Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
HARPER
I thought we were just going to a safehouse, but Caleb’s directions lead us to a veritable mansion.
“This can’t be right,” I say, peering up through the windshield.
I was expecting something like the last Airbnb—something beige, anonymous, with good deadbolts, in a neighborhood where nobody looks out their windows.
Instead we just drove up a private, tree-lined driveway that I thought was a road. Yeah, there was a gate we had to pass through, but I just thought that meant we were entering a gated neighborhood. Not that it was the gated entrance to a single house.
“What is this?” I ask.
“My best friend, Domhnall, lives here. Isaak was smart to send us here. This place has state-of-the-art security.”
“Even against the Lonestar Kings?” I ask nervously, eyes flicking back and forth at the expensively landscaped yard.
“Domhnall’s wife, Mads, took it to a level that makes professionally paranoid people feel under-prepared. They had a little trouble with…er…well, some international drug lords, so Mads took extra precautions.”
“International what?” I turn to look over my shoulder into the back seat.
Caleb shakes his head in a way that means the story is genuinely insane and he doesn’t have time to tell it. “Also Mads sometimes goes by Anna. She uses the names interchangeably. It’s—” He waves a hand. “Another long story.”
I decide not to push. I have used up my capacity for insane stories today.
I park and am quickly out of the car and around to open Bruiser’s door. It’s killed me being so far away from him the whole drive up when I know he’s been so stressed and freaked out.
I’m about to heft him up into my arms, but Caleb’s already on it. Bruiser’s head drops onto his shoulder like it’s something he’s done every day of his life.
My throat closes up. That was going to be my move. Bruiser’s technically too big for it, but on a day like today I would have carried him, anyway.
Instead, I stand beside the car and watch Caleb carry my son toward the mansion as if it’s something he does all the time, and my chest does something I don’t have a clean word for.
The resemblance between the two of them is staggering.
I don’t know how I missed it for nine years, except that I never even had a photo of Caleb. And I refused to let myself picture his face because picturing him meant wanting him. And wanting him meant admitting the life I’d chosen was built on a substitution. That didn’t seem fair to Z.
Of course, now that thought makes me furious, even as Caleb’s features—so blurred in my memory the way things do when you’re actively trying to erase them—stand out so starkly now, echoed on our son’s face.
The particular line of his jaw. The way his brow sets when he’s concentrating.
Bruiser has that brow.
Seeing them together in the flat mid-morning light, I understand that I told myself a great many stories to deny what was right in front of me.
The two of them are unmistakable for anything other than father and son.
I swallow hard as we walk up to the entrance of the mansion all together. I fall into step beside Caleb, close enough to touch without ever actually touching, which is the only way I know how to exist around him right now.
There’s too much in that three-inch gulf between us. The conversation we never got to finish. His voice in the shower going completely quiet and then—wait, what?—before the gunshot and the twelve minutes of running for our lives.
Then four hours of highway silence with his hand occasionally squeezing my shoulder, neither of us saying a word.
Now here we are walking up this driveway, still not talking about it, and the silence has weight. I can’t tell yet whether it’s protective or structural, or whether it’s about to become a big, big problem. I just know I’m too afraid to be the first one to break it.
The man who opens the front door is tall and dark-haired, with the specific stillness of someone who has dealt with things and learned to be calm about it afterward.
His eyes go to Bruiser first—a brief, significant look that tells me he doesn’t miss the resemblance between him and Caleb either—and then to me.
It’s clear he recognizes me from the memorial, but I’m not sure we ever got directly introduced. The women kept flocking around me at the time.
“Harper.” I hold out my hand. “Caleb’s—” I hesitate one beat too long, and what comes out is: “Stepsister.”
I cringe the next second. Jesus Christ. He just recognized the boy is Caleb’s son, and I’m sure Isaak told him I was coming with my son, and then I just said stepsister? What the fuck was I thinking?
Bruiser’s head comes up off Caleb’s shoulder. “Mom, you’re his sister? Why didn’t you say so?”
I close my eyes briefly. The embarrassment is almost a relief, really. At least it’s a small and manageable feeling in the middle of every other enormous one.
Caleb goes still beside me, not reacting or signaling anything to his friend. But I’ve been attuned to the frequency of Caleb Graham’s body since I was seventeen years old, and I feel the stillness the way you feel a room change temperature.
He’s standing here holding our son and giving me the space to set the terms here. I don’t know if that’s generosity or strategy or just Caleb being Caleb—patient in ways that feel almost unbearable sometimes. In the past, it would’ve made me want to do something reckless just to get a reaction.
“Come in, come in!” says a woman behind Domhnall.
She’s warm and pretty and carrying a gurgling, fat baby in the crook of her arm like a little football.
The baby’s legs kick happily. “Hi! I’m Anna.
We met briefly at the memorial—my friends were being super rude grilling you, so you might not remember me in the background.
We have a whole private wing prepared for you—you won’t even know we’re here. ”
I laugh a little at her introduction and give the baby’s foot a squeeze as we follow her into the house.
I can’t help clocking that she seems new to this level of wealth. As she gives us the tour, she looks around with the mild awe and bewilderment of someone still waiting to wake up. It makes her a little more relatable, especially since she also pauses to blow strawberries on the baby’s belly.
Bruiser wriggles out of Caleb’s arms and immediately begins cataloging the expensive objects on the mantel with the thoroughness of a small claims case assessor.
“Do you have a pool?” he asks, without looking up from a crystal object he is definitely going to knock over.
“Bruiser,” I start.
“We do,” Anna says, dropping to his level with the ease of someone used to small people. She perches the baby on her knee, bouncing him there. “Indoor and outdoor. Hot tub, too—but no going in without your mom or dad.”
