Page 24 of A Very Bumpy Christmas
“I’m not asking you to,” she says, hugging her arms around herself. “I’m telling you my boundary. I can’t build a life with someone who’s always packing a go-bag. I won’t put my heart in a schedule with wheels-up times.”
There’s a version of me that argues now, that points out I came back, that I showed up today, that I’d been trying to call. There’s a version that confesses I’m the idiot who saidI don’t do complicatedbecause it felt safer than admitting I wanted something I didn’t have a plan for.
The man who actually exists swallows all of that because I can see she needs space more than she needs my defense. And because I asked the wrong question in a fluorescent baby store and watched her armor slam into place.
She moves to the door, hand on the knob. It’s not a shove, but it’s a dismissal with manners. “Thank you for the hospital,” she says. “Really.”
“I want more than weekends,” I say, quietly. It’s the only hill in the room I recognize.
She looks at me a long second. Whatever she thinks, she doesn’t hand it over. “Good night, Lucas.”
My body knows how to leave a room without making a mess. Boots. Jacket. Keys. I step into the hall because staying would be a different kind of damage.
At the elevator, I take one breath, four-count in, four-count hold, four-count out. Box breathing. It doesn’t fix anything, but it keeps me from punching drywall.
The SUV is cold. I like it that way. I sit with my hands on the wheel until the heater stops wheezing and the windshield clears. My phone lights: a text from Duke?—
DUKE: Client wheels arrived early. We’re repositioning to South Harbor. You in?
En route
I type. Then:
Might be useless company.
Three dots.
DUKE: We’ll discuss.
I drive, city lights smearing on wet asphalt, wipers clicking steady. “Weekend father,” I say to the empty truck, testing the phrase like a bruise. My jaw aches again.
At the marina, the air tastes like metal and salt. Holiday lights are strung along the boardwalk in cheerful loops that feel like a dare. I pull into the shadow of a delivery van. Duke raps the hood twice, climbs into the passenger seat, brings a draft of cold air and hunter’s quiet with him.
“You look like a man who got handed a problem set with no right answers,” he says, buckling in.
“Feels like one.” My voice is sandpaper.
Gunner’s SUV idles two spaces down, a dark silhouette topped by his trucker cap. He crackles the radio with a low, dry: “Ihave eyes on the south entrance. And, uh, congrats, I guess? If ‘congrats’ is the word.”
“Thanks,” I say. It scrapes less the second time.
Duke watches my profile. He’s a professional at letting silence do surgery. “A baby, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“How you gonna handle it?”
I give him the truth he’ll respect. “Not sure.”
He grunts. “You breathing now?”
“Trying.”
We scan for fifteen seconds. It’s habit, and it buys me time. A couple stumbles past in knitted hats, laughing too loud. A gull screams at no one. I report what I see because I need a sentence I can finish. “Two private patrols on rotation. One black sedan circling the block for a second pass. No plates in our registry.”
“Copy,” Gunner says. “Clocking the sedan.”
Duke lets that ride, then: “What do you want?”
