CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

RILEY

A week on the road teaches you things.

It teaches you that Hunter's favorite gas station food, in order of preference, is: hotdog, then the rectangular pizza, then those cheese crackers that come in the orange wrapper, then pretty much anything else. It teaches you that Luna will read anything — road signs, cereal boxes, the backs of other people's receipts if they leave them on the table — and that this applies to maps with a specific intensity that makes her useful in a way a four-year-old has no business being useful.

It teaches you that Grayson, who presents as a man of action and directness, becomes disturbingly good at telling bedtime stories when cornered into it at a Wyoming motel and realizes the children will not sleep without one. By night three, his stories had a recurring cast of characters, a throughline, and something that was starting to look like a plot arc.

Knox teaching Hunter to check the oil: "It's like feeding the robot," Hunter said, very seriously, watching the dipstick. "You check if the robot is still hungry." Knox said: "Pretty much exactly like that." And Hunter looked incredibly satisfied with himself for two full days.

Knox teaching me to breathe through the shift urge — sitting cross-legged across from me in a field somewhere in Idaho while the twins napped in the truck, walking me through the pull-back with his hands on my wrists, voice low and patient, the same voice he'd used with the twins at the lake except this time it was me learning something my body had been waiting thirty years to learn.

"You're fighting it," he said.

"Yes, because it feels like—"

"I know what it feels like. Stop fighting it. You're not losing yourself, you're expanding. There's a difference."

I was a natural.

I hated that I was a natural. It meant something I hadn't decided what to do with.

Utah came on day five. We'd been following a loose route that Knox had in his head — road I didn't know, but he'd ridden it before, years ago — and by the time we turned off toward a property he knew about, an old working barn from a pack family who'd sold it and moved east but left the land accessible, the twins were asleep in the truck and Grayson had developed the particular expression of a man who understood he was about to be told to stay with the children.

He was told to stay with the children.

The fire was small and Knox had it going in about four minutes, which I noted and didn't comment on. We sat across from it with the dark and the Utah desert very large around us and nowhere to be for the first time in I couldn't remember how long.

"I need you to know something," I said.

He looked at me.

"I'm not doing this because of the bond." I held his gaze. "I need you to know that. I'm not — I'm not being pulled into this by something I can't control. I know that's what it looks like from the outside. I know that's what the bond is supposed to do. But I need you to know that I know the difference."

"I know," he said.

"It's mine to choose."

"I know that too."

"Good," I said.

It was the most careful I'd ever been about anything. And it was the most certain I'd ever been about anything, which were two things that had never gone together for me before and which together felt like the thing I'd been looking for without knowing I was looking for it.

The bond didn't complete the way I'd expected. No light, no thunderclap, no dramatic seismic event. It was just — warmth. Settling. Like something that had been held at exactly the wrong tension for five years finding the correct adjustment and going quiet.

He woke before dawn.

I felt him wake — that was new, the new clarity of the bond, being able to feel him adjacent to me in the dark. I kept my breathing even, not because I was hiding but because I wasn't ready to have the conversation yet, I wanted him to have the moment.

He lay very still for a long time.

Then he cried. Quietly, without a sound, just the slight change in his breathing and the fact that I could feel it through the bond — something releasing, something that had been under enormous pressure for a very long time finally, finally, allowed to go. I lay still and let him have it and held the knowledge of it in a part of me that felt nothing but tender.

Morning. Campfire. Grayson making something that resembled coffee out of ingredients he'd apparently packed for exactly this contingency.

Luna looked up from her road atlas. "Are we going home?"

Knox looked at me.

I looked at the fire, the kids, Grayson's increasingly committed coffee operation, the long Nevada road ahead.

Knox's face.

"We are home," I said.

He had to look at the fire for a moment.

Grayson pretended not to notice anything.