Page 23

The kitchen goes still.

I look down at her hand, and she pulls it back.

"I'm sorry," she says quickly. "I only meant⁠—"

"Don't." The word isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be.

Her face crumples as someone guides her away.

I stand. The chair hits the wall behind me. Knox appears in the doorway like he’s been waiting for this exact sound.

"Where are you going?"

"Nowhere."

He studies me for a long second.

"Don't make me come looking for you."

I don't answer. He steps aside anyway.

The hallway’s narrow and lined with old family photographs. I keep my eyes low, but that’s a mistake because the runner beneath my shoes is the same faded blue one that’s been here for years. Raven once slid down this hallway in socks, hit the front door, and blamed the rug for attacking her. I remember Knox laughing so hard he had to sit down on the stairs. Jon pretended to be stern for exactly six seconds before he broke.

My hand finds the knob to the den before my brain catches up. I step inside and quietly lock the door.

The room is exactly the way I remember it. The card table is pushed into the corner. A deck of cards sits where someone left it, the scorepad still tucked beneath the box. The old sectional faces the television. A dartboard hangs on the far wall. Family photos crowd the shelves.

My hands are shaking as I press my palms against the edge of the wet bar, trying to steady them. That's when I see it. A half-empty bottle of whiskey sits beside a row of clean glasses, forgotten after some long-ago card game.

I stare at it.

I know I should leave it there. The knowledge is clear and useless. My hand closes around the bottle. The cap turns with a small crack.

The smell is familiar, burning before it ever touches my mouth. I don’t drink much. Never have. Not like this. A beer after a ride. Whiskey when the club toasted something worth remembering or something worth forgetting. Enough to feel warmth, not enough to disappear.

Today, I want disappearance.

I lift the bottle. The first swallow makes my eyes water and burns all the way down. My stomach rejects it, then accepts it, then warms around it like a traitor.

I take another.

Then another.

For a few seconds, nothing changes.

Then the sharpest edges of grief begin to dull. Suddenly, I understand, with a sick kind of clarity, how men become this. How one swallow becomes a door. How grief finds the thing that dulls its teeth and calls it mercy.

I press the heel of my hand to my mouth.

Raven would hate this.

I squeeze my eyes shut. "Then come stop me."

The words leave me before I know I’m going to say them. They’re mean and desperate as they echo in the empty room.

Something changes in the room, not dramatically, nothing a sane man could point to later and call proof. Just a subtle shift in the temperature. A stillness that has nothing to do with walls.

The house noise fades until all I can hear is my own pulse. For a second, I can’t move. Can’t think. Can’t decide whether terror or hope is the thing opening inside my chest.