And that’s the moment it hits me, hard and absolute:
These two are mine.
My responsibility.
My family.
And I will burn down the fucking world before I lose them again.
31
EMMA
Talia’s roomis quiet except for the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor and the soft, steady whoosh of the ventilator breathing for my sister.
They’re harsh noises, clinical and cold, but right now, they are the most beautiful sounds in the world, because they mean she’s alive.
Badly, badly hurt, but alive.
I have never been as terrified as I was when I realized that the two most important people in my life had been taken. Even running across that lawn under gunfire wasn’t as terrifying; by then, it was adrenaline and instinct. But those minutes alone in the apartment with the silence, the waiting, the not knowing, that was pure, suffocating panic.
Fear in its truest form.
Liam has been in and out since we got here. He sat with us through Talia’s hours-long surgery. He brought food. Drinks.Found a blanket. Handed Laddie his phone to keep him distracted.
He’s been everything I knew he could be—steady, patient, kind.
I introduced him as a friend.
Calling him Laddie’s father seemed a bit too much in the aftermath of a significant trauma.
Honestly, I’m not sure when the right time will be. The truth is, I can’t picture us as a happy little family after all of this.
Maybe that sounds dramatic.
Maybe trauma is clouding my judgment. But I can’t ignore the reality: this happened because of Liam.
Not his hands. Not his intentions. But his world. His silence. His father’s debts and the danger that shadowed him.
He didn’t warn me. Didn’t give me a chance to protect the people I love.
And that wound runs deeper than anything I’m ready to untangle—not while my sister is fighting for her life, and not while my son sleeps across my lap, blissfully unaware of how close we came to losing everything.
The longer I sit in this room alone with my thoughts, the angrier I become.
So when Liam finally wanders back in from hockey practice, I feel an immediate, instinctive urge for him to turn around and leave.
“How’s she doing?” he asks. He lingers in the doorway, uncertain, like he’s not sure he’s welcome.
“She’s… stable,” I say, easing myself out from beneath my sleeping son.
Oursleeping son.
Liam watches Laddie for a long time, with that aching need to hold his son written all over his face. It’s been this way for the past forty-eight hours.
He wants Laddie to know. But he’s also respectful about where I’m at with things. He knows me well, as he always did; he knows better than to push a boundary, even an unspoken one.
I step toward the door, arms wrapping around myself, like I can brace my heart for what I’m about to say.
