Welcome Home

Chapter 11:

Packing took eleven minutes.

I want to be honest about how it went. I didn't fold anything. I grabbed a laundry basket and I filled it with Lily's clothes and her bunny and her blanket and the purple crayons and the dinosaur drawing and I dumped my stuff on top. Four shirts. Two pairs of jeans. Underwear. My toothbrush. The three rules taped to the inside of my closet door — I peeled them off and folded them and put them in my back pocket.

My mother stood in the doorway with a trash bag.

"I don't have anything," she said. "Everything I own was in that motel."

"We'll get you clothes."

"I can't pay you back."

"I don't want you to pay me back."

She looked at me. Then she looked at the trash bag. Then she went into the bathroom and took the little hotel soap and the toothbrush I'd never opened and she put them in the bag, and something about that made my eyes hot and I had to turn around.

Kael was in the hallway, on the phone.

Not to his father. He was talking to somebody else, low and fast, and every once in a while he said a name — Rook. Hatch. Benny — and then he hung up and called another number.

At 4:52 he knocked on my bedroom doorframe.

"Two minutes."

"I'm packed."

"Lily's coat?"

"It's not winter."

"It's four in the morning. Bring the coat."

I brought the coat.

---

Here's what I remember about walking out of my apartment for the last time.

The door. The one with the broken lock and the piece of wood in the window track.

My shoes by the door. My daughter's shoes next to them, and the little sneakers with the hole in the toe that I'd colored over with a Sharpie like a liar.

The neighbor upstairs. His three songs. He was playing one of them at 4:55 in the morning and I stood in the hallway and listened to it for a second and thought, I'm never gonna hear that again.

Kael's guy took the basket. Kael carried Lily. She didn't wake up. She just put her head on his shoulder and her little hand in his collar and went right back to sleep like she'd been doing it her whole life.

"Come on," Kael said. "Car's out back."

"Out back?"

"Front door's a chokepoint."

"What's a chokepoint?"

"It means if somebody's gonna shoot at us, they're gonna do it at the front."

I stopped walking.

"Kael."

"Keep moving."

"Kael, what did you just say?"

"I said keep moving."

We went down the back stairs. Out the service door. Into the alley.

The black SUV was idling with the doors open and Taz holding one of them and the blond kid — Benny — up on the fire escape with his head turning left and right like a periscope.

I got in the back. Lily went in her car seat. My mother got in next to me. Kael got in the front.

"Go," he said.

And then he turned around and looked at me.

"Ella," he said. "You ever heard a gunshot before?"

My stomach dropped.

"No."

"Then if you hear one, you don't scream. You don't duck. You don't look out the window. You put your head down and you put your body over that car seat. Understand?"

I put my hand on Lily's car seat.

"Yeah," I said. "I understand."

---

We drove out of the alley and onto Willow Street and nothing happened.

No gunshot. No headlights. No black sedan. Just a city at five in the morning with the streetlights on and the garbage truck making its rounds and a man in an apron hosing down the sidewalk in front of a diner.

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.

"Where are we going?" I said.

"The compound."

"What's a compound?"

"Twenty-two acres. Wall around it. A gate. Buildings. A garage. My house is on the back of the property."

"Your house."

"My house. Where I live. Which is where you're gonna live now."

I looked out the window.

"For how long?"

Kael was quiet for a second.

"Ella," he said. "I need to tell you something."

"Great. I love when people say that."

"This isn't gonna be short."

"What?"

"Whatever this is. Whatever my father's doing. It's not gonna be a week. It's not gonna be a month. This is gonna be long."

"How long?"

Kael looked at the road.

"He's been planning this for ten years," he said. "And he's good at this. He's better than me. He was doing this before I was born. So this is gonna be a season of your life. Not a weekend."

I sat with that.

"Okay," I said.

He looked at me in the mirror.

"'Okay'?"

"Okay. A season of my life. Fine. As long as my daughter's alive at the end of it."

Kael's eyes moved back to the road.

"She will be," he said.

"Say it like you believe it."

"I believe it."

"Say it like you're not scared."

"I'm not gonna lie to you, Ella."

I leaned my head against the window.

"Fair enough," I said.

---

The compound was not what I pictured.

I'd pictured a warehouse. Some kind of bunker. Maybe a junkyard with bikes and a dog on a chain.

It was a wall. Brick, twelve feet high, and it went on forever. A gate that opened automatically when we pulled up. A long driveway with trees on both sides.

Then the buildings. Big garage with the doors down. A clubhouse that looked like a giant hunting lodge. A row of smaller houses. A basketball hoop. A playground. An actual playground, with a slide and swings.

"Kael," I said. "There's a playground."

"Old Ladies have kids."

"You have a playground on your compound."

"I didn't build the playground. Marisol built the playground. I just paid for it."

"Who's Marisol?"

"Rook's wife."

The SUV pulled up in front of a house on the back of the property. It was not a mansion. It was a house. A big one, two stories, with a porch and a light on over the door.

Kael got out. Opened my door.

