Page 79 of Joker

Let the dark press in around the edges. Let the memory I’ve been holding back all damn day catch up enough to sting.

My sister’s face never comes back cleanly when I want it to. That’s the problem.

Grief doesn’t work like a movie. It doesn’t line itself up in neat, mournful scenes. It hits in pieces. A laugh that sounds wrong because hers used to be higher. A tiny hand on your finger in a hallway. The weight of a sleepy child against your shoulder. A cartoon voice in the distance that shoves a crack in the wall whether you wanted one there or not.

Tonight it’s the hand. That tiny trusting grip that felt so fucking familiar it made my chest ache.

I tip my head back against the siding and close my eyes for a second. Not long enough to get lost in it. Just enough to let the hurt move through instead of pretending it isn’t there.

She would’ve been grown by now. That thought comes uninvited and mean.

Would’ve had her own life. Her own disasters. Maybe kids. Maybe some asshole boyfriend I would’ve had to threaten for sport. Maybe nothing like that at all. Doesn’t matter. She would’ve had more. That’s the point.

Instead, all I get are scraps.

And now there’s this kid in my hallway and on my shoulder and in my goddamn head, brushing right up against old scar tissue like she can’t tell the difference between fresh and buried.

I laugh once under my breath, no humor in it. “Perfect,” I mutter.

Because of course this is how it happens. Not with some dramatic revelation. Not with one big moment.

Just a hundred little ones that keep landing harder until suddenly I’m standing outside a clubhouse at night realizing the line moved a while ago and I was too busy pretending not to care to notice.

I am already thinking about Raven and Lexi as my responsibility.

Not Logan’s. Not the chapter’s.

Mine.

That truth settles into place so cleanly it almost makes me angry.

Because it’s irrational. Because it’s too fast. Because there is no world where picking up a woman and her daughter for a six-hour night drive is supposed to end with me recalibrating my whole damn protective instinct around them.

And yet.

The chapter is housing them.

Fine.

The chapter owes Grinder.

Fine.

The chapter would absolutely protect them because that’s what we do.

Also fine.

But that’s not what this is anymore and I know it.

Because the chapter isn’t the one who knows which cereal Lexi likes, how Raven takes her coffee, which floorboard in the downstairs hall creaks loudest outside their room, or how many times Raven checks the locks when she thinks nobody’s watching.

I know those things.

I’m the one watching. I’m the one adjusting cameras and checking windows and mentally cataloging who gets too close and how fast I can correct the mistake. I’m the one who heard “Carry” and moved before her mother could answer.

Mine doesn’t mean ownership. It means responsibility. It means if something comes through that gate looking for them, it’s getting me first. And for reasons I’m not ready to unpack, that thought feels less like a burden than it should.

I push off the wall eventually and head back toward the light, because standing out here all night like a miserable bastard isn’t going to solve anything.