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The woman in the doorway looked older than the one I’d kept folded up in my memory all these years. There were more lines on her beautiful face now, more strands of silver running through her hair. But the face was familiar. Too familiar. It was the face of the woman I’d been mourning, the one I was told was gone.

I had exactly one photograph of her, soft at the edges from too many years of handling. I spent all the years she was gone memorizing it because it was all I had. I knew that face better than I knew my own. And now it was standing in front of me. Breathing. Blinking. Alive.

“Mom,” I said, and my voice shook on the single syllable.

Tears blurred her eyes and her hand flew to her mouth. “Ivy?” She reached out, then stopped herself, clasping her hands together like she didn’t trust them. “It can’t be. How did you?” Her gaze bounced between me and Knox, and she took a step back into the dark of the house. “Why are you here?”

Knox lifted both hands, slow and easy, the way you’d settle a spooked animal. “I’m friendly, I promise. Ivy is my wife.” His hand found the small of my back and gave me the smallest push forward, just enough. “She thought you were dead all this time.”

That broke the dam.

My mom folded in on herself, a sob tearing out of her, and then I was crying too, twelve years of it all at once, ugly and silent and impossible to stop. I don’t remember crossing the threshold. I only know Knox got an arm around each of us and herded us inside. He steered us down onto a plush, colorful sofa that didn’t match anything Rex would ever have owned, and then stepped back to give us room.

Knox wasn’t a man who specialized in gentle, but he handled our emotions like they might shatter. He didn’t crowd us. He didn’t fill the silence or make it about himself. He just made sure we both had somewhere soft to land and then stepped out of the way.

“You’re not dead,” Knox said plainly. His voice was deep and rough and full of something I couldn’t quite name.

Mom smiled and shook her head, dragging the back of her hand across her cheek. “Not yet. I was planning on leaving Rex and taking you with me.” She pulled in a breath that shuddered going down. “Of course he figured it out, and he hid you at the clubhouse. He threatened me, and I thought he would kill me.” She laughed, bitter and brittle. “But he didn’t. He drove me here to Reno and he threatened me instead. If I tried to reach out to my family, he would kill you. If I contacted you, he would kill you and mail your body parts to me until I killed myself.” Her voice cracked clean down the middle. “So I stayed here while he collected my trust fund and sent me a portion each month. Enough to live a good life. As good as I could manage without my baby.”

My hands curled into fists in my lap on their own and I made myself open them. The hate I carried for Rex intensified until it filled every inch of me, and all I wanted in the world was to see him dead. I spent my whole life believing the worst thing about him was the way he used his fists. I’d been wrong. The worst thing about him was that he’d taken my mom from me and kept her alive on a leash made out of my own life. I hated him in that moment, more than I knew I could hate a person.

“All these years I thought you were dead,” I said, my voice still shaking. “I-I missed you.” And finally I was brave enough to do what I’d wanted to do since the door opened. I wrapped her in my arms.

“Oh, honey, I missed you too.” She hugged me back so tight it hurt, like she didn’t want to let me go any more than I wanted to let go of her. Over her shoulder, where her cardigan had slipped, I saw it. A small hummingbird inked into her skin, wings spread mid-flight. Something old and buried turned over in me, a memory with no edges. My chubby little finger tracing that bird with my finger, over and over.

She pulled back, holding me at arm’s length and searching my face for answers. “How did you find me?”

I smiled through the mess of my tears. “Knox has a tech guru in his MC. We didn’t know it was you.” I had to clarify it, because she needed to understand. “We thought you’d have answers about Rex. But you are the answer.” I swallowed. “The money went to a woman named Carla Price. That’s all we had. A name.”

Something flickered across her face, old and exhausted. “That’s the name he gave me. Carla Price.” She touched the silver at her temple. “I haven’t been Magnolia in too many years.”

Magnolia. It was a name I only ever heard spoken in past tense.

Fear flashed in her eyes, fast and familiar, the same look I wore my whole life. “Rex isn’t going to be happy about this.”

“I don’t care,” I said, and I meant it down to the bone. “I’ve dealt with his anger and his cruelty and his lies my whole life. I don’t care about him at all. Not anymore.” The truth of those words crashed over me as I spoke them. Rex wasn’t a boogeyman in my nightmares anymore. He was a mean man who was part of my past.

Knox cleared his throat. He stood by the door this whole time, watching, letting us have a moment together. But now he stepped in with his gaze fixed on my mom. “Are you happy with this life?”

My mom frowned. “No. Of course not.”

“Good. Pack a bag.”

She froze. “I can’t.”

“You have to.” There was no give in him at all. “We cleared out that trust account, and it’ll only take him a few days to realize it. When he does, this will be his first stop.”

Ice filled my veins as his words sank in. I knew they were true, that it wasn’t bullshit just because he needed her to comply. And because of that, I knew what he wasn’t saying. “He’s right, Mom.” I got to my feet. “That money means more to him than any person ever has. You have to get out of here.”

She shook her head, and her hands were trembling. “I have nowhere to go. And if I’m not here when he comes, he’ll kill you.”

“He won’t even get the fucking chance,” Knox growled. The sound of it filled the small space. “I can promise you that. Ivy is mine, and no one’s doing shit to her.”

My mom looked at him for a long moment, really looked. She sized him up quickly, and then she smiled, nodding as she stood and disappeared down the hall.

“Leave electronics here,” Knox called after her, following as far as the mouth of the hallway. “Phone, tablet, anything that talks to a tower. Write down any numbers you need, and we’ll get you a phone.”

I stayed where I was and let myself really look at the place she’d been living. It was small and tidy, so full of color. It broke my heart. There were only a few photographs. Almost all of them were me, or me and her. School pictures, which stopped the year after she left, and snapshots of her family, people I’d never met. And one I recognized, the same image I found on the Colibri website, my mother young and bright and belonging to a world that had been hers before me or Rex came into her life.