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I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything. I just carry Matthew, asleep against my shoulder, worn out from the long dark drive, toward the little back bedroom.

Pyke’s there before me, turning down the quilt. I’ve barely spoken ten words to Pyke Langham. He’s a big, quiet man, one of Carmine’s best. But he takes one look at Matthew slumped and fretful against me, and something in the big man gentles.

“May I?” he asks. “Got three of my own. Youngest is about his age. I know the drill.”

I smile, nod, and hand Matthew over. Then I watch this enormous man settle my son into the bed with a tenderness that undoes something in me. He tucks the quilt just so and finds the gray rabbit in the bag and tucks it against Matthew’s chest.

When Matthew stirs and whimpers, “Mama?” Pyke’s low voice answers before I can, easy and certain.

“Mom’s right here, little man. Two feet away. Nobody’s going anywhere. You’re safe. Go on back to sleep.”

Pyke straightens, catches my expression, and shrugs almost as if embarrassed. “Kids can tell when you’re scared,” he says quietly. “So you learn not to be. Or at least not to let them know. It’s the same thing to them, really.”

He nods at the door. “I’ll take the front room. First watch is mine. You two,” he nods to me and Enzo, “have some downtime. He’s got to leave early.”

With that, he goes to sit up in the dark with a gun so he can keep my son safe.

Later, when the cabin’s quiet and Matthew’s deep under, Enzo and I end up on the porch. The lake is black glass. The cold comes off it clean and sharp. He stands at the rail with his good shoulder toward me and watches the water, and through the window behind us, we can both see Matthew, a small mound under the quilt, the rabbit’s ear just visible.

“I used to think he ruined us by being cruel,” Enzo says. He doesn’t look at me. “My father, I mean. I spent my whole life thinking that was the wound: the coldness, the fear, the things he did. I thought if I could just be less cruel than him, I’d have broken it.”

“And now?”

“Now I think the cruelty was never the worst of it.” He keeps his eyes on the water. “The worst of it was that, never once, as long as I’ve been alive, did he ever admit he was wrong about anything. Not David, not Genevieve, not what he made me into.”

I say nothing. I just listen to him speak.

“He built his whole self out of never being wrong, and it turned everyone around him into ghosts.” He finally turns to look at me. “That’s the real inheritance. Not the violence. And I’ll never pass that down to Matthew.”

“My mother tried to leave him once,” he says. “I was eleven. She got as far as the Verrazzano before his men brought her back. She never tried again. She stayed in her room on the third floor for six years, and then she died in it, of pneumonia, at forty-one, and he stood up at her funeral and called it a tragedy and meant it.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Genevieve was right, that night at the party. The women in this house don’t get happy endings. I watched it happen to my mother. I won’t watch it happen to you.”

He tips his head toward the window, toward the room where Matthew is sleeping. “I won’t do to Matthew what was done to me.” He pauses, swallows. “And I won’t do it to you.”

On a cold porch, looking out at a black lake, with our son asleep behind the glass and a war waiting three hours south, something in me that has been clenched tight for five years finally, quietly, lets go.

“When I come back,” he says, “I’m not bringing the war with me. It’s going to stay in the city, and that’s where it’ll end. When you see me come up this road, know that that means it’s over.” He glances at the cabin, the lake, the sleeping boy. “This is what I’m fighting to get to. And I’ll make damn sure it doesn’t follow me.”

His hand finally lands on my face, warm and careful. “This is what I’m fighting for.”

I lean into his hand. I let myself, for one night, believe in the thing he’s describing.

For one night, I let it be real.

And then I reach up and take a fistful of his shirt the way I always do, because the choosing is mine and I want him to know it.

CHAPTER 35

STEVIE

The kiss that follows is nothing like the others.

It’s slow, gentle, his mouth pressing against my lips as I rise onto my tiptoes and pull him closer by the fistful of fabric in my grasp. His good hand cradles the back of my head. The cold air from the lake has made its way to the cabin, but between us, there’s only the warmth of his nearness.

His tongue finds mine, and I moan into his kiss, letting his taste wash over me. His hardness presses against my middle, and I feel a pulse of heat and wetness between my thighs.

He breaks the kiss, his forehead resting against mine. “Inside,” he murmurs, “before I forget we’re not the only ones here.”

He hauls me against him with his good arm, and I feel the hitch in his breath as the movement pulls at his wounded shoulder.