Those blue-gray eyes—the ones that were soft and open and full of want this morning—are locked down tight.
But underneath the lock, I can see him reaching for me.
Not physically.
Just... reaching. The way a drowning man reaches for something solid.
"Yeah," he says. "Okay."
I sit down at the kitchen table. Across from the woman who left. Next to the space where Coin usually sits. In the chair where Sadie Jo does her homework.
This is going to be alongnight.
But I'm not going anywhere. I told him that on the porch, and I told myself in the dark wearing his flannel, and I meant it both times.
I'm not running.
Not from this.
Not from him.
Not from the blonde woman across the table who's staring at me like I stole her life, when the truth is she threw it away and I just happened to pick up the pieces.
CHAPTER NINE
My daughters are upstairs, their mother is sitting at my kitchen table, and I'm standing between them like a wall made of flesh and bone and a decade of fury I've never let myself feel.
Leah is here.
That helps more than it should—her presence in the room, steady and solid, sitting in Sadie Jo's chair like she belongs there.
Because she does.
She belongs there more than the woman across from her, and everybody in this kitchen knows it, including the woman across from her.
Angelica hasn't stopped crying since Leah sat down.
Quiet tears, the kind she always used—not hysterical, not loud.
She used to call. Not often. Once, maybe twice a year, always when she needed money.
And she'd cry on the phone, and I used to fall for it.
Used to send whatever I could scrape together because some part of me still believed the tears meant she was trying.
I stopped falling for it around the time Sadie Jo asked me why she didn't have a mommy at the Mother's Day breakfast at school.
She was five.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot afterward and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white so I wouldn't put my fist through the windshield.
That was the last time I sent Angelica a fucking dime.
"I need to see them," Angelica says again.
It's the third time now.
Her hands are wrapped around the glass of water I gave her because I was raised to offer guests something to drink, even guests who've destroyed your life from a thousand miles away. "Colton,please. I'm their mother."