“My dad’s a bad guy,” Bruiser says. The conversational tone he uses for this particular piece of information splits me in two.
Anna doesn’t flinch, though. “So is mine.” She says it simply, more as a fact than a wound. “But now I have the best people around me. It gets better. I promise, kiddo.”
Bruiser considers this with the same gravity he gives to serious information. Then he looks back at Caleb.
“Cabe is the best,” he says.
And he reaches back without looking—the absolute animal trust of a child who has decided someone’s trustworthy, and Caleb takes his searching hand immediately. Like he’s been oriented toward that reach since we got out of the car. Like there was never any question.
I have to look away so I don’t lose my shit.
Caleb’s other hand finds the small of my back as we follow Anna down the hall, and the touch is so familiar and so precisely placed—the exact spot he always used to find when we were teenagers, that simple, sneaking comfort—and my throat closes up again.
I want to put Bruiser to bed and press my face into Caleb’s chest until I’ve figured out how to say all the things I didn’t get to say in the shower.
I want to finish the conversation. I want to know what his face was doing in the moment before the gunshot, in those few seconds between you’re Bruiser’s father and wait, what?
But I’m a mother first.
Everything else comes second. So I direct Bruiser’s questions about whether the pool is heated and whether there will be macaroni and cheese.
And I try to pick at the lasagna that Domhnall’s three-Michelin-star chef sends down, and I watch Caleb make Bruiser laugh three times at lunch with a competence that looks effortless and probably isn’t.
And I think: this is what Z kept from both of them.
Not just from Caleb. From Bruiser too, who deserved to know from the beginning what kind of man he came from.
Domhnall walks me to the security room before Caleb takes Bruiser swimming, and after ten minutes of looking at the screens covering every hallway, every perimeter point, along with the multiple guards stationed around the property—I’m finally satisfied enough to let Bruiser out of my direct line of sight for the first time since yesterday.
Caleb stops beside me before they go.
His hand comes to my shoulder in the careful, questioning way he always touches me now. It’s a Caleb touch, so it’s still electrifying, but so strange now, feeling him as a man touching me in concern, checking in on me—that all my pieces are still in the right configuration.
Because he sees me.
I haven’t been so fully seen in a whole decade.
And the unfinished conversation sits between us like a physical object. We are six inches away from the thing we’re not saying.
“Get some rest,” he says. “You’ve earned it.”
His voice is completely level; I have no idea how. I feel like hyperventilating.
I nod because I don’t trust my voice.
He holds my gaze one beat past the point of ordinary reassurance—long enough to let me know that the conversation exists, that he knows it exists, but he’s choosing to wait and take our son to go swimming while I get some rest first. I watch them walk down the hall together and cannot get a full breath into my lungs until they turn the corner.
Then I make it to the guest bedroom, collapse onto the mattress, and slam my eyes shut.
The dream arrives like a monster that’s been crouched, waiting.
I’m not in my body. I’m watching her—well, it’s me—but I’m so young and terrified-small in the way I spent years learning not to be.
The girl is in a hotel room that smells like mildew and cheap whiskey.
Z is feeding the girl shots.
She keeps saying no, she’s a lightweight.
She’s laughing because she’s already past the point where laughing and not-laughing are barely different. And he keeps refilling the plastic cup.
She keeps taking it because it’s Z. And because this is the first real roof they’ve had over them in days, and because he’s her oldest friend and she trusts him implicitly.
I try to scream at her from wherever I am in this dream. But the sound doesn’t come out.
I try to yank the bottle away, but I’m just fog here. Just a witness. All I can do is watch.
The girl passes out.
Z calls her name. Once. Twice to check that she’s passed out.
Then he peels off her jeans.
I’ve had versions of this dream before. Foggy, blurred versions where I woke up with a bad feeling I couldn’t locate the source of.
I told myself it was just the general residue of survival from those years in Darlene’s trailer.
Nothing specific and certainly nothing with edges that still had the power to cut me.
But this version has edges.
And a face.
Z.
I watch the whole thing and can’t look away as Z climbs over my unconscious body and makes sloppy sucking noises at my neck. His hands wander down my body.
He’s violating me in the one way I never believed he was capable of, even if he doesn’t penetrate me.
I finally wrench myself awake, covered in sweat, with my hand pressed over my mouth and my heart hammering against my ribs.
Oh God!
The certainty of what actually happened that night sits in my chest as if it’s always been there, waiting ten years for a moment to surface. Waiting until I was finally truly safe, maybe.
I look around the bedroom with its tasteful luxury, a jewel-toned couch underneath the reinforced windows and matching curtains drawn shut.
Down the hall, I can hear Caleb’s voice, low and steady.
He’s putting Bruiser to bed. I can hear the particular cadence of it—not words, but the gentle rhythm and lilt of his voice necessary to do the specific work of making a child feel safe at the end of a frightening day—and the sound of it cracks me open in a way the nightmare didn’t.
Because here is the thing I can’t put back now that the dream has shown it to me with edges:
I know what happened in that hotel room.
I have known and not-known for ten years. I called it bad sex, or the price of survival, or a choice I made when I was too drunk to make better choices.
But now I know it for what it really was.
Assault.
And Caleb is down the hall reading our son to sleep, patient and steady and present in the way he has always been present. While I’m sitting in this clean, expensive room with a horrible knowledge I can’t stuff back in the bottle. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
I press my palms against my eye sockets.
I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep again for a very long time. I pull the covers up. Higher. Higher still, until they’re over my head. I can’t imagine possibly summoning the strength to ever get out of this bed.