My mother reaches across the table and takes my hand. Her fingers are cold. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to.
We finish the coffee and go back upstairs.
Amy meets us in the hallway outside my father's room. She's smiling the professional smile that means good news delivered efficiently.
"He's doing well. Still resting. The doctor came by while you were gone and said if everything continues like this, he could go home within a few days."
Relief. Real, physical, a loosening in my chest that I didn't know was clenched.
"Oh," the nurse adds, already turning away, already moving to the next task. "A man stopped by while you were downstairs. Left flowers."
I look past her into the room.
On the table beside my father's bed, next to the water pitcher and the plastic cup with the bendable straw, there is a vase. White lilies. Elegant. Expensive. The kind of arrangement a person sends when they want the gesture to be noticed.
I cross the room. My hand finds the small card tucked among the stems.
Get well soon. Daniel.
35
OWEN
This was Reid’s idea. He said it would help.
Get outside. Move. Burn off the static that's been building in the cabin for seven days, the particular tension of three men occupying a house that lately only had meaning with four.
So here I am. Feet set.
Jace hits the pads I'm holding and the impact travels through the foam into my wrists, up my forearms and I absorb it. I welcome the discomfort it causes.
He's not training. He's punishing.
Every strike comes harder than the last. His form, which is usually clean, the natural economy of someone who grew up fighting and learned later to channel it, has deteriorated over the past ten minutes into something rawer. He's throwing with his shoulders instead of rotating through his hips.
I read the pattern in his strikes the way I read patterns in everything. The jab-jab-cross is frustration. The hooks to the body are helplessness. The uppercuts, which are coming with increasing velocity, are grief compressed into acceleration, force,and the specific intention of making the person holding the pads feel what the person throwing the punches is feeling.
I feel it. My wrists ache. My forearms are burning. And underneath the physical, I can read the secondary layer: Jace blames me.
He hasn't said it. He doesn't need to. It's in the angle of his shots, in the way his eyes meet mine between combinations, in the particular quality of aggression that is personal rather than athletic.
He blames me because I mentioned the morality clause. Because I laid the financial exposure on the table at the worst possible moment, when Maya was already fracturing, when the revelation of our wealth had already shaken her trust, when the last thing she needed was one more reason to believe that staying with us would destroy what we'd built.
He's not wrong. In theory.
In practice, everyone at that table needed the full picture. That's how I operate. That's what I bring to this family. The complete analysis, the variables identified, the risks quantified. I don't withhold information because the timing is inconvenient. I didn't build a company's financial architecture by telling people only what they wanted to hear.
But Maya isn't a financial architecture.
Jace throws a right cross that I see coming from a mile away, then changes level. The uppercut I don't see coming. Not fully. I get the pads down late and the impact glances off the foam and catches the bottom of my chin and my head snaps back and for a second the world spins.
I reset. Roll my jaw. It's not broken. But It's going to bruise.
Jace doesn't apologize. His eyes are flat. Waiting.
"Is there something on your mind you'd like to share," I say, "or are you going to keep expressing yourself with your fists?"
He bounces on his toes. Doesn't answer.
