He absorbs that. Children always do. They remember the difference between adults who say everything is fine and adults who tell the truth without making them carry it.
Erin pulls back. “Can we help?”
The answer rises immediately.
No. Not with this. Not yet. You are children. You have already had enough of adult problems put in your hands.
But I look at both of them and remember what it felt like to be shut outside Alice’s fear until there was nothing left to do but regret it.
“You can sit with me,” I say.
Erin nods as if I have given her an assignment. Heath takes the edge of the counter beside me, close but not touching.
For a few minutes, no one speaks.
Then Erin says, “Do you think Stefano is okay?”
My chest constricts.
“He is hard to kill,” I say.
“That is not what I asked.”
The words sound too much like Heath for them to have come from anyone else.
I look at him.
He is staring at the floor.
Before I can answer, he says, “He hugged us before Boston.”
The room goes still.
“What?”
Heath’s shoulders rise. “The night you left. He came in after you were asleep.”
Erin nods quickly. “He hugged me too. He said he had to go do something bad so we could be safe.”
My stomach drops.
“What exactly did he say?”
Erin squints, trying to remember. “He said… he said, ‘Your aunt will come back. Omar will keep you safe. And nobody will ever take you anywhere again’.”
Heath looks up at me then. “He said he promised.”
Something fractures inside my heart.
Not because it excuses him. It does not. Not because it makes what he did to Leon easier to forgive. It does not. But because I can see him in that room now, standing over two children who barely trusted him, making promises he knew he intended to keep with blood if necessary. Then he left me in Boston because he thought I deserved the freedom to hate him without him standing there asking for mercy.
The idiot.
The cruel, impossible idiot.
Alex shifts in the doorway. “Maybe you should sit down.”
I am already sitting. I look at the test on the counter.
