Page 67 of Shatter

I'd cut the hand off before I let it happen again.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand.

She flinches in her sleep, a small jerk against my ribs, then goes soft again with a sigh.

I reach over with my good arm and look at the screen.

Walt, and it's Sunday.

Seven-thirty on the dot, the same as every Sunday for four years, since the morning I loaded my bike and rode south out of Delaware County with everything I owned in two saddlebags.

I ease out from under her an inch at a time.

She makes a small, cranky sound and burrows her face into the warm spot I left on the pillow, and I stand there by the bed longer than I should, looking at her.

The roots of her hair are almost two inches now, a soft wheat blonde against the copper.

Then I take the phone out into the hall and pull the door shut behind me.

"There he is." Walt's voice crackles down the line, rough as sandpaper. "Thought maybe you'd finally wrapped that bike around a tree."

"Not yet." I lean against the wall and let myself slide down until I'm sitting on the floor. "How's the knee?"

"Still attached." Something clatters in the background, a skillet on a burner. "Doc wants to replace it. I told him he can have it when I'm dead."

I close my eyes and listen to him move around his kitchen.

I can see it, the yellow linoleum curling up by the fridge and the dog bowl nobody's used since Duke died.

He talks for a while, about the Phillies and the price of eggs.

I say yeah and uh-huh in all the right places.

Then he stops talking.

"Something's different." He says it slowly, like he's working it out. "What's going on down there, Breck?"

Nobody's called me Breck in years.

Nobody but him.

"Nothing." I pick at a thread on my jeans. "Club stuff."

"Don't bullshit me." The skillet stops clattering. "I raised you. I know what you sound like when it's nothing."

I stare at the closed door of my room.

"There's a girl staying with me." It comes out lower than I mean it to. "She got hurt. She needed somewhere to stay."

Walt doesn't say anything for a long moment.

On the other end of the line, I hear a chair scrape and creak as he sits down.

"Hurt how?" His voice drops.

"Bad." My throat tightens. "Somebody came after her. I got there in time. Mostly."

The line hisses between us.