Page 38

Alcohol—too much at first.

Sleepless nights, or nights when I slept a little too well because I took an inadvisable amount of Ambien.

Rage at everyone who looked at me too long and those who looked away too quickly.

And Kamden—always somewhere in the background.

I did look.

That’s what I tell myself when I need to make myself feel less like a piece of shit.

About a year after I came home, when I was finally coherent enough to manage my own appointments and angry enough at every person trying to manage them for me, I found Sherry.

Kamden was with her—alive, enrolled in school, still living in John’s old house.

There were no police reports that told me he was in immediate danger. Nothing obvious enough from the outside to justify a newly discharged, traumatized, unemployed amputee appearing on a woman’s doorstep and informing her that her dead ex-husband had verbally assigned me custody of her child while bleeding out in Iraq.

I was nobody legally, and a fucking disaster.

I remember sitting in my car outside their house one afternoon with my second prosthetic lying on the passenger seat because the socket had rubbed my skin bloody again.

I told myself John had asked me to take care of his son.

He had not asked me to drag a kid into the wreckage of my life.

So I would get better first, get a job, stop waking up reaching for a rifle, and stop putting holes in walls when a car backfired outside. I’d become someone who could actually take care of a kid.

Then I would check again.

A year became two, then three, and by then I was working for Mathias.

I had gotten a job, sure, but the kind of criminal shit that made it dangerous to have a kid around.

I killed people.

I was exactly the kind of man no court would let within fifty feet of a custody hearing.

And Kamden appeared, from the little I allowed myself to see, to be housed and alive.

I convinced myself that meant safe.

Eventually the promise became something I stored in the same locked place as John’s voice, the explosion, fucking everything.

I didn’t forget—that might be easier to forgive. I just chose not to look too closely.

For eleven fucking years.

“Adrien.” Mathias’s voice pulls me back.

I realize I’ve been staring a hole into the paper. I shake myself out of it and continue reading—address, employment, recent high school graduation, no criminal history.

Mathias watches me closely. “You sure you don’t know him?”

I lift my eyes. “Why?”

“You’ve been staring at his file for a full minute.”

“I’m reading.”