Page 149 of Falcon’s Forever

"What thing?" Sarah looks confused.

"Looking happy and pretending she isn't." Emily is pissing me off now.

Falcon's voice comes from behind me, carrying another chair over. "She does do that."

"Whose side are you on?"

"Mine,” he says.

"Wrong answer."

He sets the chair down beside mine. "Move."

My eyebrows go up. "Excuse me?"

He closes his eyes the second the word leaves his mouth, and across the table Harrier points at him without looking up from his plate.

"Dollar," Harrier says, laughing.

"I asked her to move." He’s trying to backtrack.

"You said move." He’s right, Falcon did say that.

Zip glances at the whiteboard behind the bar, where a jar sits under a sign in Emily's handwriting that reads FALCON'S CONTROL ISSUES. "That's definitely a dollar."

Falcon digs a bill out of his pocket and drops it in on his way past. "You're all assholes."

"Twenty-eight dollars," Vulture says, lifting his beer.

"What was that for?"

"Insulting your family."

"You insult us every day."

"I'm President. Different rules." He's smiling into his glass, and Falcon shakes his head and sits down beside me anyway, and his hand finds mine under the table without either of us making a thing of it.

Merrick's picture still hangs on Condor's monitor sometimes, a loose thread none of us pretend has been fully tied off. It took four months to run him to ground, in the end, a joint effort between Sterling's contact and a federal task force that finally had enough to move without tipping him first. He's in a cell now, awaiting trial, and the network under him is still being pulled apart one shell company at a time. Nobody at this table believes the fight's finished. We've stopped needing it to be finished before we let ourselves live, and we've stopped pretending that living and grieving have to happen on separate days. Some weeks they happen at the same dinner, sometimes at the same table, sometimes in the same breath, and that used to feel like a contradiction. It doesn't anymore.

Haven House is full now, the four women who came out of that warehouse and two more who found their way to us since, through channels I helped build with women who understand exactly what it costs to ask for help. Emily's still at the transition property, permanently now, with curtains so aggressively yellow Falcon complained about them for exactly six seconds before Emily threatened to rename the whole house after him out of spite. Sarah splits her time between there and the clubhouse, working three days a week at a bookshop downtown with identification papers Sterling helped her rebuild from nothing.

None of it happened because one conversation fixed everything. It happened because a hundred small conversations kept happening, week after week, and nobody stopped showing up for them, including the hardest one, a man standing in a grieving mother's living room and refusing to leave until she'd said every angry word she needed to say to him.

Falcon leans toward my ear. "You disappeared."

"I’m just thinking," I say.

"That’s dangerous."

"That's not a control issue."

"Wasn't trying to make it one." He nods toward Vulture, who's still smiling at his beer like the argument's already won. "It's insulting."

"That jar doesn't cover insults."

"Vulture changed the rules."

I laugh and pull my hand free just long enough to steal a bite off his plate, which earns me a look I've come to recognize as one part exasperation and two parts something warmer that he's stopped bothering to hide from the whole table.