I don’t cry. I should. I will. But right now the grief is too new and too large and it hasn’t found its shape yet. It’s just pressure. Enormous, formless pressure behind my eyes and in my chestand in the place where I was already building a life for a little girl with Whitney’s red curls.
Inside, Ada is waiting. She’ll need to know. Saylor is somewhere on a dark road, and he’ll need to know too. Tomorrow there will be lawyers and appeals and the grim machinery of a system that decided Eleanor Trace’s grief outweighed her daughter’s wishes.
But right now, I sit on a bench that Saylor built, on the porch of a house we fixed for a family that is unraveling as fast as I can stitch it together.
I hold on to the only thing I have left.
Whit loved me. Whatever a judge says, whatever a court decides, whatever happens next—Whitney chose me.
That has to be enough. For tonight, that has to be enough.
chapter 20
Saylor
I drive for forty minutes before I realize I have nowhere to go.
That’s the thing about being far away from the place I know as home. No childhood streets to cruise down, no mate’s house to show up at unannounced, no bar where the bartender knows my order and doesn’t ask questions. I have a borrowed truck, a half-tank of petrol, and a county full of roads I only know because they lead back to the same place.
So I drive in circles. Past the hardware store where I bought the cabinet hinges. Past the farm stand that sells the tomatoes Mum likes. Past the elementary school with the playground where I sat on a bench two weeks ago and watched kids on the swings and thought about what it would feel like to bring our daughter here. To push her on those swings. To be the kind of man whose biggest problem on a Saturday morning is making sure a four-year-old doesn’t launch herself into orbit.
Our daughter. The phrase formed so easily, as though she already existed. As though she was already ours.
I pull into a petrol station. Kill the engine. Sit there with my hands on the wheel and my forehead against my knuckles and try to untangle the mess inside my chest.
Celeste offered to pay for Mum’s surgery. That’s the fact. Everything I said after that—every sharp word, every accusation, the sugar mama comment that I want to claw back out of the air—that was pride. Not the good kind, the quiet kind that holds your spine straight when the world pushes back. The bad kind. The kind that would rather let your mother suffer than admit you can’t fix it yourself.
Mum was right. She’s usually right. The guilt isn’t about protecting her. It’s about protecting me. From the truth I’ve spent four years running from: I was driving. The other bloke had no headlights on, was speeding, and the road was dark. I did everything right according to the book but none of that matters because I was behind the wheel and Mum was in the passenger seat and now she’s basically bound to a chair. That’s the equation. That’s the math I do every morning when I help her from the bed to the bathroom and pretend it doesn’t cost me anything.
Celeste sees the cost. That’s what terrifies me. She sees all of it, raw, and she stays anyway. She doesn’t just stay, she reaches in. She tries to help. And I slapped her hand away because accepting help would mean admitting I’ve been drowning, and admitting I’ve been drowning would mean letting go of the only identity I’ve held onto since I was twenty-two years old.
I fix what I break.
I’m the boy who takes care of his mum.
What if I could be more than that?
What if it’s time to do the impossible?
I start the truck and drive straight home.
The house is dark when I pull in. Not the warm, every-window-glowing dark that greeted Celeste a few hours ago.Darkdark. The porchlight is off. The kitchen windows are black. The only light comes from a thin line under Mum’s bedroom door, which means she’s either reading or she’s fallen asleep with the lamp on, which she does more often than not.
The kitchen is clean. The Thai containers have been put away. Someone wiped the table down. The normalcy of it hurts more than the mess would have.
Mum’s door is cracked open. I push it gently. She’s asleep, the paperback tented on her chest, the lamp still on. I ease the book off her, fold the corner of the page she’ll scold me for folding, set it on the nightstand. I pull the blanket up to her chin and turn off the lamp, watching shadows reclaim the corners of her room.
She stirs. “Saylor?”
“Yeah, Mum. Go back to sleep.”
“Did you apologize?” she asks in the dark.
“Working on it.”
“Work faster, love.” Within ten seconds her breathing evens out, and I stand there in her doorway and love her so much my ribs ache.
I close her door and walk through the dark house. Celeste’s car is still in the driveway, so she’s here. But she’s not in the kitchen. Not in the living room. Not in my bedroom.
