“Out,” Maude said, and it was the closest I’d ever heard her come to spitting. “You don’t belong in this house.”
Her hands were steady. The spoon didn’t rattle in the crock. She stood like women stand when they’ve run out of polite and found spine.
“Maude,” he said, almost chiding. “I paid for a room. Your young man checked me in.” He glanced at Gideon then, assessing the breadth of him the way a man clocks a doorframe before deciding whether he’ll fit. “I ate a muffin. I mind my business.”
Gideon didn’t step away from me. He didn’t bark or posture. He simply inserted himself with the quiet authority of someone who knows exactly what he’s capable of and has no taste for theatrics.
“This is your last step forward,” he said, the sentence as careful as a loaded weapon laid on a table. “Don’t take another.”
The pale eyes slid to him, then back to me. “You let this guy talk for you now, Haze? You let him keep you from your father?”
The word father hit me like cold water. It didn’t belong to him, but he wore it, anyway, poorly.
“I—” I stood and sat in the same second, body undecided. My palms wouldn’t stop moving. Find a pocket, a glass, a list, anything. I reached and found Gideon’s hand. He didn’t squeeze. He let my fingers press his knuckles until they whitened and let me decide what to do with the pressure.
Sam tilted his head like he wanted to look softer. “I came to apologize.”
Gideon’s body changed temperature next to me. I don’t know how else to describe it. A heat that wasn’t anger—something colder. Calculation shed its coat.
“No,” I said. “You don’t get to apologize.”
He blinked, slow. “You always were dramatic.”
Gideon’s fingers tapped the inside of my wrist once—one, two.
“Sam,” he said. “You heard the lady.”
Sam’s smile came back, smaller. “You security?” His gaze flicked to Gideon’s hands, the roughness, the scars, the way a body tells its history.
“Yes,” I said, before Gideon could. I didn’t look at Gideon to check if I’d overstepped. I didn’t need to.
Sam wet his lips. His eyes were wrong-blue and wrong-bright. “I kept up with you, you know,” he said to me, conversational. “As much as I could. Illinois, your aunt and uncle.” He fake-looked around the room, admiring. “And now, look at you. A whole inn to your name. You always liked to play house.”
A sound left me I hadn’t heard from my own throat before—half laugh, half something that could have been a scream, if I’d fed it. “Get out,” I said.
“Ah, Haze.” He tsked like I’d spilled milk. “You used to be sweeter.”
Maude moved then—not toward him, but toward the drawer where the house phone sat. She didn’t yank it open. She slid it. The subtler threat. “I can call Sheriff Larsen faster than you can finish twisting that sentence,” she said. “You want to test my timing?”
He shifted, and something mean flickered behind his eyes—a flash of the man the newspapers had described, the one the courtroom cameras had caught smirking in chains.
“That won’t be necessary,” Sam said, raising his hands. “No need to make a scene. I’m just here to see my daughter.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t call me that.”
Gideon’s arm brushed mine, solid and unyielding. His tone came low, lethal. “You want to explain what the hell you’re doing here?”
Sam smiled like he enjoyed being the center of attention. “What, she didn’t tell you? Daddy’s home.”
Gideon’s jaw ticked, the muscle working hard. His hand at my waist tightened. “From where?”
“Prison,” I said. The word scraped on the way out. “He’s out. Somehow.”
Sam’s expression didn’t falter, but I saw the flicker of pride there, warped and shameless. “They call it parole,” he said. “Model behavior, early release, all that good Christian talk. Thought I’d make a few amends.”
Maude’s mouth went thin as fishing line. “Amends?” she repeated. “You murdered that girl’s mother, Sam Jarrow. There’s no amount of Bible verses or good behavior that makes that right.”
His eyes cut toward her, cold. “That’s one version of it,” he said, voice dripping with false patience. “But people forget the details.”
