Page 22 of My Broken Biker

"Mommy had coffee with you," she says.

"A few times," he says.

She looks at the cane with interest. "Your stick is cool," she says.

Something shifts slightly in his face. "It's a cane," he says.

"Is it real wood?"

"Mahogany," he says.

She takes this in with the seriousness it apparently deserves. "That's a good wood," she says, and I have no idea where she got an opinion on wood. "Do you want to see my drawing? I changed the horns because I found out something important."

He looks at her for a moment with the expression he gets when something has surprised him and he has no prepared response for it.

"Sure," he says.

She goes to her room and comes back with the Triceratops drawing and holds it up and explains, fully and with complete authority, what she has learned about the horn structure and what that required her to change in the drawing.

Jace takes it from her and looks at it properly, actually looks, and asks one specific question about the angle of the brow horn. She answers it in three sentences. He hands it back.

"The horns look right," he says.

"I know," she says, and takes it back to her room.

The hallway is quiet. I look at him.

He looks at me, and what's on his face is the full weight of the afternoon and something quieter underneath it, and I cross to him and take his hand in both of mine and hold it.

He lets me.

We stand there in the ordinary hallway of my ordinary house, and from the back Angela has resumed the narration of Frank and Princess Bucket's adventure, the quiet steady sound of her voice talking herself through it, and outside the street does what streets do, and the afternoon goes on, and I hold his hand and I don't let go for a long time.

Chapter 7 — Jace

The street is just a street when Knox's bike goes around the corner, and Harper's hand is still around mine in the hallway, and the house is quiet except for the sound of Angela in her room.

After a while Harper lets go of my hand and goes to the kitchen.

I follow because standing alone in the hallway seems wrong and because I'm not ready to go and I'm not going to pretend either of those things is more complicated than it is.

The kitchen has garlic and rosemary in the air from the chicken that got abandoned when Derek knocked.

She opens the oven, checks it, adjusts the temperature and moves to the potatoes she'd been cutting. She does all of this with a steadiness I recognize from the sidewalk on Thursday, from the coffee shop, from every version of her I've seen, which is someone who handles what's in front of her and doesn't just perform the handling.

"You don't have to stay," she says.

"I know," I say.

She looks at me. "Good," she says, and goes back to the potatoes.

I sit at the kitchen table.

There's a drawing on it, a large piece of paper with two figures, one unmistakably a dinosaur, the other less clearly anything.

Angela appears in the kitchen doorway. She looks at Harper first, the specific quick check of a child reading whether the coast is clear, and then she looks at me looking at her drawing.

"That's Frank," she says, and sits down across from me. "He's a Stegosaurus but also a prince. The other one is Princess Bucket."