Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
His brother had thrown out the only good thing in his life, and a man with a scar from temple to jaw had just told him where to find her.
He would get the information to him. Anonymously. Through channels he would never trace, the way Luciano had done everything for twenty-four years—from a distance, without fingerprints, without ever letting him know that the brother who stole him from a stone house in the night was still watching. Still building walls around him that he couldn’t see.
Elsa would tell him to call. She would tell him that walls weren’t the same as love, that protection from a distance wasn’t the same as presence, that the man who saved a baby in the dark should be brave enough to stand in the light and say I’m your brother and I never stopped.
Elsa would be right.
But not today. Today Luciano put the phone in the drawer and walked back inside and closed the door on the cold Nebraska morning and stood in the bedroom doorway and watched his wife sleep.
His wife.
She had moved since he left. Rolled onto her stomach, one arm flung across his side of the bed, her hand resting on the warm indent where he had been. Her fingers were slightly curled. Even in sleep, even unconscious, her hand had found the place where he was and reached for it.
Her finger twitched. A circle. Small, involuntary, traced on the sheet where his body had left its warmth.
She was drawing circles on the ghost of him.
He crossed the room. Sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes didn’t open, but her hand moved, finding his thigh and resting there, her palm warm through the cotton. Her finger drew one slow circle on his knee, and he felt it in a place he didn’t know he had left.
“You left,” she murmured.
“I came back.”
“Mmm.” Her hand tightened on his knee. Not pulling. Holding. “You always come back.”
He looked at her. At the ring on her finger. At the hand on his knee. At the Nebraska sky doing something impossible outside the window—going from pale blue to gold, the kind of gold that belonged in a museum, the kind that someone should paint before it changed.
He didn’t describe it. He didn’t name the colours or catalogue the way the room transformed. He just sat there, on the edge of a bed in a ranch house in Nebraska, with his wife’s hand on his knee and her circle moving slow against his skin and the morning filling up around them, and he let it be what it was.
Enough.
More than enough.
Everything.
~ The End ~