Page 4 of My Girl to Take

“That’s it?”

“Jax vouched.” He goes back to whatever’s in front of him. “Rules are on the fridge. Short version, keep your business your business and let everybody else keep theirs.”

I pick up the key. In seventeen years of moving money for people who make their living being curious, I don’t think anyone has ever handed me anything and asked me for nothing.

The apartment is one bedroom, clean, plain, and quiet in a way my flat in Kensington has never once been. I set the bag on the floor and don’t open it.

A week, maybe. Long enough to see him with my own eyes and decide whether there’s anything to say. Then a flight, and back to my life, where none of this will ultimately matter.

I’ve been in the country for ninety minutes, and I’ve already told myself that twice.

***

The gates are the same. That’s the first thing that gets me—not the house, the gates. Same iron, same slow drag as they open, same sound.

The man in the booth is older than the last time I saw him. I watch him do the math on my face and come up short.

“Name, sir?”

There are two answers. I’ve been giving one of them for seventeen years—the other, I haven’t spoken aloud since I left.

“Edwards,” I say. “Logan Edwards.”

He goes very still. Then he steps back, and the gate starts to move. He doesn’t say anything else, and I put the car in gear before either of us has to.

The drive feels longer than I remember. Everything else is smaller. The lawn, the fountain my father said my mother hated, the pale front of the house with its ridiculous columns—all of it has shrunk to fit inside a man instead of a boy. I hate that it still fits at all.

I park. I sit there with my hands on the wheel the way I did the last time, except the last time I was leaving.

Then I get out, button my jacket, and knock on my father’s door like a stranger—because that’s what I am.

The door opens.

And I forget, for a second, what I came here to do.

The woman is small. That registers first and doesn’t stay important. Reddish-brown hair, loose, a little of it caught against her jaw. Green eyes that meet mine and hold there, instead of sliding off, which almost nobody does. She’s in something soft and unremarkable, and I have absolutely no business noticing how it sits on her.

Something goes through me, low and fast and entirely uninvited. Seventeen years of discipline, and it takes about a second and a half to lose my focus.

I’m thirty-five years old. I don’t do this.

“Hello,” I say, and it comes out rougher than I mean it to.

“You’re…Logan.”

Not a question, quite. She says it like she’s confirming something she’s been holding a long time.

“Yeah.” I look past her, into the hall, because looking at her isn’t working. “And you are?”

Something crosses her face. It’s gone before I can name it.

“Kiera,” she says. “I live here.”

Kiera.

The name goes in slowly before realization hits. A girl on a staircase with her hands clasped. A framed photograph held out in both hands at a car window.

And then the rest of it. The last name I never used because I never had to, because she was never anything to me except a quiet child who had the bad luck to be brought into this house by the woman who emptied it.