"You're the woman who gave birth to them," I say. "That's not the same thing."
It hits her hard.
I watch it land—the way her face crumbles, the way her shoulders curve inward, the way she looks down at the table like she's been slapped.
Good. She should feel it. She should feel one fraction of what Wrenleigh felt at five years old, standing at the window every night for a month waiting for headlights that never came.
Leah is watching me.
I can feel her eyes on the side of my face, and I know what she's seeing—the cold version of me.
The one that doesn't raise his voice because he doesn't need to.
The one that scares people who know me well enough to understand that my silence is where the danger lives.
"Here's what's going to happen," I say. "You can stay in Morgantown. You're not safe on your own—the people you owe money to are already here, and if they find you before we dealwith this, that's a problem for everyone. So, you can stay but I’ll be damned if you're staying in this house."
"Where am I supposed to?—"
"I don't care. A motel. A hotel. The clubhouse can put you somewhere if Ruger agrees to it. But not here. Not where my girls sleep."
"Ourgirls."
"Don't." The word comes out quiet enough that Leah shifts in her chair. "Don't call them that. You don't get to call them that. Not after what you did."
Angelica's chin lifts.
The tears are still there but something harder moves behind them—defiance, or desperation wearing the same mask. "I made a mistake, Colton. I know that. I know what I did was?—"
"A mistake is forgetting to pay a bill. A mistake is bouncing a check. You gambled away two hundred thousand dollars and when the men you owed it to came looking, you handed them our daughters' names. You gave them to strangers like collateral on a car loan." My voice hasn't changed. Not a single degree. But my hands are shaking under my crossed arms, and I press them tighter against my ribs to keep it hidden. "They sent men to my house. They took photographs of our girls at school. They broke into this house and sat at this table—thistable, Angelica, where your daughters eat breakfast—and left a glass of water to prove they could. That's not a mistake. That's a choice. And you made it."
The kitchen is silent. Angelica stares at me. Leah stares at me.
Somewhere upstairs, I hear the low murmur of Garrett's voice—talking to the girls, keeping them calm, keeping them away from this until I say otherwise.
Angelica breaks first. She always does.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know they'd actually come here. I thought—I thought if I gave them your name, they'd leave me alone long enough for me to figure something out. I was scared. I was desperate. I wasn't thinking about?—"
"About them. You weren't thinking about them. You were thinking about yourself. The way youalwaysthink about yourself."
She flinches again.
The tears fall harder. And I feel something..
I wish I felt nothing.
Nothing would be easier.
But somewhere underneath the ice and the fury, there's a twenty-year-old kid who loved this woman.
Who married her at nineteen because she smiled at him like he was the only person in the room.
Who held her hand in the delivery room when Wrenleigh came screaming into the world, and again a little over two years later when Sadie Jo arrived quiet and small and perfect.
That kid is still in there.
He's just buried under a decade of raising two girls alone and learning to stop missing someone who chose slot machines over her own children.
