Blue-gray eyes that see too much and a mouth that says too little.
She worries about everything and tells me about none of it, and I know this because I do the exact same thing.
Ten years I've been doing this.
Ten years of alarm clocks at five-thirty, lunches packed the night before, permission slips signed on the dashboard of my truck, parent-teacher conferences where I'm the only man in the room.
Ten years of homework help and period talks I wasnotprepared for and arguments about screen time and curfews and boys—God, the boys are starting, and I am not ready for that conversation with either of them.
Ten years since I came home to a half-empty closet and no note.
I don't think about that.
I've gotten good at not thinking about it—the way you get good at anything you practice enough.
Some men go to the gym. Some men drink.
I perfected the art of compartmentalization somewhere between Wrenleigh's first day of kindergarten and Sadie Jo's first nightmare about a mother she couldn't remember.
The coin sits heavy in my front pocket.
Grandpa's coin—passed down through three generations of Adkins men, worn smooth on both sides from decades of fingers turning it over and over.
I flip it when I'm thinking.
The brothers started calling me Coin because of it, and it stuck.
Most people don't even know my real name anymore.
Colton. Colton Adkins. Father of two. Secretary of the Saint's Outlaws MC, Morgantown chapter. Divorced for ten years from a woman who chose Vegas slot machines over her own daughters.
But right now I'm just Dad. And Dad is running late.
"Sadie Jo, zip your backpack. Wrenleigh, crutches—and if you throw them again, you're hopping to school."
"You wouldn't."
"Try me."
She grabs the crutches off the wall with a huff that could power a wind turbine.
Sadie Jo zips her backpack without being told twice.
I grab my keys, do a mental sweep—lunches, water bottles, Wrenleigh's extra sock for the cast, Sadie Jo's math homework that she left on the counter—and we're out the door.
I drive them to school because I've been driving them to school for the past three weeks.
Ever since the four-wheeler, I can't seem to let them get on that bus.
I tell myself it's because the crutches make the bus steps difficult, and that's true, but it's not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I saw my daughter on a hospital gurney with her bone breaking through her skin, and something in the wiring of my brain hasn't fully reset since.
I pull into the drop-off lane at Morgantown High.
Wrenleigh unbuckles before I've fully stopped, already reaching for her crutches in the back seat.
She's out the door in seconds—no goodbye, no backward glance, because she's sixteen and being seen getting dropped off by her father is a fate worse than a compound fracture.
