Nora looked at me with warm, assessing eyes. "Good," she said simply. Like she knew exactly what that meant and had been hoping for it.
I liked her immediately.
We walked the rest of the store together, the three of us, and the ordinary Sunday motion of it—the cart and the list and the small domestic negotiations of which pasta and whether to get the good bread—felt like something new. Not the performance of family. The real thing, moving through a grocery store, the land of it shifting under all our feet, all of us finding our footing.
In the parking lot, Colleen hugged me again, longer this time.
"Thank you," she said against my shoulder. "For yesterday. For—all of it."
"You held the door open," I said. "I just finally walked through."
I drove back to Wentworth Street with the groceries, and I thought about two women holding a world of unsaid things between them for years, and I thought about the courage it took to say them, and I thought about the word brave that Colleen had used once about a woman arriving somewhere new with nothing but a decision already made.
There were so many kinds of brave.
I was learning them, one at a time.
Wow.
18
BROCK
They were waiting for me.
I came up a long private drive lined with live oaks older than the Republic, and the house at the end of it stopped me for half a second even in the state I was in—a great Lowcountry mansion lit up gold against the dark, columns two stories tall, piazzas stacked one over the other down the side, the kind of place that got built when somebody had more money than God and wanted the world to know it. Wrought iron. Brick the color of dried blood. A fountain somewhere I could hear but not see.
And men. Armed men, moving easy and spread-out across the grounds with the loose discipline of people who did this for real, long guns slung, eyes already on the jalopy before I'd cleared the gate. Half a dozen, at least, more shapes back in the dark. They swarmed the car the second I stopped, and for one ugly heartbeat every instinct I owned came up screaming—until I saw they weren't coming for me. They were coming for Darren.
They had his door open and four sets of hands on him before I'd killed the engine, lifting him out of the seat smoothand fast, somebody already calling for the clinic, somebody else snapping orders, low and clipped. They carried him up the broad stone steps and in through a set of doors tall enough to ride a horse through, and just like that, he was gone inside and I was standing by a stolen wreck with blood drying on my arms, watching an operation I had no part in run like clockwork around me.
Then, Tommy came out the front.
My brother. Older than the last time, harder through the face, a sidearm riding in a drop holster strapped to his thigh the way you wear a gun you expect to use. But it was him—that loose-shouldered walk, the Valentine in him that no amount of years takes off a man. He came down the steps two at a time and we met at the bottom and grabbed each other hard, a real embrace, the kind brothers who've been scattered to the corners of the earth give each other when they wash up in the same place alive.
"God, it's good to see you," he said into my shoulder.
"You too, little brother."
He pulled back and held me at arm's length and looked me over, and the grin that had always lived on his face flickered up and didn't quite catch.
"Wish to hell it was under better circumstances," he said.
I didn't argue.
His eyes dropped to my arm, the right one, the sleeve dark and stiff where the dash had opened me up. "That needs looking at."
"It's nothing."
"Humor me. We've got people." He was already turning me toward the steps with a hand on my good shoulder. "Come on."
But I'd stopped, looking up at the thing I was about to walk into—the columns, the lit windows, the gunmen in the dark, the sheer impossible scale of it.
"Tommy. What is this place?"
He followed my gaze up the face of it. Something moved across him, a weighing, a man deciding how much of a thing he could say standing in a driveway.
"Long story," he said finally. "For right now, it's just a safe place to get you patched up. The rest keeps till you're not bleeding."
