Chapter One
~ Quiad ~
I woke before the sun. The shadows on my ceiling held their breath, the air in my room thick with it, too—the kind of silence that told you the world was about to change and had the decency to wait until you’d gotten your bearings.
I lay still and counted my heartbeats, one hand curled in the space where Levi’s wild tangle of hair sometimes sprawled when he napped in my bed. Nineteen today. Two years since I’d started counting days, and now they’d run out.
I let my mind drift on the edge of sleep until it got dangerous. The part where I could see him as clear as if he’d been carved into the insides of my eyelids: Levi, barefoot in the kitchen, clutching a chipped mug to his chest, that blue-eyed gaze already searching for me before he’d even had coffee. I let that vision stay a second longer than I should. A weakness, maybe. Or the only reason I’d stayed human this long.
By four, the farm was already calling. I peeled off the sheets and stood, taking my time, every movement deliberate—never in a hurry, not even for this.
The floorboards creaked under my weight, the cold grain biting into my calloused soles. I dressed the same way I fought—first the armor, then the weapons. Threadbare jeans. Black t-shirt, soft from too many washings. Sweatshirt that still bore the faint stain of varnish along one sleeve. I went for the boots last, lacing them tight enough to remind myself I was made of bone, not want.
Coffee first. Always.
The kitchen was empty, but still lived-in: Harlow’s empty mug by the sink, Bodean’s muddy boots left just inside the mudroom door. I traced my thumb along the rim of my own cup before filling it, black and bitter, as close to ritual as I allowed. I drank standing by the window, watching the early fog snake through the orchard.
The memory of Levi at seventeen hovered beside me, ghost-pale and jittery, skinny arms wrapped around his own ribs, like he was holding together the pieces nobody else had bothered to tape up.
He’d shown up midwinter, shivering in a jacket that wasn’t his and too polite to complain about the cold. I remembered the way he’d watched me: first out of the side of his eye, then bolder, as if waiting to see if I’d live up to the story they’d told him.
The social worker had said, “He needs somewhere quiet, somewhere with structure.” I’d said, “We have that,” and Ma and Pa signed the paper.
I took another swallow, holding it in my mouth, letting the heat burn away the sharpness of that first day. Most kids showed up with defenses welded to their skin, but Levi didn’t have the energy to pretend.
He’d flinched at sudden movement, sure. He’d hesitated to take food off a plate, like I might snatch it back. But after the first night, when he realized the walls here didn’t hold hidden fists, he’d gone soft and curious instead. Everything in him telegraphed want: for safety, for approval, for someone to bother learning what he liked besides not being yelled at.
That was the problem. I’d never been good at liking things in half-measures.
I finished my coffee in silence, watching the sun begin to bleed orange behind the trees. I tapped my fingers on the window frame, feeling for the hairline crack I’d patched with wood glue after Harlow knocked into it last year. My hands always found the flaws in things before the beauty.
Except for Levi.
I opened the top drawer of my old dresser—a leftover from my mother’s attempt to make my space “feel more homey.” The drawer stuck, as it always did, and I worked it loose with the practiced patience of a man who fixed things for a living.
At the back, under a stack of utility bills, lay the object that had kept my hands busy every night for the last month: the leather bracelet, burnished and tight, my name pressed into the inside with a metal stamp. “Quiad.”
The other bracelet never left my wrist. “Sunshine,” it said, in letters almost too small to read, but Levi’s eyesight was sharp when it came to things that mattered.
I rolled the new bracelet in my palm. The weight of it was slight, but not insignificant. I tried to picture Levi’s reaction, and failed—every prediction fell short of what he actually delivered, and I’d learned not to bet against him. I set it back in the drawer. Not yet.
* * * *
I passed the time with a workout: pushups, pullups on the joist above the laundry room door, a set of squats while the sun finished rising. I liked the pain. It kept my mind clear, kept me from getting tangled in old patterns.
I thought of Levi again. Not the shivering kid this time, but the one from last week: taller now, arms still skinny but fillingout, that wide-mouthed grin aimed at me as he’d tried to outlift Bodean in the barn.
He’d failed, but not by much.
The real test had been the woodshop. I’d agreed to show him the basics: how to use the table saw without losing fingers, how to sand a curve until it was glassy smooth. I’d expected him to get bored, or distracted, like most of the others.
Instead, he’d watched every move, memorized the sequence, asked questions that told me he’d already figured out the answer, but wanted to hear it from me anyway.
The first project was a box. He’d made it for himself, a secret place for things he’d brought from the old life: a ratty sketchbook, a cracked guitar pick, a strip of denim torn from the inside hem of his jeans.
When I’d asked him what the box was for, he’d shrugged. “Memory insurance,” he’d said, deadpan, but his face flushed when he looked away.
I remembered opening that box one night when he’d left it in the shop. Not to snoop, just to check his dovetail joints. I’d thumbed through the sketchbook, expecting cartoon doodles or copied tattoo art.
