Page 92 of Deacon

I closed my eyes for half a second before forcing myself to face what I had spent sixteen years protecting.

Jackson looked from Jade to me, then back to her. I couldn’t know what he saw in her face, only that he stopped looking at her like a stranger. The stillness in him turned absolute.

Jade’s confusion sharpened too. She had seen the photographs.

Jackson’s focus never left her. “Who is that?”

My throat tightened around every possible answer.

His attention came back to me, certainty beginning to replace confusion. Jackson’s voice dropped lower. Rougher. “Lila.”

There was no answer I wanted to give in front of Priest and Blue, with Jade trapped inside the same moment. “Please don’t do this out here.”

Jade looked past us toward the entrance to the lot. Her expression changed first.

Then she said, with sudden certainty, “Grandpa and Uncle Matty came back.”

I turned. My father’s truck was rolling straight toward us.

25

Deacon

The first thing I noticed was her eyes.

Green. Lila’s green.

They hit hard enough to steal my breath. I had carried those eyes for years without meaning to, caught them in dreams and memories I never knew what to do with after Lila disappeared from my life. Now they stared back at me from a face too young and too familiar.

The girl came out of the apartment distracted by her phone, took a few steps toward the truck, then looked up.

And stopped.

So did I.

Traffic moved beyond the complex. Blue’s baby fussed against her shoulder, and somewhere behind me Evan said something low to Ink. None of it reached me properly anymore.

She looked like me.

There was nothing vague or generous about the resemblance, nothing somebody could dismiss as coincidence because we happened to share a hair color. My mouth. My jaw. Even the wary set of her body struck somewhere deep, that braced look of somebody waiting for the world to explain itself before she gave it anything.

Then she looked at Lila, and I saw her there too. Those green eyes. The expression around them. Pieces of two people I knew too well assembled into somebody I had never seen before.

Jesus Christ.

“Mom?”

A tiny sound left Lila, almost nothing, but I heard it. She stood close beside me, pale in a way I had never seen. The fear on her face had nothing to do with danger. She looked cornered, as if the thing she had been trying to prevent had arrived before she could decide how to survive it.

“Please,” she said, voice low and tight enough only I could hear it. “Please don’t do this out here.”

I stared at her, then at the girl.

There are moments that split a life cleanly in two. Everything before, everything after. I could feel mine dividing while years crashed together inside me: that night with Lila, leaving, everything that came after, and seventeen years of anger with nowhere useful to go. I had carried questions I thought I understood because I never knew there was one this big waiting underneath all of them.

The answer stood twenty feet away with Lila’s eyes and my goddamn face.

“Lila?” I asked again, and my voice barely sounded like mine.