Chapter 142

Liam

Kaia made the call the morning after the fire.

She had been going to make it four days ago. She had said so, sitting on the floor of her doorway with her hand in mine and her face wrecked from crying. Tomorrow. I’ll tell him tomorrow. And the next morning she had come down to the kitchen with my phone in her hand and sat at the table and looked at Tiernan’s number on the screen for twenty minutes, and then put it face down on the wood and pushed it away from her, and said, very quietly, Not today.

I hadn’t said anything. I had made her toast.

The day after, the same. And the day after that. Every morning she picked up the phone and looked at it, and every morning she put it down, and every morning I said okay and meant it. I could do not yet. I had told her I could.

Then the storehouse burned, and I came home at nine in the morning smelling of smoke, with soot in my hair and a burn across the back of one hand where a bea