Page 71 of Colt
We stood there for a moment, both of us pretending we weren’t emotional wrecks. Then Luca climbed into the truck, buckling his seatbelt with the solemnity of a six-year-old who’d just made a monumental decision.
“Can we come back tomorrow?” he asked. “Uncle Handful said he’d teach me how to shuffle cards like a pro.”
Daddy. Uncle Handful. Family.
I had to grip the steering wheel to keep my hands steady.
“Yeah, buddy. We can come back tomorrow.”
Knox was still chattering, oblivious to the seismic shift that had just occurred. But Luca caught my eye in the rearview mirror as I pulled out of the lot, and the tiniest smile crossed his serious face.
Chapter 28
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— Lilac —
Last night had been good. That was the thought I kept coming back to as I stood at the counter with my coffee, the house quiet around me.Last night had been good.
I’d cooked. Nothing elaborate, just the chicken and rice dish I’d been making for years, the one Knox claimed was the best thing on earth even though it was really quite simple. Betty had flitted happily in and out of the kitchen, and Colt had sat at the table while I worked, talking to the boys about nothing in particular. Just easy conversation. The kind a family has.
After dinner, I’d had an idea.
There was a box of early photos on a shelf in Betty’s hallway—scan pictures, bump photos, birth photos, years’ worth of moments after. I’d been thinking about it for a couple of days without quite naming why. Colt had missed all of it. Every ordinary, specific thing that made the boys who they were—he hadn’t been there for any of it.
I couldn’t give him those years back. But I could show him some of them.
I got out the albums.
I’d spread everything across the kitchen table. Prenatal scan photos—little blobs of grey static that Luca studied with intense concentration, as though he could identify himself in the haze. My bump photos, a whole sequence of them Betty had taken of me standing sideways in her kitchen with my hands cradlingmy stomach, getting rounder and more tired-looking in each shot. Birth photos that Betty had taken. The first picture of me holding them both, one in each arm, looking absolutely wrung out but so, so happy.
Birthdays. First steps, caught on video but freeze-framed into prints. The first time they got haircuts. Knox’s phase of wearing a cape everywhere. Luca learning to ride his bike, triumphant and filthy.
I’d told the stories as they came back to me.This was the day they refused to nap and I thought I was losing my mind.Here’s Luca after he tried to eat an entire jar of peanut butter when Betty’s back was turned.That cape-Knox wore it everywhere for four months, I have no idea what started it.
Colt had asked questions.What were they like as newborns? Were they different from each other even then?He’d had his phone out at some point and I’d noticed him photographing the photographs, careful and unhurried, making sure to get them clear. He didn’t say anything about it. Just did it.
Then, toward the end of the evening, after the boys had gone to bed, he’d saidI brought something. Hold on.
He’d gone out to his truck and come back with a shoebox.
He’d set it down on the table and explained it simply, without preamble—the way he explained most things. When I disappeared, he’d packed everything. Our apartment, whatever was in it, anything that was ours. Boxed it all up and put it in a storage unit in Texas because he hadn’t been able to look at it and hadn’t been able to throw it away. When he joined Venom Riders, he’d paid a company to collect the unit and move it to storage on club grounds, where it had sat for years without him opening it.
He’d opened it last week. Gone through the boxes and found some photos, and the shoebox had been sitting in his truck since then.
He’d laid them out one by one, across the space where the boys’ photos had been. As he set each one down he said a few words.
A gas station somewhere.You insisted on paying for gas. Every single time. Never won that argument.
Me in a coat that was clearly his, sleeves past my hands.You kept it. I stopped asking for it back.
Places I didn’t recognize. A life I couldn’t remember. But the girl in those photographs was at ease—with the camera, with the man behind it, with the ordinary shape of a life she knew by heart.
And the wedding photo. Small, slightly blurred, clearly taken by someone who wasn’t a professional. Me in a white dress I didn’t remember choosing. Colt in a dark shirt and his cut, his hands around mine, looking at me like he’d never seen anything so necessary in his life.
He hadn’t said anything about that one. Just placed it last and let it sit.
I hadn’t known what to say about any of it. I’d looked at each photo for a long time.
