Neither one of them will win because they're both too stubborn to lose.
She comes inside with the printouts and a look on her face that tells me she got nothing out of her brother, and she's not happy about it.
"Physical therapy exercises," she says, handing me a folder.
Her eyes sweep my kitchen—taking in the dishes in the sink, the homework spread across the table, the photos on the fridge, the lunch boxes already packed for tomorrow because I always pack them the night before.
"Thanks," I say. "Wrenleigh's in the living room."
Leah goes to Wrenleigh.
Within five minutes they're on the living room floor, Leah showing her stretches for the leg, Wrenleigh complaining about every single one while doing them perfectly.
Leah is patient in a way that isn't soft—firm, clear, no-nonsense, but warm underneath it.
The kind of patience that comes from dealing with people in pain every day and knowing that sometimes the best thing you can do is make them work through it.
And then Sadie Jo drifts in.
She doesn't announce herself.
She just appears the way she always does—quiet, small, settling onto the couch with her homework in her lap and her blue-gray eyes on Leah.
Watching. Measuring. The way she measures everyone who comes into our house, checking them against some invisible standard that only she knows.
"Do you want help with that?" Leah asks, noticing Sadie Jo's math textbook.
Sadie Jo looks at me. I nod.
"It's fractions," Sadie Jo says. "I hate fractions."
"Everyone hates fractions. They're terrible." Leah sits down next to her on the couch, and I watch my dark-haired daughter—the cautious one, the one who doesn't let anyone in, the one who looks to me for permission before she trusts—lean toward this woman like a plant turning toward light.
I stand in the doorway of my own kitchen, watch Leah help my daughter with fractions, and feel something crack inside my chest.
Not breaking. Opening.
It's been ten years since a woman sat in my living room and helped my kids.
Ten years since someone other than me or Ellie or one of the brothers was here, in this space, making it feel like something more than a single dad's survival bunker.
A decade of holding it together alone, and now there's a woman with a scar that matches mine sitting on my couch explaining denominators to my thirteen-year-old, and my sixteen-year-old is laughing at something she said, and the house sounds different.
Fuller. Warmer.
Like something that was missing just walked through the door and filled a space I'd stopped noticing was empty.
I don't get to want this.
Not now.
Not with photographs of my girls in the hands of men who'd use them as leverage.
Not with a drug pipeline flooding my town and a debt I didn't earn and a war on two fronts that hasn't even started yet.
I don't get to want this.
But I'm standing in my kitchen watching Leah brush a strand of dark hair behind my daughter's ear while she explains how to find common denominators, and Sadie Jo is smiling.
