Page 34 of Colt
Knox nodded, his lower lip trembling. He grabbed my arm with both of his, small fingers digging into my skin.
I cleaned the wound with antiseptic, quick and efficient. Knox whimpered but didn’t cry out, his grip tightening on my arm. When I smoothed on the antibiotic ointment and covered it with a large bandage, he let out a shaky breath.
“There.” I sat back on my heels. “Good as new. You’ll be back on your bike soon.”
Knox sniffled, looking down at the bandage. “You’re good at this.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you learn in biker school?”
I almost laughed. “Something like that. You patch up a lot of scrapes when you spend your life on two wheels.”
“I wish…” Knox started, then stopped, glancing at his mother.
“What do you wish?” I asked quietly.
He looked back at me, and for the first time since I’d met him, there was no fear in his eyes. Just a kid who’d gotten hurt and found someone to make it better.
“I wish you’d been here before,” he said. “For the other times I got hurt.”
As he said it, he glanced past my shoulder toward the doorway—toward Luca—so fast I almost missed it. Something happened between them. A whole conversation in the space of a breath, in a language I didn’t have access to.
It unsettled me in a way I couldn’t quite name. Like walking into a room where everyone already knows the punchline and nobody thinks to explain it because it’s just always been that way.
I had to swallow twice before I could speak. “Me too, buddy. I wish I’d been here for every scraped knee, every nightmare, every first day of school. I missed so much.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Knox said it simply, like it was obvious. “Mama said the bad men lied to you. That’s not the same as leaving us on purpose.”
I couldn’t look at Lilac. Couldn’t look at anyone. If I did, I was going to lose it completely, and crying in front of my sons wasn’t going to help anything.
“That’s right,” I managed. “But I’m here now. And I’m not going anywhere.”
Knox studied my face for a long moment. Then, slowly, he released my hand and reached up to pat my cheek awkwardly, the way a child comforts an adult when they don’t quite know what they’re doing.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We can start from now.”
?
Later, after Knox was settled on the couch with ice cream and cartoons, I found myself on the back porch with Luca.
He’d been quiet through the whole thing, watching from the doorway as I bandaged his brother’s knee. Now he sat on the top step, his book abandoned beside him, staring at the bike Knox had crashed.
“Everything okay?” I asked, lowering myself onto the step beside him. Not too close—I’d learned to give him space.
“Yeah.” Luca didn’t look at me. “He always bounces back fast.”
“What about you?”
That got a reaction. Luca’s head whipped around, his green eyes—my eyes—narrowing with suspicion. “What about me?”
“Scared you too, I bet. Seeing your brother get hurt.”
For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. He looked at the floor. “I’m supposed to protect him.”
“Says who?”
“Me.” He lifted his chin, defiant. “I’m older. By four minutes. That makes me responsible.”
