“Why are you doing this?” I ask. It isn’t only about money. It’s why a man with salt at his temples would be awake at my door before dawn with a plastic truck and a sober face.
He shrugs, small. “Needed extra tonight. Figured I could help. Got kids in my life too.”
“Do you have a record?” I ask because honesty is a shield.
“No.” Clean and concise. I take it.
I read the contract aloud. He answers, never evasive. When he promises school drop-off and work pickups, I call another reference. A man who sounds born before sunrise says Caleb’s dependable, quiet, not much for talk but steady.
I sign the contract. I print my name, then initial. I write “non-transferable guardianship for weekdays” in my own hand because I need tactile proof that I made this choice on my terms.
“You know how to change a band-aid?” I ask later, because anxiety makes me reach for the mundane, for the kitchen sink.
“I can stitch a wound if I had to,” he says and grins, only half. He sees the look on my face and adds, “I won’t stitch. I’ll call.”
Leo has declared Caleb “funny” and is showing him a trick where he makes faces with his stuffed dinosaur. Caleb laughs—full and human—and I almost don’t recognize the sound in my kitchen.
When I hand over the signed paper, our fingers touch. His hand is warm, callused, with a pale crescent of scar along the knuckle of his index finger. It’s a healed thing that looks healed wrong, like something that didn’t want to mend. Scars tell stories; mine are all narratives I don’t want read.
“You okay?” Caleb asks.
“Fine,” I say. I don’t ask about the scar and he doesn’t offer. Dawn bruises the skyline. He kneels to strap a sleepy Leo intoa car seat the way someone who’s done it a thousand times would. The care in his movements is precise—gentle strength. I catch myself studying him like I study the backs of legal forms, searching for leverage, for weakness.
“Text me when you get to work,” I tell him. A requirement. A rope.
He nods and presses his palm to the paper like a seal, then crosses the yard to his truck. At the tailgate he pauses and looks back. For a heartbeat his face shifts—out of the mundane frame, something kin to the woods. He tilts his head like he hears something I don’t.
A long, low sound threads through the air—wolfish but not quite a howl, a note that sits between animal and human. It chisels at the hollow in my ribs. I stand frozen on the porch because the sound wakes something I thought I’d buried.
Caleb doesn’t flinch. He exhales and the scent of him swells again—leather, hay, undergrowth. Leo leans out and laughs, oblivious to the warning in the morning.
“You’ll be all right, Miss Torres,” he says. His voice is steady, like an anchor. “I’ll watch him.”
I want to tell him he’s not allowed to be the kind of man who says things that settle me. I want to tell him I don’t do favors, I make plans. Instead I tuck the contract into my bag, feel the crease I made with my thumb, and nod.
“You have my number,” I say. “My lawyer’s on speed dial if anything changes.” It’s performative bravado. It keeps the panic at bay.
He gives me a small almost-smile and the truck engine growls. As he puts the vehicle in reverse the sound comes again—clearer now, a full-throated, mournful call that slices the morning air like both promise and warning.
The hair rises on my arms. I watch his profile, the scar catching the light. It’s not the sort of mark you get from work. It looks older. Intentional.
He drives away. Taillights blink, then disappear. The kitchen feels too small. I smooth the paper contract like a talisman and tuck it into my purse. His scent lingers—ghostlike.
Then my hand brushes something in my pocket: a slip of fabric I did not put there. Dark and rough, folded small. A smear of ink marks one corner. A symbol—sharp, unfamiliar. Not letters.
The sound from the trees comes again, nearer this time. A wolf-like howl slices the morning and the scrap of cloth trembles in my fingers like a warning.
The world I knew tilts. I look at Leo sleeping in the next room and realize I just signed the first page of a different life. I realize I don’t know who Caleb Stone really is.
Ink blurs under my thumb. The porch light flickers. I should call the police. I should throw the contract away. I should keep everything exactly as it was.
Instead I clutch the paperwork and the scrap of fabric like lifelines.
Somebody else knows our rhythms. Somebody left me a token.
And at the edge of hearing a low, almost-human growl answers the howl—too close to the house to be only wild at all.
2
