Flat in a way that isn't calm—it's controlled.
The kind of controlled that happens when something detonates and you're holding the pieces together by force.
"Can you come over? I need—the girls need—" He stops. Breathes. "Angelica showed up."
I make it to his house in record time.
My brother's bike is in the driveway.
Maddox's truck is across the street.
The porch light is on and the front door is open, and I can hear voices inside—not shouting, not fighting.
Something worse.
The tight, controlled voices of people who are barely keeping it civil.
I walk in.
The kitchen.
Coin is standing against the counter with his arms crossed and his face completely shut down.
Every ounce of warmth I saw this morning, every crack in the wall, every soft thing he let me see last night—gone.
Locked away.
What's left is the man I first saw in the ER the night Wrenleigh broke her leg—ice and control and a terror so deep it's looped all the way back around to still.
Across from him, sitting at the kitchen table, is a woman.
Blonde.
Thin—the kind of thin that comes from not eating enough, or eating the wrong things for too long. She was beautiful once. I can see it in the bone structure, the shape of her mouth, the way she holds herself like she remembers being looked at.
But the Vegas lifestyle has caught up with her—hard.
Her clothes are expensive but starting to fray at the edges.
Her roots are growing in dark.
Her hands shake when she reaches for the glass of water in front of her.
She looks like Wrenleigh.
The resemblance is so sharp it takes my breath away.
Same blonde hair, same bone structure, same jawline.
Wrenleigh in twenty years, if twenty years were unkind.
And I understand now with a clarity that hurts why Coin flinches when he looks at his eldest daughter.
He's not seeing Wrenleigh. He's seeing this woman. Every single day.
Angelica.
She looks up when I walk in.
