Page 407 of Wicked Brutal

“Are you sad?”

“No.”

“Happy?”

“Yeah.”

“Because Tobias?”

“Yeah.”

She nods like that makes perfect sense. Because to her, it probably does. She doesn’t know there’s anything complicated about it. I’m Mommy. Tobias is Tobias. We’re family. End of story.

“Can I have another strawberry?”

“No.”

“Pozhaluysta?”

“Still no.” She sighs. Worth a try.

I head toward my office for the paper plates I hid in there after Piper decided last week that paper plates make excellent Frisbees. My office didn’t exist when we first moved into this house. Neither did half the house. Nobody calls it the guest house anymore. It hasn’t been one in years. It’s ours. Mine and Ryan’s.

We expanded after Piper was born. Knocked down walls, added rooms, built my office, and made a bedroom for Tobias that could grow with him instead of preserving the six-year-old who first slept here because he was too afraid to sleep anywhere else. Piper has her own room. Tobias has his. Across the yard, they have rooms at Cassandra and Walter’s too — his old room never stopped being his, and the nursery became Piper’s over there once she got older. Sometimes she announces she’s sleeping at MY Cassandra and MY Walter’s and packs enough stuffed animals for a three-month trip. Sometimes Tobias disappears over there after school because Walter is helping him build something. Sometimes both of them stay. Sometimes neither does. Nobody asks anymore where Tobias belongs. He belongs wherever the hell he wants.

Ryan and I talked about moving once. His work is in Boston — he graduated from Northeastern and took everything he’d always been terrifyingly good at and somehow turned it into a cybersecurity career with the CIA. We could’ve moved closer. But Tobias had his school, his friends, his soccer team, the lake, Cassandra, Walter, us. A life he’d finally stopped waiting to lose. And when Ryan and I really looked at what moving would give us, neither of us could come up with anything better than what we already had. So we stayed. Because we chose to.

I find the plates on the bottom shelf. When I pull them free, the edge catches two books, and I grab them before they fall. Then stop. One in each hand. Hers. Mine.

The old memoir is battered now — the one I used to read in Ryan’s car when I was eighteen. A woman who got out. Back then, those were the words that mattered. She got out. I thought that was the finish line. I know better now. Getting out is the beginning. Afterward comes figuring out who you are when nobody is telling you who you’re allowed to be. Learning that quiet doesn’t always mean something bad is coming. Learning that somebody loving you doesn’t mean they own you. Learning how to stay somewhere safe without waiting for safety to disappear. Building.

My memoir sits beside hers. Alison Harrington. Mine came first. Then the children’s books — also Alison Harrington. Alice illustrates every single one; the first time I handed her a manuscript, she showed up three days later with sketches and informed me she’d already decided what the frog looked like. Tobias maintains the books aren’t about him. The dedication in the first one says For my Frog King. He’s committed to the lie.

My work with Saoirse grew alongside everything else. Her nonprofit gave me somewhere to put all the things I learned the worst possible way. Some weeks it’s meetings. Some weeks fundraising. Sometimes I’m writing resources. Sometimes I’m sitting with a woman who doesn’t need me to tell her what she should do — she just needs someone who understands that whatever happens next should be her choice.

And then there are the romances. Those took longer. The stories I started writing before — girls who wanted things, girls who kissed boys, girls who had sex because they wanted sex, girls who got angry, girls who took up space, girls who weren’t punished by the story for refusing to make themselves smaller. I hid them because Roman would’ve hated them, then kept hiding them long after he couldn’t do a damn thing about what I wrote. Ryan was the one who finally asked me why. I didn’t have an answer that belonged to me. So I stopped. My romances belong to Jane A. Piper. Jane for my mother. A for Alison. Piper for my daughter. Mother. Me. Daughter. All three of us tucked into the name on the cover of every filthy little love story I once thought I had to hide.

The front door opens. I hear a bag hit the floor, then — “DADDY!” Piper flies past my office, and I smile before I even leave the room.

By the time I reach the foyer, Ryan barely has the door closed before she launches herself at him and he catches her. “There she is.”

“You’re home!”

“I told you I’d be home.”

She grabs both sides of his face. “No more work?”

“No more work.”

“Good.” She kisses him directly on the mouth.

Ryan laughs. “Thanks.”

“I put a penny in my cake.”

His eyes find mine over her shoulder. “You what?”

“For luck.”