Page 20 of My Broken Biker

"Who is that?" she says.

"Someone I used to know," I say. "From before we moved here."

"Why is he at our door?"

"He wants to talk," I say. "I'm handling it. Can you do something for me right now? Can you take Gerald and your crayons and go sit on your bed for a little while?"

She holds my eyes for a moment. She's six and she reads rooms the way she reads everything thoroughly. "Is it safe?" she says.

"Yes," I say. "I'm handling it and someone's coming to help. I just need you in your room."

She picks up Gerald and the crayons and her drawing and she goes down the hall without arguing, which tells me she understood more than I said.

I hear Derek try the door handle.

The knob shifts, just once, and I locked it when we came home but the sound of him trying it does something specific to the air in my chest, and I stand in the kitchen with my phone on the counter and the call still open and I breathe through it.

"I heard that," Jace says from the phone. "Fifteen minutes."

I pick the phone up. "Okay," I say.

I check on Angela. She's on her bed with Gerald and the encyclopedia and she's not reading it, just sitting with it in her lap and looking at me when I appear in the doorway.

"Almost done," I say. "You're okay."

She nods. Her arms tighten around Gerald.

I go back to the kitchen and I wait.

Derek's voice from the porch goes through its versions, the reasonable one and then the harder edge of it and then back again.

And I know this cycle, I lived inside it for months, and knowing it doesn't make hearing it from the other side of a locked door less frightening. It just means I can name what's happening, which is not quite the same as being fine.

I hear the truck.

The engine coming down the street and cutting out. Two sets of footsteps on the front path.

Derek's voice changing register. And then another voice, one I know, and the thing sitting in my chest since I looked through that glass panel shifts into something else.

I go to the front door and open it.

Jace is at the bottom of the porch steps and Knox is beside him, and Derek is between them and me, facing them, his whole posture recalibrating quickly.

Jace isn't looking at me yet. He's looking at Derek with the focused attention I recognise from the coffee shop, from the park path, from the specific way he reads situations before he acts in them, except that here, on my front porch in the afternoon light, it looks different.

Not different from who he is but more fully who he is, and whatever the leg changed and whatever the two years cost him, it changed and cost nothing about what he takes up in a space.

"You need to leave," Jace says. Not loud. He doesn't need it loud.

"I'm not on your property," Derek says. "I have every right to be on this street."

"You've tried the door handle," Jace says. "There's a restraining order. Leave."

"I don't know who you are," Derek says, the voice going harder now, "but this is between me and Harper."

"No," Jace says. "It isn't."

He comes up the porch steps. With the leg it isn't fast, but there's nothing hesitant in it either, each step certain, and Derek takes one step back without seeming to decide to. Jace positions himself between Derek and the door, the full breadth of him in the narrow porch space, and he looks at Derek with an expression that has no anger in it and no performance of anything. Just complete and final clarity.