CHAPTER 15: ELENA
Ilocked the door behind me.
The house was warm after the cold outside, the smell of chili still hanging in the air. My hands were steady as I crossed to the back door and leaned the shotgun against the wall. No shaking, no adrenaline crash, no surge of emotion threatening to pull me under. My hands were just doing what needed to be done.
Dad was sitting at the kitchen table where I'd left him. He had a beer open in front of him, and he was watching me with those sharp eyes of his.
"Thought you were gonna shoot him."
I turned to look at him. "I wasn't going to shoot him."
"I know that." He took a sip of his beer. "He didn't, though." He said it like we were discussing the weather. "Still, would've been justified. Trespassing, maybe. Man shows up uninvited, makes a nuisance of himself on private property. Castle doctrine, right? I'd have backed you up in court, told them you felt threatened."
"You're insane."
"Paperwork would've been a pain in the ass, though." He set the bottle down, still perfectly deadpan. "Sheriff would'vehad questions. Whole town would've been talking about it for months. Mrs. Patterson would've brought it up every single time she came in with that damn cat. 'Remember when Elena shot her husband?'"
I stared at him, and then… I laughed.
I couldn't help it. It bubbled up from somewhere deep and unexpected, startling us both. The first real laugh I'd managed in days. It felt strange in my chest, like something that didn't quite fit anymore but still felt right.
Dad's mouth twitched at the corner. As close as he ever got when he was being serious underneath the humor.
"You alright?" he asked, and the levity was gone now.
I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. I looked at my hands on the table, at the way they weren't shaking even though I'd just told my husband of eight years that I felt nothing when I looked at him.
"Yeah," I said. "I think I am."
We sat there for a moment in the quiet, listening to the kitchen clock ticking on the wall. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the windows in their frames.
Dad tapped the side of his beer bottle, staring at the condensation ring it had left on the table.
“Hell of a way to end dinner,” he said.
“It’s fine,” I told him.
He nodded, like we'd settled something important. Then he took another sip of his beer and said, without looking at me, "Your mom would've been proud."
I blinked. "What?"
"Of that." He gestured vaguely toward the front door, toward where Matt had been standing five minutes ago. "The way you handled yourself. Your mom would've liked that."
"I pointed a shotgun at my husband, Dad."
"Soon to be ex-husband, I imagine," he said. "And yeah. She would've loved it. Your mother didn't take shit from anyone. Not me, not the town, not even the cancer when it came for her. She went down swinging."
I thought about Mom. About the way she'd organized her own funeral, picked out her own casket, told Dad exactly what hymns to skip because they were "too damn depressing."
"She was something," I said quietly.
"She was." Dad looked at me. "And so are you."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I looked around the kitchen instead. The yellow linoleum that had been here since the eighties, cracked in places but still holding. The cabinet doors with their mismatched handles because Dad had replaced them one at a time as they broke and never bothered to make them match. The refrigerator covered in magnets and old photos and a grocery list in his handwriting that probably hadn't changed in a month.
This kitchen had held every important moment of my childhood. Birthday cakes and homework at this table. Mom teaching me to crack eggs without getting shell everywhere. Dad coming in at odd hours, smelling like antiseptic and animal, washing his hands at the sink before he'd even say hello. The three of us sitting here after Mom's diagnosis, nobody knowing what to say, just holding hands across the scarred wood.
I'd left this place for the city, for the clinic, for Matt. Convinced myself I was building something bigger, something better. But this kitchen had more life in it than anything I'd tried to create in eight years.
