Page 36 of Charging Dodge

"The kids need somewhere settled. School. Routine. People who know their names." I pause. "Amelia needs someone real to talk to, not just me at two in the morning talking her back down."

"Yeah," he says. "She does."

I lift my head and look at him. "Say something that isn't agreement."

The corner of his mouth pulls up. "Come to Muscogee with me." I hold his eyes, trying to figure out if he’s joking or being sincere. "Not because you've got nowhere else to go," he adds, voice level. "Not because you need somebody to rescue you. I know you don't." He shifts, adjusting so he can see my face properly. "I want you there. I want all of you there. I want to wake up and know where you are. I want Noah asking me questions about motorcycles at breakfast. I want Carter to have somewhere to put all that energy that isn't fear." He pauses. "And I want you. Not as a problem I solved. As a person I want in my life." I look at him for a long moment. "There's a house two blocks from the clubhouse," he continues. "Three bedrooms, solid yard. It's been sitting empty. It's not fancy."

"I don't need fancy."

"No," he agrees. "You need solid. You need a front door that locks and a school that won't ask too many questions and somewhere Amelia can use actual coloring books."

I exhale something that's almost a laugh. "She's going to need a lot of them."

He chuckles before announcing, "She can have every one in the store."

I press my smile against his shoulder. "I want to be there," I tell him, and I say it flat and clear because he gave it to me straight and he deserves the same. "I've been telling myself it was too much, that I couldn't ask that of you, that the kids were my problem and not yours." I pause. "But I don't want to leave. I don't want to go somewhere else and start over and act like none of this happened. Like you didn't happen." He looks at me, waiting for me to expand, so I do. "I want to be somewhere you are," I say. "That's what I want."

He doesn't make a big thing out of it. He just pulls me a little closer and settles back, his jaw resting against the top of my head. "Then stay," he says quietly. "Come home with me."

"Okay," I say. A decision, not a wish. "We'll go home with you to Muscogee."

His arm tightens around me once, brief and solid. Outside the door the house is starting to wake in pieces. Footsteps somewhere down the hall. Noah's voice, low and sleepy, asking something. The screen door opening and closing as Hulk makes his rounds. I don't move. Neither does Dodge. This is what it's supposed to feel like. Not the absence of hard things, because there are still hard things waiting, Carter still needs to grieve what he lost, Amelia still wakes up in the dark, there will be paperwork and questions and the long work of piecing a life together from whatever made it out of Colorado. But none of that is this moment. This room. This specific quiet.

His heartbeat. The birds outside. My siblings alive down the hall.

I close my eyes and stay.

EPILOGUE

Dodge

The morning we're supposed to leave, my mother makes enough pancakes to feed a small army, which is basically what's parked in her front yard.

I count the bikes from the porch. Mine, Glacier's, Rebel's, Cobra's, Hulk's, Speed's, and Creeper's. Seven machines lined up along the gravel, chrome catching the early sun, saddlebags already packed. It's more men than we need for a two-hour ride down the highway, but nobody's taking chances anymore. Not after everything.

"You're going to eat all of these before the kids get one bite," Rebel teases, already reaching for a third pancake from the stack Miranda's carrying to the table.

"Then you shouldn't have grown into a bottomless pit," she fires back, swatting his hand with the spatula before setting the plate down.

Noah's at the table already, swinging his legs, syrup on his chin before he's even touched the food. Amelia sits next to him with her backpack on the chair beside her, the one that used to carry a ledger full of dead men's sins and now just carries crayons and a stuffed rabbit Miranda bought her two weeks ago. Carter stands near the window with his arms crossed, watching the bikes the way he watches everything now, cataloging, assessing, making sure the world's still steady under his feet.

"You ready for today?" I ask him.

He shrugs, but there's something loose in his shoulders that wasn't there a month ago. "Guess so. Keep thinking about what needs fixing once we get down there. Hulk says the place near the compound needs a lot of work."

"It does." Roof's soft in a couple spots, and the porch won't hold anybody heavier than Amelia yet. "You'll get your chance to swing a hammer soon enough."

He doesn't say thanks. He just nods once, like it's a fact we're both confirming, and goes back to watching the bikes.

We've spent the better part of a month here, healing in ways that don't show up on any hospital chart. Miranda's guest rooms turned into something more permanent than any of us planned, quilts smoothed flat every morning, a rhythm to breakfast that didn't exist before. I found a place two blocks from the clubhouse before I ever left to end things with Gallows, four bedrooms and a yard big enough for Noah to run wild in without anybody worrying he'll wander into the road. Nobody's touched a hammer on it yet. That work starts the day we roll in. Carter's asked twice already if he can help with the roof, and I've told him twice that's exactly what I want from him.

"You'll come visit," Miranda insists, not really a question, setting a hand on Adalynn's shoulder as she pours coffee.

"Try and stop us," Adalynn tells her, and it isn't the polite kind of promise people make when they don't mean it. I've watched the two of them over the last month, watched my mother fold Adalynn into her kitchen like she's been standing there her whole life, watched Adalynn stop flinching every time Miranda touches her arm. That took time. Everything with Adalynn takes exactly as much time as it needs and not a second less.

Hulk comes through the screen door, ducking his head under the frame out of habit even though he clears it by a foot. "Bikes are fueled. Bags are strapped down." He looks at the table, at the stack of pancakes dwindling fast. "Is there any left for the actual convoy or did Rebel eat the whole convoy's breakfast?"

"There's plenty," Miranda adds, already sliding another plate toward him. "Sit."