Page 19 of My Broken Biker

"Stay here," I tell Angela.

"Why?" she says, not looking up from her drawing.

"Just a minute."

I go to the front door. There's a narrow panel of glass beside it and I look through it before I touch the knob.

Derek is standing on the front step with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the door.

I stop.

He looks exactly like he always looked. That's what hits me first, before anything else.

Dark jeans and a grey jacket and his face that is ordinary and reasonable and gives nothing away about what's underneath it, which is what made years of being afraid of him so difficult to explain to anyone who hadn't been inside it.

He looks like someone you'd have no particular reason to be afraid of.

He knocks again.

I breathe out slowly. My hands are steady when I check them. Angela is fifteen feet away on the living room rug and I am not going to open this door.

I get my phone out and I call Jace.

He picks up on the second ring.

"Derek is at my front door," I say, low, moving into the kitchen doorway where I can see Angela and she can see me. "He's been outside. He watched us come home this morning."

A pause that is short and specific. "Don't open it," he says, and I can already hear movement in the background. "Has he said anything?"

"Not yet. He just knocked twice."

"Talk through the door if you need to. I'm coming. Twenty minutes." A beat. "Knox is with me."

I didn't know that. I don't know what it means that Knox is with him but I feel the weight of it without fully understanding it yet. "Okay," I say.

"Stay on the line," he says.

I set the phone on the counter with the call open and I go back to the front door.

"Derek," I say through it.

"Harper." His voice is the same, even, the tone he uses at the beginning of things. "I'm not here to cause trouble. I drove a long way and I just want to talk."

"You have a restraining order against you," I say. "You know that!"

"That was filed in a different state. I've spoken to a lawyer about the jurisdictional question." His voice has the practised reasonableness of someone who has rehearsed this. "And I have rights. Angela is my daughter."

"You signed those rights away," I say. "Yourself. Years ago."

"I'd like to discuss that," he says. "I've thought about a lot of things. I've changed. If you'd just give me five minutes to talk, face to face, we could—"

"I'm not opening the door."

A pause. Then the tone shifts, just slightly, just enough: "Harper. I'm not going to stand on your porch all day. Sooner or later we're going to have a conversation. It can happen now or it can happen another way."

"No," I say. "It can't."

I go back to the kitchen. Angela has turned over on the rug and is sitting up looking at me with the expression she gets when she's understood that something is wrong.