Page 103 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

Every part of me wants to follow, to mouth the place where her throat arches in sleep and replace the word afraid with the word mine.

What keeps me in the chair is the memory of a door closing in the pale hour, of a girl in a flour-streaked dress walking away because wanting scared her more than winter.

The note is folded next to my hand.

No flourish.

No threat of consequence, just the one sentence that does not blink.

You will never belong here.

Whoever put it in her apron pocket stood where our woman tucks things when her hands are full.

That is the part that sits in my teeth.

I hear her before I see her.

Barefoot, soft steps on the runner.

She stops in the doorway and the room takes a breath.

She is wrapped in an old cardigan that might once have been mine, sleeves over her hands, hair up with a fork I know from the kitchen drawer.

She looks like a prayer made by someone who never learned the words, which is to say she looks perfect and I am already lost.

We do not greet each other. We let the quiet show us our faces in it.

“You read it,” she says at last, voice steady enough to make me proud.

“I did.” I tap the folded paper with one finger. “You got this how.”

“In the pocket of the chicken apron,” she says, mouth wry. “The pocket I kept sticking the pacifier in. Someone knew I would touch it a hundred times and still not find the thing that mattered until I stopped moving.”

“Good handwriting,” I say. “Bad thinking.”

“Not wrong about me.” She winces at herself. “Or not wrong about what I have been.”

There is a place in me that wants to rage. I do not feed it. I keep my voice low and the words exact. “Do you intend to run again, Marisa? Did you come back to us to stay, or did you come back to this roof because the weather told you to?”

She takes that in, stepping to the other side of the table and placing her palms flat on the wood.

The light catches the gold in her irises and turns it into something I should not look at for too long if I plan to keep my composure.

“I do not know,” she says, and the honesty lands like a clean blade. “I want to say yes. I want to say I am brave and I choose this and that is the end of the sentence. My whole life has been leaving before someone could tell me to. I am good at packing in the dark. I am good at deciding it hurts less if I choose it.”

“You left the morning after,” I say, and I do not make it a question.

“I did,” she answers, softer. “I was terrified of wanting more than I was supposed to. I was raised to think love is a room you get if you behave. I did not know how to live in a house where people make room for you even when you make mistakes.”

“You were raised to make yourself small,” I say. “You are not small.”

She nods once.

The cardigan sleeve rides up and I see the wire whisk tattoo on her forearm, black line fine as a secret.

Her fingers worry the cuff then go still.

My jaw tightens then lets go.