him steady while his insides began to tremble.
An owl hooted. A frog croaked. The world around him indifferent and enormous.
Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be, except for the man standing fifteen feet away.
The one Trent and his mother had laid to rest twenty years ago.
Visions of that day raced across Trent’s mind. It had been cloudy. Slightly chilly. Enough so that his mom had needed a sweater. She'd stood over that grave and cried for what seemed like hours.
Everything that Trent knew and understood tilted sideways all at once. Every possible emotion a man could have filtered through his heart. They competed for his attention, but he couldn’t hold onto a single one.
Joy shot through him like electricity at the sight of his father. Flesh and blood and fucking breathing.
But then came rage, and behind that, the grief that had nowhere to go because the thing he'd been grieving was standing in front of him with a pulse, and underneath all of it, a confusion so deep it made him dizzy.
He breathed through it. Planted his boots on the walkway and breathed through it because if he didn't, he was going to do something he couldn't take back—and he didn't know yet if that something was throwing his arms around the man or putting his fist through his face.
Both were logical options.
"Lower your weapon," he said to Dove.
She didn't move. “I’m not gonna do that.”
“Yes, you are.”
"I'm not lowering anything until someone tells me what the hell is going on.” She kept the Glock up, her stance wide, her eyes fixated on the man. "Because what I’m looking at doesn't make any sense."
He couldn't argue with that. His mind fought what his eyes saw.
He turned back to the figure—to his father.
To the jaw he'd inherited and the eyes he hadn't and the shoulders that were broader than he remembered, his hair had grayed at the temples, and he had a few more wrinkles, but nothing else had changed, nothing, which was impossible.
Twenty years was impossible. All of this was impossible.
"Prove to me that you’re Jack Mallor,” Trent said.
His voice came out rougher than he intended.
"Because my father has been dead for twenty years.
" The words crawled through his mouth like he was chewing glass.
"And the man I knew—" he paused, wiggled his fingers to keep from fisting them and took in the deepest calming breath he could manage. "Wouldn't leave his wife and kid."
Jack—his father—looked at Trent with an expression that held twenty years of something Trent couldn't name and wasn't about to try.
"Coming back from the dead isn't as simple as people make it sound.
" His voice. That voice. Low and unhurried, with the particular timbre that had narrated Trent's entire childhood.
"But if Dolly dancing for me isn't enough—" The corner of his mouth curved into a familiar half smile.
“Then we can talk about the time you were six. Confident little boy. Always following me around and wanting to do whatever I did. I loved that. But your mother, she worried I gave you too much free rein.” Jack shook his head and laughed.
“One day, while my back was turned, you decided you were big enough to drive the Jeep. "
Trent went absolutely still. He remembered that day as if it were yesterday.
"Your mother was inside. I was in the equipment shed. We’d been loading some tools to to go fix the gate.
You got it in your head, because your mother thought I needed to walk more, that you could drive it to the gate, and I could walk.
I came out to the sound of the engine and watched you back that Jeep straight into that cypress tree up by the drive over there.
” Jack laughed. "Took out the whole left taillight. You tried so hard not to cry.” Jack pointed to his mouth.
“But your lower lip quivered, and you lost it when your mom came running out of the house.”
“Mom yelled at you for leaving the keys in the Jeep. Yelled at me for doing something I knew I shouldn’t. Then she scooped me up and hugged me so hard I thought my guts were gonna come out like a frog being squeezed.”
“Exactly what you said to me when I tucked you in that night.”
“And you told me next time to use the rearview mirror, and you gave me my first driving lesson right after the Jeep was fixed.” Trent laughed.
He hadn't meant to. It came out rough and short, but it came out, and across the fifteen feet between them, his father laughed, too—the same broken, helpless sound, as if neither of them had planned this, and neither of them could stop it.
Dove stared at both of them like they'd lost their minds entirely.
Trent reached over and put his hand over hers. Gently. The way you moved a weapon you weren't taking, just redirecting. She let him guide it down, slowly, her eyes still fixed on Jack—his father.
His fucking father.
"Give us some time alone,” he said quietly.
"Absolutely not."
“Please. Just go inside.”