Page 111 of The Final Cut

“And not with everyone staring at me like I’m a rescued dog.”

Shiloh lowers his gaze to his plate. Ever turns back toward the stove, though there is nothing left to cook. Nash leans against the counter, arms folded, face unreadable. Deacon looks down at his coffee.

Men who take orders when they matter.

I shift in my chair to face her more fully. “Okay.”

Delia’s throat moves. “If I tell you things, you don’t get to look at me like I’m dead.”

The sentence opens something under my ribs.

I think of all the ways I have looked at her since she walked into the cabin. Like a ghost. Like proof. Like grief that learned to talk back. Like the girl I lost and this woman I don’t know and desperately want to know. Maybe those looks hurt worse than anger because she had no defense for being mourned while breathing.

I nod once.

“Agreed. As long as you don’t talk to me like I should be dead.”

Her eyes lift to mine.

There’s a flash of pain. A flash of offense. Then something that looks almost like respect, which is ridiculous because we are sitting in a kitchen with a cat shedding on her borrowed sweatpants and a poached egg cooling on her plate.

She looks down at Homer.

“Fine,” she says.

The word is small, but it holds. It’s not forgiveness, and it’s not peace.

But it’s the first thing we’ve built together since we were seven.

And it’s going to stand.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EVER

By noon, Reva and Delia have learned how to sit in the same room without making a thousand tiny cuts they don’t mean to and can’t avoid.

It’s not smooth. It’s not easy. The silences between them still have teeth, and both of them keep finding old wounds by accident, stepping on memories as if the floor is scattered with broken glass. But they are on the sofa together, a careful space between them, with Homer stretched across Delia’s lap like he has appointed himself a furry referee.

I sit in my room full of monitors just off the living area and pretend I’m giving them privacy.

The room is small by design, tucked behind a sliding panel of dark wood that stays open unless we need the room sealed. From here, I can see the main living area, the wall of bullet-resistant glass facing the marsh, the dock feed, the old access-road camera, the east sensor grid, the hospital feed, and the map of every moving piece that keeps this cabin breathing.

I can also hear them.

Reva has been trying for twenty minutes to make conversation without making it feel like an interrogation, which is difficult for a woman whose nerves show up wearing boxing gloves. She asks Delia whether she remembers a neighbor with a yellow bike. Delia says the bike was green. Reva argues it was yellow because she fell off it and got paint on her knee. Delia says the paint was green too. Reva calls her impossible. Delia tells her she always was dramatic.

Then they both go quiet because always is still a trigger word.

A minute later, Reva asks whether Delia remembers their father whistling in the kitchen on Sunday mornings.

Delia answers so softly I almost miss it. “Badly.”

Reva laughs once. It breaks at the end.

I look down at the screen in front of me because watching them feels too intimate. I have seen Reva naked, furious, terrified, laughing around Shiloh’s cock, bleeding from old memories, and standing with a gun in her hand over a body she put on the ground. Somehow this is harder. Reva on one end of the sofa and Delia on the other, trying to pass pieces of childhood back and forth without admitting how many are missing.

It gets under my ribs and squeezes.