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I sit there quietly, letting his words settle. I don’t know what to say to that. I know how I feel, but there’s no point in expressingit. I don’t know this man. He’s a stranger. I shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t hurt me to listen to this.

But it does.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” is what comes out.

He shrugs again, stiff and defensive. “I’m only telling you that so you’ll understand there are way worse mothers out there. Some mothers leave and don’t come back. Some pretend you were never born. You made a mistake in a stressful situation. That’s human. That’s forgivable. Abandoning your fucking child is not.”

Something swells inside me. It’s raw and it aches and it makes me feel good. He didn’t tell me that for sympathy; he told me to pull me out of my shame. To soften the knife I’d been twisting into myself.

I glance at him. His eyes still haven’t left the screen. His fingers hover over the keyboard, then he presses a button, awakening the screen again.

My eyes drop to where our thighs are touching. His body heat radiates through the fabric of his sweatpants. Then I trace his profile with my gaze, flickering over his sharp jaw, his high cheekbones, the little scar just below his bottom lip. Everything about him is solid and masculine and strong. He’s beautiful in an untouchable way, like something that will shatter into a million pieces if you aren’t careful. But I think I understand. He’s just locked up tight, welded shut by years of pain and the need to survive.

It’s a pain I’ve never known, but I have to think I’d be just as reticent to let someone in if I’d gone through what he had.

I don’t say another word. I don’t ask another question, even though there are several swirling in my mind right now. I wanna push, but I don’t.

Instead, I lean over and press my lips gently to his cheek.

The skin is warm and stubbled, but also, alive. It’s a brief kiss, but I feel it tremble through both of us.

Then I stand, because I don’t trust myself to linger.

I move back to the bed and settle on the edge, watching his back. His shoulders are frozen. His fingers hover over the keys, unmoving. It’s like his whole body is locked up while his brain processes what just happened.

My eyes burn as I stare at him. Something about this moment hurts.

It’s not just his voice that’s robotic. Emotionally, he’s stilted. Right now, he’s on a delay, struggling to figure out how to feel what I did, and I feel like I’m grieving for the child he once was and the man who’s two feet away, the man who had to becomethisin order to survive another day. I don’t know how you reach a man like him. If it’s even possible.

I blink hard and a tear spills over. I wipe it quickly and remind myself it’s not my burden to bear.

15

King

Sable sits cross-legged onthe bed, a slice of greasy pepperoni pizza folded in half in her hand. Her lipstick is faded now, her hair in slight disarray, but she somehow looks more human this way. And just as beautiful.

“I guess my appetite came back,” she says between bites, licking the tomato sauce off her thumb.

I’m still at the desk waiting on AJ to get back to me on the encrypted files. I watch her, relieved to see that she could eat. That means her body calmed down enough to let her digest something. That’s a good sign. Fear and trauma have a way of disrupting even the most basic human functions.

I toggle back over to the tab with Brett’s flight info. “He’s still in Memphis, by the way.”

She looks up.

“He’s not flying back to Atlanta until tomorrow afternoon.”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “He probably stayed an extra day to celebrate my ‘death’. He’s probably popping bottles as we speak.”

I know something else he’s done today—wire transferred fifty-thousand racks to my account—but I don’t mention that. Instead, I lean back and ask something I still can’t figure out.

“Why doesn’t he care about how his daughters are doing?”

That earns me a look. She stops chewing as something flickers across her face. Guilt, maybe. A memory? It’s hard to tell. Then she swallows hard and shrugs. “He’s never really been a hands-on father,” she says. “He’s always been there, but not necessarily present. He plays the family man when people are watching, but emotionally…there’s nothing there.”

She wipes her hands on a napkin and picks up her phone. I recognize the shift in her posture…relaxed shoulders, slight head tilt, the beginnings of a smile. She’s calling the girls.

I watch her as she talks to them, her tone syrupy sweet, her energy maternal in a way I’ve never seen up close. She’s nurturing. Gentle. She asks if they brushed their teeth, if they ate dinner, if they had a good day with their auntie. She tells them she’s proud of them. She misses them. I don’t think she even realizes how beautiful it is, how much life there is in her voice when she talks to her babies.