Chapter Two

Welcome To The Family

SHAW

The room is too nice and that’s a problem.

I’m not being ungrateful. I understand, intellectually, that a bed with actual thread count and a window that opens voluntarily is an improvement on what I’ve been sleeping on for four years. I understand this.

But there’s something deeply unsettling about standing in a room this clean holding a duffel bag this empty. Like the room is making a point about me without saying a word.

I don’t deserve inhabiting it.

I unpack in four minutes because that’s how long it takes to unpack when everything you own fits in one bag. Three shirts. Two pairs of jeans. One jacket that has seen better decades. A paperback I’ve already read twice. A photograph of my late mom I keep face down because I'm never ready to look at the disappointment on her face.

I put the empty duffel under the bed and sit on the edge of the mattress.

It’s the softest thing I’ve touched in four years.

I stood back up immediately, like I sat on hot coal.

This is undeserving.

Mayor Richard Hale arrives home at six fifty-eight, which means he’s the kind of man who says seven and means six fifty-eight. I hear the front door, then voices downstairs, then Mrs. Able calling up that dinner will be ready in twenty minutes.

I change into the least wrinkled of my three shirts and go down.

The mayor is nothing like his son.

He’s a polite man in his mid-fifties, with the kind of face that was probably very handsome thirty years ago and settled gracefully into distinguished. He’s still in his work shirt, tie loosened, and when he sees me at the bottom of the stairs he crosses the room with his hand already extended.

“Shaw.” He shakes my hand firmly. “Richard Hale. You’re welcome, son.”

I shake it. “Thank you for having me, sir.”

“None of that. Richard is fine.” He claps me once on the shoulder like we’re old friends reuniting after a long trip and not a mayor greeting a convicted felon in his foyer. “How was the journey over? Mrs. Able got you settled alright?”

“Yes sir. She did.”

“Good, good.” He gestures toward the dining room. “Come on then. I hope you’re hungry. Mrs Able cooks tremendously.”

I follow him in and find Lucas already seated at the long dining table, phone face down beside his plate, expression arranged into something that communicates polite tolerance.

He doesn’t look up when I sit down across from him.

Dinner is lamb and roasted vegetables and bread that was clearly baked in this house today, and under different circumstances I think I might actually enjoy it.

The mayor talks easily—about the city, about a council meeting that clearly irritated him, about a road construction project that has been ongoing for two years longer than it should have been. He includes me in the conversation naturally, asking questions without making them feel like an intake form.

How long I was in Blackridge. What kind of work I was looking for. If I have any skills besides the obvious.

I answer honestly. In short sentences. Nothing volunteered that wasn’t asked for.

Lucas says almost nothing.

He eats quietly with an efficiency of someone who is physically present and mentally somewhere else entirely. Contributing the occasional word when his father addresses him directly. Otherwise, he’s just there. Sitting still. Watching his plate.

Except when he’s watching me.

I caught it twice. The third time I catch it, I hold his glare.

Lucas doesn’t look away immediately. He holds it for exactly three beats longer than someone with nothing to hide would, then drops his gaze back to his plate without any change in expression.

I file that away.

“You were convicted on a single count,” the mayor says, reaching for the bread. It doesn’t sound accusatory, just conversational, the way men like him discuss things that would make other people uncomfortable. “No priors. The prosecutor’s notes described you as…what was the phrase.” He thinks for a moment. “Peripheral involvement.”

“That was their assessment,” I say.

He nods slowly. “And yours?”

I pick up my fork. “I was in the wrong place making wrong choices for what felt like the right reasons at the time.”

The mayor considers this. Seems to find it satisfactory. “Well. You’re here now.”

“I’m here now,” I agree.

Silence settles for a moment, the comfortable kind, or what passes for comfort in a house where one of the three people at the table is actively radiating hostility at a low frequency.

Then Lucas speaks.

“Blackridge closed its east wing eighteen months ago.” He says it to his plate, conversational, almost bored. “Due to an inside murder case. They relocated about sixty inmates to the main block.” A pause. “You were in the east wing when you were sentenced.”

He finally looks up.

“Bit of a rough transition, that must have been.”

The table goes quiet.

The mayor glances at his son briefly with the expression of a father who has spent decades managing his son’s social situations and has made peace with the effort it requires.

I look at Lucas.

He looks back at me—perfectly calm, and neutral, the picture of casual dinner conversation.

My east wing transfer was not public information. It wasn’t in any news article. It wasn’t in my conviction record. It was a standard internal relocation logged in Blackridge’s administrative files.

I pick up my glass.

“News to me that you follow prison logistics so closely,” I say pleasantly.

Something moves behind his eyes. It’s brief and controlled.

“I’m just a curious person,” he says, shrugging.

“Must be nice,” I say. “Having the time.”

The mayor clears his throat and asks Mrs. Able about dessert.

Lucas goes back to his plate.

But for the rest of dinner I can feel him not looking at me—which, I’m learning, is somehow louder than when he is.

I’m back in my room by nine.

I sit on the edge of that obscenely soft mattress and stare at the opposite wall and think about the east wing.

My mind drifts to Lucas' statement. I think about how Lucas knew, about the way he said it so casually. Like it was nothing. Like he hadn’t just revealed that he knows details about my incarceration that he has absolutely no reason to know.

Maybe it’s nothing.

Maybe the mayor pulled my full file when the placement was arranged and Lucas read over his shoulder. Maybe it’s administrative information that moves through official channels I don’t understand. Maybe I’m a man fresh out of prison looking for threats in dark corners because that’s what four years inside a cage teaches you to do.

Maybe.

I lie back on the mattress and look at the ceiling.

Down the hall, a door opens and closes. Footsteps. Then silence.

Lucas’s light is still on. I can see it under my door, a thin gold strip on the hardwood floor. Still on at nine. Still on at ten. Still on at ten forty-five when I’m still staring at the ceiling running the same loop.

I should sleep. I should be grateful. I should focus on the hundred and nineteen days remaining and not on the man down the hall who knew something he shouldn’t.

I’m almost drifting to sleep when I hear two quiet knocks at my door.

I sit up.

Lucas pushes the door open and leans on the frame, shoulder against the wood, arms loose at his sides, like he’s just passing by and this is incidental. He looks around my room once with the slow, measured gaze of a property inspector finding problems.

His eyes land on the sealed single window. The bare walls. The duffel bag corner. The paperback on the nightstand.

He clicks his tongue softly.

“Little shit,” he says, “You don’t need to shut the window.” A pause. He meets my eyes. “Rest assured, there are no thieves around. I know that’s what you’re used to.”

He pushes off the doorframe.

“Sleep well, Carter.”

He pulls the door shut behind him.