Coffee in hand, my t-shirt hanging off one shoulder, the bruise on her face visible in the morning light.
She doesn't hide it. Doesn't cover it.
Just walks into my kitchen with the evidence of what she survived on display, and sits down at the table like she's been doing it for years.
Wrenleigh looks at the bruise. Looks at Leah. Looks at me.
"She's tougher than you are, Dad," she says.
"I know," I say. "That's why I keep her around."
Leah kicks me under the table and I laugh.
And for five minutes, five ordinary, extraordinary, sacred minutes, we're just a family having breakfast.
A man, a woman, two girls, and a kitchen that smells like eggs, coffee, and the kind of morning that feels, impossibly, like the first day of something new.
The coin is in my pocket. The knife is cleaned and put away.
It's over.
And this… the eggs, the coffee, the girls, the woman at my table with the matching scar, this is what it was all for.
This is what I killed for.
I'd do it again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Leah
The bruise is turning green.
I stand in front of Coin's bathroom mirror and tilt my face toward the light.
The black eye has cycled through its stages.
Purple-black to deep blue to the sickly yellow-green that means my body is doing what bodies do.
Healing. On its own schedule, without permission.
The split lip has closed. Thin line where the skin knit itself back together. Barely visible unless you know where to look.
I'll always know where to look.
I run my fingers along my collarbone.
The parking garage bruise—the older one—has faded to a dull yellow.
Two bruises, two different nights, both of them gifts from men who don't exist anymore.
Three months ago, I was eating cold Thai food in my apartment in a towel and telling myself I didn't think about a quiet man with a matching scar.
Now I have a toothbrush in that man's bathroom, scrubs in his closet, and a drawer in his dresser he cleared out without being asked.
I didn't ask for any of this.
I wasn't looking for it.
