Chapter 191: HOMECOMING

DAMON'S POV

Seven forty-two this morning, we walked out the doors of the hospital and I say seven forty-two in particular because I have always, like anyone attempting to keep control of a situation that has too many balls in the air, been watching the clock.

And by seven forty-two, Roan had the car at the curb,Diane's discharge form was signed, Seraphina was in the clothes that Lyanna had to swing back to the house to retrieve at six, before the rest of us had finished dealing with the fallout from the night, and Marcus was in the car seat that Roan put in behind the wheel,with all of the precise, if slightly frantic, care of a man who's asked to perform a skill he's only had a chance to practice on television.

It was quiet in the car all the way back; not the anticipatory kind of quiet, but the aftershock variety. Each person in the car had their own running tally of the events of the previous twelve hours.

Marcus slept.

He'd been sleeping for most of the last two hours, the deep unconscious sleep of someone who had strong opinions about his first night in the world and had expressed them thoroughly and was now finished for the time being.

I kept glancing at his face in the mirror and didn’t fight myself to stop.

There are things you find out about yourself when you become a dad that come into existence in a space you didn’t realize had room and you didn’t invite them in, and apparently, that thing is you will sit in the morning at 7:40 AM in a car after having lived through the absolute worst night of your life, and you will still feel, despite all that, a wholeness that is so pure, so perfect that it has no name in any of the languages you knew.

Seraphina's hand found mine on the centre console.

She didn't say anything. Neither did I. We drove.

The house felt different when we pulled through the gate.

Not different in any way I could point at specifically. It was the same gate, same gravel, same stone walls.

Osei's garden to the left still on its own schedule independent of what the people in the house had been doing with their lives. But the garden had changed in quality and in its ambiance and its general manner of responding when people return home, which they have. Roan holds the door.

Seraphina stepped into the hall holding Marcus in her arms.

I saw her pause just inside the door and then she scanned the hall and the stairway and the kitchen entrance at the other end – every bit of it known to her and hers and somehow, calling for this brief pause.

I stood beside her and let her have the moment.

Then Lyanna, who'd somehow gotten back before us despite leaving to collect clothes and apparently also acquiring food from somewhere, appeared in the kitchen doorway with the specific expression she wears when she's been doing things that required effort and has decided not to mention any of it.

"Coffee's on," she said. "There's food. Don't ask me where the food came from."

"Where did the food come from?" Seraphina asked.

"I said don't ask."

We ate in the kitchen, all four of us, Diane included with Marcus in the bassinet Diane had placed beside the table, precisely where Diane parked things: at an angle which afforded her an excellent view with a minimal inconvenience to human movement.

We ate something tasty, from somewhere. Better than the something was the coffee; warmer than the something was the kitchen which holds people when they require holding.

Nobody talked about the night for a while.

That was a collective, unspoken agreement, the kind that forms without anyone proposing it, because all of us had been inside what happened and all of us needed something ordinary before we could go back in and handle the parts that still needed handling.

Eventually it was Diane who brought it back, as I'd known it would be, because Diane's version of ordinary includes things that other people's ordinary doesn't.

"The vetting file," she said. "The candidate. The company registered three years ago." She set her coffee down. "I ran it further this morning while you were getting discharged. The company has three listed directors. Two are shell identities, which is expected. The third is a real person." She looked at me. "Someone with a prior connection to Seraphina's father's professional network going back almost a decade."

"Do we have a name?" I asked.

She said the name.

It wasn't a name I recognised, which meant it was either genuinely new or deliberately kept off every record I'd ever had access to, and I pulled out my phone and started running it through the channels available to me, which were more than most and less than I'd like.

Seraphina was watching me across the table with the patient attention of someone who'd decided to let a process complete rather than interrupt it. Lyanna was pretending to be interested in her coffee, and Marcus was asleep, and the kitchen was warm. And somewhere outside this house a man who wanted my son had a three-track operation and five weeks before the only occasion he knew about where we'd all be assembled in one place.

Five weeks.

My phone buzzed.

It was Roan, with the results of the facial recognition from the photograph Catherine's contact had sent last night. I read it, and then I read it again. And the cold that settled into my chest was different from the cold I'd been feeling all night, less the acute fear of immediate danger and more the slow cold of understanding something that had been true for a long time without being visible.

The person in the photograph hadn’t been a new contact.

The person in the photograph had been in the house before.

Three weeks ago to be exact on the day Seraphina got back from a prenatal visit and I got caught up on a call that had run too late to cut and came downstairs to discover her already making herself tea in the kitchen and there’d been a delivery guy heading out in the hall way on the way to the door.

I'd thought it was, or a contractor follow-up, someone with a reason to be here that I'd registered and filed and not looked at again.

I looked at Seraphina across the kitchen table.

She read whatever was on my face and put her coffee down slowly.

"What?" she asked.

"He's been inside this house," I said. "Not the nurse. The new contact. Personally. Three weeks ago."

The kitchen went very quiet.

Marcus stirred in the bassinet, the small involuntary sound of a sleeping baby shifting weight, and I looked at my son and then at the door and then at Seraphina, and I thought about five weeks and a wedding and a man who apparently had access to places I'd believed were unreachable, and felt the specific fury of someone who has been outmanoeuvred in their own home by someone they've never even seen clearly.

"Show me," Seraphina said.

I turned the phone so she could see the photograph.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked up, and what was on her face wasn't fear, it was something past fear, the other side of it, the place you get to when you've been frightened enough times that the body stops producing the full version and starts producing something quieter and more absolute.

"I know who that is," she said.