Xavier
The club didn't care that I was dying.
That was the thing about a business, it had its own metabolism, its own demands, its own relentless appetite for decisions and signatures and the thousand small acts of management that kept the machinery running regardless of whether the man at the center of it had slept more than two hours in any given night for the past week. The club needed inventory ordered and staff scheduled and the new sound system in the main room calibrated and the plumbing issue in the women's bathroom on the lower level resolved beforeFriday because Friday was the showcase event Gideon had been planning for months, and plumbing failures during a showcase event were the kind of thing that ended up on review sites with language that made customers nervous.
So I worked.
I worked the way I'd worked in theater—mechanically, efficiently, with the part of my brain that handled logistics and operations running at full capacity while the rest of me simply existed, like a building that had been structurally compromised but hadn't collapsed yet because the load-bearing walls were still holding through sheer material stubbornness. I approved Kathy's onboarding paperwork. I reviewed the security rotation for the weekend. I sat in my office with the door closed and stared at spreadsheets that might as well have been written in Aramaic for all the meaning I extracted from them, and when Dave knocked at eleven to ask about the vendor contract for the bar restock, I answered his questions with a competence that apparently satisfied him because he left without comment.
He came back twenty minutes later with a sandwich and set it on my desk without a word.
I ate it. Not because I was hungry—hunger had become an abstract concept, a thing I understood intellectually but couldn't locate in my body, the way you understood that other countries existed without being able to feel them—but because Dave had made it. The bread was sourdough. The turkey was thick-cut. There was an aggressive amount of mustard, because my bar supervisor’s approach to condiments, like his approach to most things, operated on the principle that more was better.
I ate every bite and tasted nothing.
The afternoons were worse than the mornings. Mornings had momentum—the residual inertia of getting up, getting dressed, getting in the truck, driving to the club, opening the building, starting the day. The mechanical sequence of tasks created ascaffolding that held me upright even when the structure inside the scaffolding was hollow. But by two, three o'clock, the tasks thinned out and the scaffolding developed gaps, and through those gaps the silence rushed in—not the absence quiet of her apartment, which I'd never heard, but the absence quiet of my own house, which I heard every night and every morning and in every space between the sounds of a life that had been built for two and was now occupied by one.
The bedroom was the worst. I'd changed the sheets the first night because I couldn't sleep in them—couldn't lie down on fabric that held the ghost of her warmth and the fading scent of lavender and the molecular memory of what we'd done—and then I'd changed them back because the clean ones were worse, sterile and blank, sheets that had everything about her washed out, and at least the originals carried proof that she'd been real. That the afternoon in the golden light had happened. That I hadn't invented the sound she made when I—
I stopped that thought with the same blunt force I'd used to stop incoming rounds: fast, deliberate, with no consideration for collateral damage. The thought died. The feeling didn't. The feeling lived in my body like shrapnel too deep to extract, shifting every time I moved, sending bright, jagged flares of pain through places I hadn't known could hurt.
I didn't drive to her apartment again. Not because I didn't want to, wanting was a constant, a background hum that never dropped below a certain frequency, like tinnitus except instead of ringing it was the sound of her voice sayingI can't be with you until I learn I can live with myself, but because she'd asked me not to, and honoring what she asked was the only thing I had left to give her. That and coffee. She'd brought me coffee on that first morning, standing on the sidewalk in her own clothes with her own braid and her own steadiness, and the act had rewritten something in my understanding of what love looked like. Lovelooked like a paper cup held through a truck window. Love looked like knowing someone's order. Love looked like walking toward someone instead of being carried.
I couldn't bring her coffee. She hadn't asked for that, and showing up at her apartment with a latte would have been a smaller, more caffeinated version of circling her building in the dark, and I was trying—God, I was trying—to learn the difference between caring for someone and controlling the terms of their recovery. But the trying felt like holding a position without reinforcements: sustainable in theory, brutal in practice, and eroding a little more with every hour that passed without the sound of her breathing in the next room.
Day four, Walker found me in the parking lot at eight a.m., sitting in my truck with the engine off, staring at the building that would be getting a liquor delivery I really didn’t need to be here for.
He didn't say anything at first. Just appeared at my window the way Walker appeared everywhere—silently, without preamble, his haunted eyes taking inventory of things most people wouldn't notice. The rumpled shirt I'd worn yesterday. The coffee cup from Morrow's that I'd driven twenty minutes out of my way to buy because it was her coffee shop and ordering from it felt like touching something she'd touched. The phone in my hand, open to a text thread where my last message—Sleep well—sat unanswered from the night before, and the read receipt beneath it told me she'd seen it at 2:47 a.m., which meant she'd been awake at 2:47 a.m., which meant she wasn't sleeping either, which meant we were both lying in separate beds in separate buildings staring at separate ceilings and being terrible at the same thing simultaneously.
Walker looked at the phone. Looked at me. Looked at the coffee cup with the Morrow's logo.
"You're buying your coffee from her shop," he said. Not a question.
"It's good coffee."
"It's twenty minutes from your house and eleven minutes from the club in the wrong direction."
"The beans are ethically sourced."
Walker leaned against the truck. His tattoos caught the early light—the sleeve that told the story of his service, the memorial pieces that mapped his losses. He crossed his arms and studied me with the quiet, devastating patience of a man who'd watched his grandmother die slowly and had learned that sometimes the kindest thing you could do for someone in pain was to stand next to them without trying to fix it.
I stared at the steering wheel. The cracked leather. The place where Molly's coffee cup had sat five mornings ago, leaving a ring of condensation that I hadn't wiped away because wiping it away felt like erasing evidence. I got out, ready to sort the delivery, to check the stock, to do anything other than what I really wanted to do which was to drive to Molly’s, when both Walker’s and my phone lit up with an alert that meant one thing. We had the location of the missing Little.Finally.
Molly
I went to work the morning I took the coffee to Xavier because according to Katya he’d slept in his truck. Maria's was a mercy. The children were loud and needy and relentless in their demands for attention, and their demands left no room for the demands of my own grief.
The nights were their own sort of suffering and lasted twice as long. Sleep didn't come. Not really. I got fragments. Maybe forty-minute stretches that felt like falling into dark water and being yanked back to the surface by some internal alarm that couldn't be silenced. I'd wake gasping, reaching for a heartbeat that wasn't there, my hand closing on empty air and cool sheets thatsmelled like nothing. And in those moments, when the conscious mind hadn't fully rebooted and the body was running on pure, unfiltered instinct, I missed him so acutely that it felt new every time.
He texted me.
Mainly I didn’t reply because I didn’t trust myself. So the casual “like” replacedI miss you so much it feels like I left my heart behind with you, except that didn’t make sense because I knew by the pain that it was still lodged firmly behind my ribs.
The only good thing in four days had been the call from Gideon. Ten to twelve years for Ruby and Clark. Federal. Asset seizure. No trial. No mention of me. My name would never pass their lips in a courtroom, never be printed in ink for strangers to dissect. I sank down onto the edge of the bed and let the air leave my lungs in a slow, shaking breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding for months. They were going away—not because of me, not at my expense—but because the world had finally caught up with them. I wouldn’t have to see their faces again. I wouldn’t have to testify. I wouldn’t have to relive it.
Which was insane because I hadn’t given the thought of consequences one single thought in weeks. Xavier had just told me not to worry about it. No, not Xavier—Daddy.Daddyhad told me not to worry about it, and I’d trusted him instantly.
So why didn’t I trust him with me?
