Harlon walked up the steps toward us. He was moving slowly, still healing, but there was something different in his stride. Lighter, somehow. Like a weight had been lifted.
“You did it,” he said.
“We did it.”
He looked at Colton, who was holding my hand with one hand and his bear with the other, and something in his face softened.
“You were pretty brave in there, buddy.”
Colton shrugged, but he was smiling. “Lena says being brave is doing what’s right even when you’re scared.”
“She’s right about that.”
He looked at me then, and there was so much in his eyes that I couldn’t name it all. Gratitude. Respect. Something else, something deeper, that I wasn’t ready to name yet.
“What happens now?” he asked.
I looked at Colton, at the motorcycle gang, at the courthouse behind us and the road ahead. I thought about the apartment on Elm Street, the blue room I’d painted for a boy I didn’t know three months ago, the refrigerator covered in drawings, the life we were building out of the wreckage of everything that had come before.
“Now,” I said, “we go home.”
ONE YEAR LATER
The apartment on Elm Street looked different now. The walls were covered in photographs—Colton’s first day of school, Harlon teaching him to ride a bike, Jolene’s graduation from the treatment program. There were drawings too, dozens of them, taped up with the obsessive enthusiasm of a child who had discovered that art was a way of making things real.
In the center of the refrigerator, held by a magnet shaped like a motorcycle, was the most recent drawing. It showed a house with a blue door, a motorcycle parked outside, and a family of stick figures. There was a tall figure with a beard and a vest, a smaller figure with long hair, a tiny figure with a teddy bear, and in the middle, two figures holding hands. One labeled “Mommy,” one labeled “Me.”
Colton was in the living room, building a tower with Moose. The blocks were the same ones from the warehouse, salvaged and cleaned, and the tower was already taller than Colton’s head. Moose was on his knees, his massive frame somehow folded into a child’s posture, his face intent as he placed each block with the precision of a jeweler.
“You’re going to knock it over,” Colton said.
“I’m being careful.”
“You’re always careful. That’s why it’s so tall.”
Harlon was in the kitchen, making dinner. He’d learned to cook over the past year—something about wanting to be useful, about needing to take care of people in ways that didn’t involve violence. The spaghetti sauce was his own recipe, perfected over months of trial and error, and the smell of it filled the apartment.
“You need to stir that,” I said, coming up behind him.
“I know how to stir.”
“Then stir.”
He turned and looked at me, and there was that look again. The one I still wasn’t used to. The one that made my heart do things I didn’t want to analyze.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I am tired. I spent all day in court.”
“Did you win?”
“I always win.”
