“As good as it can be,” I say, eyes flicking to the treeline rushing past. “How’s Nana spoiling you?”
“She gave me chocolate after dinner,” she whispers conspiratorially, “but don’t tell Aunt Charlotte. She’s trying to make me eat… broccoli.”
I huff a laugh. “Poor thing.”
There’s a rustling, like she’s shifting on the sofa. Then—softly—“How’s Lucky?”
My grip on the wheel tightens, but in a good way. “She’s okay. Resting.”
A beat. “She misses you.”
A delighted gasp. “Really?”
“Really.”
Silence. A thoughtful kind. Then Lily says, in that small, earnest voice of hers, “I miss her too. Nana’s fun, but… Lucky’s like… I don’t know. She’s nice. And she listens. And she talks to me like I’m her friend.”
My heart squeezes, slow and hard.
“She thinks the world of you,” I tell her.
Another pause. A long one this time.
So I nudge it. “What do you think about her moving in? With us.”
She doesn’t answer immediately.
Then—“Is she your girlfriend yet?”
I blink. “Yet?”
“Yeah,” she giggles. “Nana and Aunt Charlotte have a bet about it. They wanted to see how long it takes for you two to get your stuff together.” She lowers her voice. “They didn’t say stuff.”
Of course, they didn’t.
“I’m going to have a word with both of them,” I mutter.
She giggles again—carefree, innocent, something I will burn the world down to protect.
“I can’t wait to come home,” she says. “And live with Lucky.”
The smile pulls at my mouth before I can stop it. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “I think that’s going to work just fine.”
We say our goodbyes. The call ends.
The quiet that follows is different now—less heavy. Less haunted.
But the memories still come.
A few days ago, everything could’ve ended differently. Spectacularly worse. The kind of ending that rewrites a man in the ugliest ways.
But you don’t come intomyterritory. You don’t follow someone I care about. You don’t put your hands on her. You don’t make her bleed.
And you sure as hell don’t walk away from it.
I didn’t tell Lucky what happened after she smashed that rock into Sheifer’s skull—not the part shemust never know.
She thinks Sam and I “made him disappear,” and that’s the version she’ll keep. The clean version.