"Home," he said. "For now."

I looked at him.

"For now?"

"Until the farm's done."

"What farm?"

He didn't answer.

I got out of the car.

---

The house was warm. That was the first thing. The heat was already on. The lights were on. Somebody had been here. Somebody had set it up.

There was a crib in the room off the hallway. Not a pack and play. A crib. With sheets. And a little bookshelf. And a box of crayons on top of it.

I stood in that doorway for a long time.

"Who did this?" I said.

"Marisol," Kael said. "Taz's old lady Nadia helped. They did it in an hour."

"How did they know to do it in an hour?"

"Because I called them at four in the morning and told them to."

I sat down on the floor.

"Are you okay?" Kael said.

"No."

"Okay."

"Don't say okay."

"Okay."

"Kael."

He crouched down in front of me.

"Tell me what you need," he said.

"I need to sleep for a hundred years. And when I wake up I need none of this to have ever happened."

"That's not on the menu."

"I know."

He reached out. Pushed a piece of hair off my face. Just that. Just one finger along my cheek. And something in my whole body went soft.

"I'm putting Lily in the crib," he said. "Then you're going to bed. Then I'm going to go out and find out who burned that motel and I'm going to make sure they never do anything like it again."

"Kael."

"Ella."

"Don't go alone."

He looked at me.

"You're not going alone," I said. "You're not doing that thing where you walk out into the night and handle it by yourself and come back with blood on your knuckles and I'm supposed to be okay with it."

"Ella — "

"I'm serious. I just spent three years alone and I am done with the whole thing. If you're going out there, you take your people and you tell me what happens."

Kael looked at me for a long time.

Then he said, "Alright."

"Alright?"

"I'll take Rook and I'll take Taz and I'll tell you what happens."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

---

I don't know how long I slept. I don't even remember getting into bed. But I woke up at some point in the afternoon to a knock on the door, and then Marisol's voice saying, "Ella? Girl. You need to eat."

I got up. I pulled on jeans. I went downstairs.

The kitchen was full of people. Marisol was standing at the stove. Nadia was at the table with a cup of coffee. Taz was leaning against the counter. My mother was sitting in the corner with her trash bag still next to her chair like she was afraid to put it down.

And Lily was sitting in a chair with her feet not touching the ground, eating a pancake, and somebody had given her a stuffed rabbit.

She saw me and raised both arms. "Mama!"

I picked her up.

"Who gave you the rabbit?" I said.

"Marisol."

I looked at Marisol.

Marisol looked at me.

"You're a whole thing, aren't you," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"You walked in here on zero sleep with your kid and your mom and nothing but a laundry basket and you're looking at me like I'm gonna eat you." She turned back to the stove. "Sit. Eat. Nobody here is gonna hurt you."

I sat.

I ate.

It was the first meal I'd eaten in a day and a half.

---

Kael came in at six.

He looked tired. Not tired like he needed coffee. Tired like somebody had taken a piece of him and used it up.

He walked over to the table. Kissed Lily on the head — casual, like he'd been doing it forever. She said, "Hi Papa K," and my mother's eyebrows went up to her hairline and I decided not to deal with that right now.

Then he looked at me.

"Motel owner's a guy named Ferris," he said. "He's a worm. He rents rooms to whoever pays in cash and he doesn't ask questions. But Rook got a photograph off his security camera from three weeks ago."

He put a piece of paper on the table.

A grainy photo of a man in a hoodie.

"You know him?" he said.

I looked at the photo.

Then I looked at it again.

Then I said, "That's not — that's not a man."

"What?"

"That's not a man, Kael. Look at the way she's standing. Look at the ankles. That's a woman."

Kael picked up the photo.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he said, "How do you know?"

"I'm a waitress," I said. "I've looked at a thousand people's feet. She's got narrow ankles and small hands and the hoodie's too big for her. It's a woman."

Kael put the photo down.

"Okay," he said. "So my father sent a woman to pay a motel owner in cash three weeks ago and a woman set the fire. And that same woman is the one who wrote a note to your mother telling her to come to your door."

He looked at me.

"That means he's got a woman on the inside of whatever this is," he said. "Somebody he trusts."

Marisol said, from the stove, "He had one before."

We all turned.

Marisol put the spoon down.

"Ten years ago," she said. "Before he went away. There was a girl he was close to. A girl he had plans for. When he went to prison he sent her away somewhere and nobody's heard of her since."

"What was her name?" Kael said.

Marisol looked at him.

"Sierra," she said. "Sierra Blackwood. Your sister."

The room was very quiet.

Then somebody knocked on the front door.

Kael was already moving. Taz was up. Marisol put her body in front of Nadia and I put mine in front of Lily.

The door opened.

Benny was standing there holding an envelope.

"Boss," he said. "Guy left this at the gate. Said it was for her."

He pointed at me.

Kael took the envelope. Opened it. Read it.

Then he turned it around and held it up so I could see.

One line, in black ink:

Welcome home, daughter-in-law. We'll meet soon.

Chapter 11 Ends.