She says, "You're going. Tomorrow."
I try to step back. She doesn't let me.
She's got my face in her hands, and she's stronger than she looks.
She's always been stronger than she looks, and she holds me there and makes me hear it.
"There's a place. Your father and I found it. It's good, it's the best one, and they know what they're doing, and you're going tomorrow, and you're staying as long as it takes."
"Mom—"
"I sat in that courtroom for days, Njal." Her voice doesn't rise. That's the thing about my mother. It goes quiet and flat and immovable, and quiet-and-flat is how you know there's no ground left to argue on. "Days, listening to them talk about my son like he's a thing that happened. And I watched you the whole time, Njal. I watched you not be in there with us. You haven't been in there with us since the spring." Her eyes are wet, but they don't spill. "They let you go today, and I will thank God for that every day I've got left. But the law letting you go is not the same as you being well, and I’m not getting you back from one thing just to lose you to the other."
Behind her, my father appears.
He's not a man who fills a room with words.
He fills it some other way—with the size of him, the stillness, the sense that the floor belongs to him wherever he stands on it.
He steps up beside my mother and puts one hand on her shoulder, and he looks at me.
For a long moment he doesn't say anything at all. "Your mother's right." His voice is gravel and gone rough at the bottom. "And I'll tell you the rest of it, the part she's too kind to say. I watched three of Bembe's men get talked about inthat room like a weather report. I felt nothing for them, you understand me? Nothing. They had it coming, and you're mine, and I'd burn that whole courthouse down before I'd let them put you in a cell for it." His jaw works. "But I sat there and watched my son not know what day it was. I watched you flinch at sounds that weren't there. And that, boy—that I can't burn down. That I can't fix with money, with Dag, or with my own two hands. There's only the one road, and you're taking it."
He doesn't cry. He won't. But the shine's there in his eyes, the one he'll deny to his grave, and he gives me one nod—slow, heavy, final—and it lands on me harder than anything the judge said all day.
I'm a grown man, a prospect for the club, a man who walked into a warehouse and walked back out.
And my mother's telling me I'm going, and my father's backing her with a look, and the worst part, the part I can't get around, is that some small flat exhausted thing way down underneath the hum is so tired it could weep with relief.
Because nothing makes sense.
Because I can't trust the floor or my hands or the size of any word anybody says to me.
Because there's a name in a hole I can't stop almost-reaching for, and a certainty that drove me to do a thing the law forgave and I can't… and I amsotired of being trapped in a body that runs too hot and a head that won't stop climbing.
"Okay," I tell her.
It comes out cracked.
She hears the crack, pulls me down, and holds my head against her shoulder right there in the courthouse hall.
I let her, because for one second the hum drops low enough that I can.
Runes finds me outside.
He's leaning against the building in the cold with a cigarette he's not smoking, just holding, the way he does.
When I come down the steps, he pushes off the wall and meets me on the sidewalk and looks at me for a long time before he says anything.
"You hear your mother?" he asks.
"I heard her."
"Good. Then you'll hear me." He doesn't put his hand on me. Runes isn't a toucher. He just stands square in front of me so I've got nowhere to look but at him. "I'm glad you walked. I want you to know that first. The whole table's glad you walked. You're ours, and we don't forget that, not for this, not ever."
"But?"
"But." He turns the unlit cigarette in his fingers. "You don't come back to the club the way you are right now. I can't have it. Iwon'thave it. Not because of what you did—what you did is between you and the gods, and it's handled—but because ofwhatyou are right now, which is a man who's not all the way in his own head. I've watched it for months. We all have. We've been holding our breath, waiting for you to either come back to us or fly clean apart. Today you got a door other men in your shoes don't get. You're going to walk through it."
