The Mercedes eats up the highway while the desert blurs gold and rust outside the windows. In the rearview mirror you watch Addie watching everything at once, every exit sign, every passing truck, every movement of your shoulders, as if preparing for the second your story stops matching your face. Lily has stopped crying, which frightens you more than the crying did. You keep talking, because silence feels dangerous.
“Addie, did someone hurt you?”
No answer.
“Are your parents looking for you?”
Her chin lifts with a toughness so old it should not exist in a child. “Not the kind that cares.”
“Who’s chasing you?”
She looks down at Lily. “My stepdad.”
The words hit the air and stay there.
You have heard enough stories to know a whole courtroom can fit inside one sentence. You do not ask the obvious next question because you are afraid of what shape the answer will take. Instead you say, “You’re safe right now.”
She gives you a look in the mirror that is much too adult.
“No,” she says. “Not if he’s still alive.”
At the hospital, Naomi is already waiting with a nurse and a wheelchair.
Everything becomes motion. Doors sliding open. Cold fluorescent light. The squeak of wheels. Forms. Scrub tops. A nurse trying to take Lily from Addie, and Addie nearly clawing the woman’s face off before Naomi steps in, crouches to her eye level, and says, “Nobody is taking your sister away from you. But I need to help her breathe easier. You can come with us every second. Deal?”
Addie looks at you.
It is absurd how much rides on that glance. You, a man who once m
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