“Yeah. I know,” he says. His face tightens. “Mav.”
“Yeah?”
“You and Storm…you did a good job with this.” He gestures at the house and trails off. “Thank you.”
I grin at him because if I do anything else we’ll both fall apart, and we’re allowed to do that after, not now. “You can pay us in favors for the next decade.”
“Fuck that,” he says, and goes downstairs.
I check the time on my phone. We have forty minutes before we need to be on a boat. I grab a duffel and toss in everything I can think of… It’s probably overkill but I want to be prepared for anything.
And it makes me feel better, I guess, to think about managing the wounds and hurts and discomforts that can be managed—clothing to keep her warm, protein gels if she can’t chew, a blanket that isn’t Zeus’s but smells like him now because Conrad pressed it to the dog’s side before he handed it to me. Storm adds a trauma kit, a space blanket, restraints we won’t need if the men we meet aren’t idiots. Atticus brings a case that speaks multiple legal languages and will confuse a man with a badge into thinking that the paper in it is his own.
It’s the thought of how we’re going to care for the other kinds of wounds that sends ice down my spine.
I can more easily kill the men who hurt her, I think, than make it better, and nothing has ever made me feel smaller than that awareness.
But maybe she’s not hurt.
Maybe.
On the way to the garage, Storm peels off toward the side deck. I follow because when Storm moves like that, it’s either a problem or a gift.
He stops in the shadow of the live oak, looks out at the suggestion of the water beyond the houses, and says—more like he’s talking to the tree because he doesn’t know how to talk to a person about this, “I called my father.”
I lean against the tree. Let the wind move my shirt. Make it easy for him not to look at me while he says it. “How’d that go?”
“He had some good advice,” he says. Then, after a beat, “He told me some things we could do, afterward.”
I nod. “That is useful.”
“He said he loves me,” Storm says after a moment, like a man reporting a strange weather event.
“What’d you say back?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. We’re the kind of men who know silence is a whole story in itself.
“My dad would tell me to move on,” I say. “Pick a new girl, go to a new bar, pretend I didn’t turn my insides into this one person’s shape.”
Storm cuts his eyes at me. “Could you do that?”
I bark a laugh that has no humor in it. “That’s not a possibility for me. Not anymore.”
He holds my look a second longer than he’d have allowed last year. “You love her.”
“Of course I love her,” I say, and there’s zero lightness in the response. It lands like a hammer.
He exhales. “I guess welcome to the same bullshit, then.”
“You there, too?”
He doesn’t look away. “I’ve fucking been there for years. It’s perfection and hell all in one place”
We stand in that for a breath. The wind moves the oak; somewhere in the marsh a bird makes a sound that doesn’t belong to our conversation. I clap his shoulder once, hard enough that his body jerks with the jolt.
“Good,” I say. “She’s going to need all of us when she gets here. Steady. Heart-whole. With her.”
“We will be,” he says.
