Page 14 of Rune’s Solace

Inside was warm and a little messy in the way a house with kids in it was supposed to be messy, a fort made out of couch cushions nobody had bothered taking down, a laundry basket that looked like somebody had started folding it hours ago and given up halfway through, crayon on a low stretch of wall that apparently wasn’t worth the fight to scrub off. I loved it so much it almost hurt.

And it wasn’t the mess. The houses I grew up in were messy too.

My father never cared where anything landed or how long it stayed there. The difference was that Sable’s house was loud. The kids were allowed to be loud. Zara could come flying through the room yelling about something, knock into a table, send something crashing to the floor, and nobody got scared. Nobody stopped talking. Somebody laughed, somebody picked it up, and five minutes later everybody had forgotten it happened.

I couldn’t imagine growing up like that.

There hadn’t been other kids in my house. Just me and him, and I learned pretty early that silence was better. I knew every floorboard that made noise. I knew how to get from my room to the back door without him hearing me, and I knew how to stay wherever he wasn’t. If he was in the living room, I stayed in my room. If he went to the kitchen, I waited. If he was having a bad day, I made myself as easy to forget about as I could.

By the time I was eleven or twelve, I’d pretty much stopped using the front door of whatever place we were living in. I went out my bedroom window instead. Every time. Dropped into the side yard and took off, because getting to the front door meant walking through the house, and walking through the house meant there was a chance I’d run into him. The window was easier. I could leave for an entire afternoon, come back the same way, and if I did it right, he’d never even know I’d been gone.

I used to be proud of that. How quiet I could be. How easy it was for me to disappear. I thought being good at it meant I was safe.

Took me a long time to understand those weren’t the same thing.

Zara had colored on that wall right out in the open, with a grown man in the house, and nothing had happened to her. She hadn’t hidden the crayons. Hadn’t tried to cover it up. Probably hadn’t even thought about whether Thunder would see it.

* * *

Sable put the kettle on. She’d stopped drinking coffee, she said, because it made the old jumpy feeling worse, and she got down two mugs without asking which one I wanted because she remembered. “Malik started fifth grade. Reads under the covers with a flashlight like I can’t see the glow.” She tipped her head toward the fort, where Zara was dragging Malik around by one arm and Malik was letting her do it while acting like he was way too grown-up to be playing with his little sister. “Zara won’t remember much of the before. She’s already forgetting some of it. That’s the one thing I wanted, you know? I didn’t do anything special. I just kept her little and kept her fed and gave it time.” Her voice caught a little. “Malik remembers. He’s old enough to. But he’s getting there. They both are.”

The back door opened and Thunder came in with road dust on him, dropping his keys into the bowl by the door. He saw me and gave me a nod. “Amy.”

“Hey, Thunder.”

Then Zara scrambled out of the fort and launched herself at him, and I watched this huge biker catch her right out of the air like she weighed nothing and settle her on one arm while she grabbed his face with both hands and started telling him something that seemed to involve a dinosaur. Thunder listened to every word like whatever she was saying was the most important thing he’d heard all day.

Both kids looked at him like there wasn’t anything in the world to be scared of when he was there.

I had to look at the laundry basket for a second.

Then Thunder told Sable he was heading down and would be under the house until late. I knew enough by now not to ask what happened underneath the house. Club stuff happened down there, and that was all I needed to know. He brushed his hand over the back of Sable’s neck when he passed her, like he didn’t even think about doing it, and she leaned into him for half a second without stopping what she was saying.

I noticed.

Of course I noticed.

I was starting to notice everything in that house, and I really wished I wasn’t.

Sable was one year older than me. Eleven months, actually. People never believed it because she had two kids, Thunder, this house, and I had purple hair, college classes, and a backpack I kept forgetting to clean old granola-bar wrappers out of, but we’d started in almost the same place. She wasn’t some grown-up woman who’d figured out a secret I was too young to understand. She was twenty. That was it. Twenty years old, and somehow she’d gotten all the way here.

Which meant girls like us weren’t automatically disqualified from having this.

Maybe I could have it too.

That was a really inconvenient thing to figure out when I’d spent months convincing myself I didn’t want it.

* * *

She got the kids set up with a show and we took our tea out to the back steps where we could still hear them but they couldn’t hear us, and the yard ran down to a stand of pines going gold at the tips, and for a while we just talked about nothing. School. The tooth. A woman we both knew who’d done something ridiculous. It was easy. It had always been easy with her, from the first night, which is a strange thing to say about the person you met on one of the worst nights of your life, but there it is.

Then she bumped my shoulder with hers and said, straight out, the way only she did, “You gonna tell me about him, or are we gonna keep pretending I forgot?”

And there it was.

I looked at my tea. “There’s nothing to tell. It’s done. It’s been done a long time.”

“Mm.” She didn’t push. She just waited, the way she knew how to wait, because she’d been on the receiving end of every kind of pushing there was and swore off ever doing it to another person.