Page 30

Liam

The Chicago police station was draped in tacky Christmas ornaments, faded from decades of living in storage between winters. Their presence added more melancholy than the intended holiday cheer, but Liam found that to be a more appropriate setting for the mood anyway.

Time had blended since the events of the dinner party. He could only string together a loose timeline: his mother scraping him off of the Bakers’ garage floor, holding him in the backseat of his father’s SUV, and gently rubbing blood stains off of his knuckles under warm water. She’d had a lot of questions, naturally, and Liam had tried to answer them as best he could, but the majority of his time had been split between inconsolable crying and drifting into fits of exhausted, restless sleep.

Now, the sun was golden-bright outside the single window of the precinct. Liam’s mother was beside him; tense and strung tight with an anxiety that mirrored her son’s in the form of a bouncing knee and rigid shoulders, but she was there. Something in Liam hadn’t quite expected that, nor was he prepared for the warmth it brought in the midst of so much cold.

It hadn’t been an easy decision to come here, and he still wasn’t sure it was the right one. His eyes flicked toward the exit every few minutes, weighing the option of running away against staying.

Helping Jonah or hurting him.

The push-and-pull was a physical strain in his chest. Liam pitched forward and buried his fingers in his hair, still damp from the shower his mother had made him take before driving him into the city. A sound that might have been a precursor to throwing up clawed its way from his throat. A warm hand landed on his back.

“Breathe, Liam,” his mother repeated. “It’s going to be okay.”

“What if it’s not?”

Her hand paused, but no answer came.

Liam couldn’t reasonably expect a solution from her, but still some childish instinct doubled down on the panic at the realization that this problem couldn’t be solved by any motherly reassurance.

The soothing movements resumed in silence. Liam focused on breathing, tracing the line of grout between the tiles with his eyes.

“Mom?” he spoke up after a minute. “Are you mad at me? ”

The tension in his back grew tighter the longer her silence stretched, until finally she pushed her fingers into his hair. “No, Liam,” she said. “I’m not mad at you. I’m worried about you. I’m trying to... to make sense of all of this. If anything, I’m upset at myself for not seeing that you were clearly going through something.”

Liam sat up. “I’m not a kid anymore,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to clean up my messes.”

She smiled at him, and for the first time he noticed the signs of age around his mother’s eyes. “I’m sure you think that’s true. But you’re my kid. I’m always going to feel the pain when you’re hurting.”

The glow in his chest grew a little warmer, but it only seemed to loosen whatever valve was holding his composure together. Liam swallowed, trying to force the tears back. “He’s someone’s son, too.”

Not for the first time, Liam thought about Jonah’s parents. It was hard not to harbor such a genuine hatred for two strangers he had never met, when all he knew of them was that their callous actions had pushed their son onto the streets that would eventually swallow him whole. If just one thing had been different, if they could have opened their hearts, just a little, to the boy who had come to them for love and acceptance, everything could have been different.

And maybe that meant he never would have met Liam, but he would have lived in his lonely reality a hundred times over if it meant sparing Jonah the miserable life he was living now .

“I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear,” he started, his voice weak. “But I love him.” If there was any shred of certainty to be found in the madness that surrounded the situation, it was that.

“I know,” she said.

There was no time to process her easy acceptance of his confession and all that it entailed, because a uniformed officer appeared in front of them, and Liam’s heart bottomed out.

“Liam Cassidy? You can come with me.”

Renewed terror flooded his system. He couldn’t ignore the gravity of the choice in front of him now, nor the potential consequences that could follow. He didn’t know how this would play out, but he hoped Jonah wouldn’t hate him for going back on his word.

That was the best-case scenario; at least if Jonah was angry, he was alive. Liam wasn’t sure how he could live with the alternative.

His legs were stilts under him, quivering as they took his weight. They followed the officer to an interview room off the main bullpen. It was a small, gray box of a room, with a single table and four chairs. Liam sank into one next to his mother, but the urge to run only doubled down inside the tight space.

The officer left again with a promise that her partner would be in to take his statement, but Liam was miles away.

The moment the door closed behind her, sealing them in, his heart took off like a rabbit .

“Mom.” He struggled to speak around the fist-sized lump in his throat. “Mom, I— I can’t... Is this the wrong thing? Am I making everything worse?”

Her eyes grew sullen as she watched him, perhaps only then registering the full extent of Liam’s uncertainty. “Liam,” she started to say.

But he never heard whatever reassurance she had to offer him, because the sudden buzz of his phone against the metal table seemed to shake the whole room.

Liam hadn’t let it out of his sight all week. His plea to Jonah, that he should call him if he ever needed him, lurked in the back of his mind. Some part of him—maybe a larger part than he realized—held out hope that he would. It was improbable, and in a situation like this that hope could be poisonous. For a split second, he considered letting it go to voicemail.

The unlisted number could have meant any number of things that Liam couldn’t deal with right now: a spam call, an overdue payment, a different police station calling to let him know that Nathan had decided to press charges against him after all.

Or maybe it was a hospital in Chicago.

Maybe Jonah’s body had been found, and the only identifiable piece of information was a sliver of paper in his pocket with Liam’s phone number on it.

But maybe he was alive.

He pressed the phone to his ear. “Hello? ”

There was a pause, probably not a long one in reality, but one that stretched an eternity as Liam listened for any sign of life on the other side. Then someone cleared their throat.

“Liam? It’s me.”