I stare at him. "You want to hear about my grandmother."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
Something moves across his face. Not quite a smile, but close. "Because I want to know your story."
No one has ever said that to me. Not like that. Not with that quiet certainty, like my story is something worth knowing rather than something to be fixed or pitied or used against me.
Even my grandmother, who loved me fiercely, was more practical than sentimental. She showed love through action, through having dinner ready and clothes clean and showing up when no one else did. She never sat across from me and said *I want to know your story.*
"That's..." I clear my throat. "That's a strange thing to say."
"Probably."
"Most people don't actually want to know other people's stories. They just want to share their own."
"I'm not most people."
That's the understatement of the century. I look at my hands, folded in my lap, and try to figure out where to start. How do you summarize the kind of childhood that sounds like a country song when you say it out loud? Mother who loved drugs more than she loved me. Father I never met. A little girl bouncing between relatives until her grandmother took her in at age seven and finally gave her something that felt like solid ground.
"Her name was Delia," I start quietly. "Delia Lane. She was my mother's mother, which is a lot to forgive someone for, raising the woman who did what my mother did. But she never made excuses for her. Never pretended my mom wasn't who she was." I pause. "My grandmother used to say that some people are born with holes in them that can't be filled with love, only with whatever substance comes closest. She said it with sadness, not anger. I never understood that until I was older."
Havoc is utterly still across from me. Not the stillness of someone waiting for me to finish so they can talk. The stillness of someone actually listening.
It disarms me completely.
"She took me in when I was seven," I continue. "My mom had been arrested again and there was no one else. Grandma Delia lived in a small house in Dayton, Ohio. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that always smelled like cornbread and lavender." I smile at the memory, involuntary and aching. "She worked two jobs her whole life. Cleaning office buildings at night and working a register at a pharmacy during the day. Never complained once."
"She sounds tough," Havoc says.
"She was the toughest person I've ever known." I glance at Marcus, sleeping through all of this. "She's the reason I know how to be tough. She showed me that you could survive hard things and still be kind. That strength wasn't about not hurting. It was about hurting and showing up anyway."
"She raised you alone?"
"Pretty much. My grandfather was long gone by then. So, it was just the two of us." I pause. "She's the one who made me feel like I was worth something. Like being loved wasn't conditional on being perfect or quiet or small." My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate it. I hate that my body still betrays me when I talk about her. "She died when I was twenty. Heart attack. No warning. Here one day, gone the next."
"I'm sorry," Havoc says, and the simplicity of it, no platitudes, no silver lining, just those two words delivered with complete sincerity, slams me harder than anything elaborate could.
"Thank you." I exhale. "After she died I was just... completely alone. I thought I was in love with Marcus's father by then. Thought he was my next solid ground." I laugh, short and humorless. "I was wrong about that."
Havoc's jaw tightens, barely perceptible, but I catch it.
"He was charming at first," I say, because I want to tell the truth tonight and the truth starts there. "They always are, right? Charming and attentive and making you feel like you're the only person in the world worth looking at." I pause. "Then my grandmother died, and I was grieving and vulnerable, and I guess he decided that was the right time to show me who he really was."
"What did he do to you?"
"What didn't he do." It's not a question. "Mostly he made me feel worthless. Made sure I knew exactly what he thought of my body, my intelligence, my choices. The physical stuff came later, after Marcus was born." I look at my son, that fierce protective love rising in my chest. "The day he shoved Marcus… He was barely two years old, just in the way, and he shoved him into a doorframe, that was the last day. We were gone by midnight."
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear Marcus breathing.
"Good," Havoc says finally, low and rough. "You got out."
"We got out." I meet his eyes. "That's all that matters."
"It matters what you did to get there too." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, those gray eyes steady on mine. "Leaving took courage."
I laugh softly. "Leaving took terror. I was absolutely petrified. Still am, most days."
