Page 21 of My Broken Biker

"Last time," Jace says.

Derek makes a mistake then. He closes his hand around Jace's forearm and says: "Move."

What happens next is fast and total and precise.

One moment Derek's hand is on his arm and the next Derek is face down on the porch boards with his arm wrenched behind him and Jace has a knee between his shoulder blades and the cane is against the railing and none of it appeared to cost anything, which is its own specific communication about what is actually happening here.

Derek makes a sound. Jace doesn't.

"Done?" Jace says.

Silence. Then: "Done."

Jace gets to his feet, which costs him something, a hand on the porch railing and a moment, and then he's upright and he retrieves the cane and steps back and watches Derek find his own feet and brush his jacket down. That's all he does. There's nothing else required.

Knox comes up the steps.

He stops in front of Derek and says his full name, both names, and something in Derek's posture shifts before Knox has said anything else. Knox speaks quietly enough that I catch only pieces of it. Derek's name again, this address, her daughter, but I don't need to catch everything because I can read what it's doing to Derek's face.

Whatever Knox knows, it's more than Derek expected anyone here to know, and that specific gap between what Derek thought was private and what Knox has laid in front of him is doing its work without any help from volume or anger.

Derek looks at Knox. Looks at Jace. Looks at me, last.

I hold it. I don't look away and I don't give him anything, and whatever he came here for he doesn't find it, and he goes down the path and gets in the car and the car leaves and doesn't look back.

Knox watches the end of the street for a moment after the car has gone around the corner.

Then he turns and looks at Jace on the porch.

I don't have the full picture of what two years looks like between them. But I can see Knox's face when he looks at his brother, jaw tight, something working through it that hasn't had an opening until right now.

I can see what Jace's face does when he looks back, and whatever passes between them does it without a word and takes long enough that I know it matters.

Knox nods once.

Jace nods back.

"You all right?" he says.

"Yes," I say. "Thank you. Both of you."

He nods. He looks at Jace one more time, something that isn't quite relief and isn't quite grief and sits somewhere between them, and then he goes to the curb, and the street is just a street again.

I notice my hands are shaking slightly. Just the body releasing what it held while it needed to hold it.

Jace comes inside. He closes the door and stands in the hallway and looks at me, and the flatness has come out of his face now, something more present in it, something that's just him.

"Angela," he says.

"Her room," I say.

From the hall, her door opens. Small feet. She appears at the end of the hallway and she looks at me first, checking, and I nod, and then she looks at Jace.

He's taken up most of the narrow hallway, broad through the shoulders, the cane in his right hand, and she looks at him the way she looks at new things, which is directly and with real assessment.

"You're Jace," she says.

"Yeah," he says.