Page 86 of Carry on Wayward Son

She came through the door, predictably laden with bags of food, announcing as she came that Daniel had gone up to the Coast Guard station at Nags Head to check in with his superiors and would be back by afternoon. Willa was already at the counter with a bowl of black-eyed peas soaking in water, because apparently we were ringing in the new year right regardless of the fact that we were also strategizing how to keep me alive.

I kind of loved them for the way they clung to the normal, made room for the ritual, refused to let the threat take the whole of the day. Black-eyed peas for luck and bacon for breakfast, and the world’s troubles could wait until everyone was fed.

“You’re on onions,” Willa told me, pointing at a cutting board. “Since you’re the knife expert.”

I laughed. I actually laughed, the sound surprising me. “I think I can handle that.”

So I chopped onions while Willa got bacon going in a cast-iron skillet, and Gabi unpacked enough food to feed three times our number, and the kitchen filled with the smells of it. The talk around me was easy and ordinary and not about any of the things that mattered most. Nobody made me feel strange. Nobody treated me like a ghost, or a victim, or a problem to be managed. They just folded me into the morning like I’d always been part of it, like the chair I’d sat in for weeks had always had my name on it.

Maybe for them it was that easy. Maybe when you’d spent more than a decade grieving someone, having them back, alive and chopping your onions, was simple in a way that overrode everything else.

Madden showed up next.

She let herself in the way the rest of them did, calling out that Rios had gone to the station, shedding her coat by the door. And the moment I saw her, I knew there was something I needed to do.

Because I wasn’t sure I’d handled her right last night. Not that there was a manual for it. Not that anyone had ever written a guide for how to tell your cousin you weren’t actually dead after she’d given years of her life to your missing persons case. I’d dropped the truth on all of them at once because that had been the only way I could do it. But Madden was blood, and blood deserved more than a group reveal and a contact case.

“Can I talk to you?” I tipped my head toward the dining room.

She nodded and followed.

We stepped inside, and of course her gaze went straight to the target. The plywood with its spray-painted rings and the cleared floor. One brow winged up.

“Are we training for something?”

Smooth as water, I drew one of the knives from the sheath at my thigh and threw it. It buried itself in the center of the target with a solid thunk. “Always. It helps settle me.”

Madden looked at the knife quivering in the wood. Then she closed her eyes. “I can’t even imagine⁠—”

“Don’t.” I reached out and laid a hand on her arm. “Seriously. Don’t go there. It’s not productive, and it doesn’t help either of us. I survived. That’s the piece that matters. That’s the only piece that matters.”

She didn’t say anything. Her eyes stayed closed for a moment longer, and I watched her work to put something back in its box, the same way I’d watched her hold herself together last night, the family resemblance written all over the effort of it.

I dropped my hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. Any of you.”

“I understand why.” She opened her eyes. “Or I can surmise. WITSEC?”

“Yeah.”

“They wouldn’t even let you tell your parents?”

“At the time, they had no idea who was involved. Who could be trusted, how far it reached.” I shook my head. “It killed me not to tell them. That they still don’t know. But right or wrong, it wasn’t my call to make. By the time I had any say in it, I’d already lost them. There was no way to undo it without putting everyone at risk.”

She nodded slowly, taking it in, processing it the way she processed everything, her prosecutor’s mind turning it over, looking at it from the angles, filing each piece where it belonged. Then she said, “I need to ask you something.”

“I’ll answer if I can.”

“When did you know it was me who reached out to Devon?”

“Almost as soon as you put in the case request.” I watched that detail land.

“Does he know who you are?”

“No. Nobody at Unaccounted does.” I held her gaze because this part mattered, and I needed her to hear it. “And to be clear, I didn’t have any idea you and Devon were friends until your request came through. But once it did, he needed to send someone, and I made sure that someone was me. Because it was you asking. Because you never gave up on me.” My throat tightened around the words. “That mattered, Madden. Even when I didn’t know it was happening, it mattered. You mattered.”

That was what did it.

Madden’s composure, the careful, contained thing she wore the way I wore mine, finally cracked clean through. She crossed the space between us and pulled me in, and this wasn’t last night’s stunned, disbelieving embrace. This was the tight, fierce hug of family. The hug of someone who’d been holding a grief shaped exactly like me for all these years and was only now, finally, allowed to set it down.