Chapter Forty-Six—Liam
Everybody's asleep, which means it's my shift.
Nobody assigned it. Nobody ever does. But somebody stays up and somebody keeps watch, and in this house that somebody has always been me.
I just never told them that's what I'm doing.
As far as the three of them know, I'm a guy who can't sleep in a new place.
Which is also true. The two things live comfortably next to each other.
The new place still smells like paint and cardboard.
Half our life is in boxes labeled in Ethan's block letters—KITCHEN, FRAGILE, RILEY OFFICE—and the other half is in boxes I labeled STUFF, which Ethan has already informed me twice is “not a system.” He's right.
It's not. It's a guy who's moved enough times to know the label doesn't matter when you're the only one carrying the box.
Except I'm not, this time. That's the part I keep tripping over.
I do a lap of the house.
Not because anything's wrong. Because that's what the wiring does at two in the morning, and after enough years you stop fighting it.
Front door, locked. Windows, latched. I clock the exits without meaning to, the same way I clock them in a restaurant, a lobby, a hotel across the street from a penthouse we just got thrown out of.
Old habit. You learn early that the fastest way to not get hurt is to always know how to leave.
I've been very good at leaving. It's practically the family trade—except I don't have one of those, so call it the only thing I trained myself into instead.
I did two tours. I don't talk about them much, and not because they're some dark locked room. There's just nothing to say that doesn't come out sounding like a bumper sticker. You go. You count seconds until something goes sideways, and then you count them until it stops. And then you come home.
That's the part nobody warns you about, actually.
Not the going. The coming home. Standing in the doorway of an apartment at three in the morning with your bag still on your shoulder, milk gone bad in the fridge because there was no one around to drink it, keeping watch over four hundred square feet of nothing because your body hasn't gotten the order to stand down.
You get used to it. That's the real trick.
You get so used to it you start to think it's a personality.
The bedroom door is open a few inches. I don't go in. I just stand where I can hear them.
Riley's on her side, the way she sleeps now, one hand tucked under the pillow and the other resting low on her stomach even in sleep.
She started doing that a couple weeks in.
A reflex. Andrew notices it too—I've caught him watching it with that look on his face like he's memorizing something.
None of us says out loud that we've all gone a little stupid over a person currently the size of a lime.
Ethan's on the far side, flat on his back, dead asleep and somehow still looking like he's solving something. Andrew's got an arm thrown across the middle of the bed, reaching for her without being awake enough to know he's doing it.
Funny thing about those two. I spent most of my life sure that the guys who'd have my back in a bad situation were guys I'd meet in a bad situation.
Turns out mine came from a poker game and a business deal and a decade of nobody letting anybody drift too far.
I didn't pick this family so much as refuse, over and over, to leave it.
First real thing I ever stuck around for.
And here I am in the hall. Keeping watch. Like always.
Except tonight it lands different, and I stand there long enough to work out why.
All those years, the counting was about knowing how to get out. Exits. Angles. The fastest clean line to the door. I could walk you through the escape route of any room I've ever stood in.
I've been in this house four days and I haven't clocked a single exit.
I've been counting other things. How long the coffee takes, so Riley's is ready the second the nausea lets her keep it down.
Which stair creaks, so I don't wake her when she's finally out.
The exact way her breathing changes right before she drops off, so I know when it's safe to stop watching and let myself go under too.
Same habit. Completely rewired. I'm not counting how to leave anymore.
I'm counting how to stay.
The last door down the hall is going to be the nursery. Right now it's where the boxes went to die. But the crib's in there, still flat-packed, leaning against the wall in a carton about the size of a coffin—which is a real cheerful thought at two a.m.
I go in and put my hand on the box. Just to do something with the feeling before it does something with me.
I could start it now. God knows I'm not sleeping, and I've built worse things in worse conditions with worse light.
But some stubborn part of me wants the others up for this one.
Wants Andrew swearing at the instructions and Ethan sorting the screws by size and Riley in the doorway telling all three of us we're doing it wrong.
I don't want to put the kid's bed together alone in the dark and have it done by morning like a chore I got out of the way.
That's new too. The not-wanting-to-do-it-alone.
I leave the box where it is. It'll keep till daylight.
On the way back I stop at the bedroom door again. Riley's shifted; Andrew's arm found her. Nobody's cold, nobody's alone, nobody's keeping watch except the idiot in the hallway who's apparently decided that's his whole personality now.
I could go to bed. I probably should.
Instead I stand there another minute and let myself have it—the paint smell, the dead soldiers of cardboard, the three people breathing in the dark like it's the most ordinary thing in the world.
A man who spent his whole life memorizing the way out, standing in the one room he has no intention of leaving.
“Go to sleep, Liam,” Ethan says, not opening his eyes.
“Wasn't tired,” I lie.
“You were counting again.”
I don't ask how he knows. He notices things. It's a gift.
I get in bed. Riley makes a small sound and settles back against me without waking, and I feel the exact second her breathing goes deep and even.
I stop counting.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I don't need to know where the door is.