I notice him through the kitchen window while washing the boys' lunch bowls—Rhys, sitting cross-legged in the dirt outside my cabin like a man with absolutely nowhere better to be. His knife moves in slow strokes, peeling curls of pale wood that collect on his knee.
He doesn't look at the door, doesn't knock—just sits there, carving something from a block of pine with the patience of a person who has decided that time is not, in fact, a limited resource. Nothing says I come in peace like a man with a blade who refuses to use it on anything but lumber.
I dry the same bowl three times. I rearrange the shelf above the sink, check the boys—both dead asleep in a tangle of limbs and stuffed wolves, Rowan's fist curled in Ash's shirt like he's anchoring his brother to the earth.
Twenty minutes I last before the door is open and the question is out. "What are you making?"
Rhys tilts the wood, examining it from an angle that suggests deep artistic consideration, and the pause he leaves is long enough to be theatrical. "No idea."
"That's a terrible approach to woodworking." I lean against the doorframe and cross my arms because my hands want to do something and I'd rather they didn't. "Most people start with at least a concept."
"It's worked for everything else in my life." He brushes a curl of shaving off his knee without looking up. "I start cutting and eventually the shape tells me what it wants to be."
"And if it wants to be a disaster?" I lean my shoulder into the frame, and his mouth twitches at one corner without committing to a full expression.
"Then I've got firewood." He lifts one shoulder and the knife resumes its slow passes, the blade catching afternoon light and throwing a thin line of gold across his wrist.
I sit on the top step, which puts four feet of porch between us. His knife pauses for half a second before continuing—he noticed, and he's smart enough not to acknowledge it.
The compound hums around us—someone hammering near the main hall, a bird going berserk in the oak tree. The boys' breathing drifts through the open door, Ash's hitching rhythm and Rowan's steady pull.
I watch another shaving fall and the shape emerging from the block is round at one end, tapered at the other. Could be anything, could be nothing—the not-knowing sits in my chest the same way the question I've been circling for a week does, formless and heavy.
"Why didn't you just do it?" His knife stops. The stillness in his hands is total—not the pause of a man thinking, but a man who's been waiting for this exact sentence.
"You had weeks, Rhys." My voice stays flat, the tone I use when I need words to carry themselves. "The party, the compound, a dozen moments where the boys were close enough to touch. You could have contacted Harlan, had a team here before breakfast."
"You could have dragged me back yourself." I press my thumbnail into the wood grain of the step. "Why the letters, the misdirection—weeks of performance when the mission was sitting right there?"
The bird in the oak runs through its entire repertoire twice before he speaks. His thumb finds a knot in the grain and presses—not carving, just holding.
"The first morning." His voice comes out lower than usual, stripped bare. "I watched you cross the compound with both boys on your hips. Ash was yanking your hair and you were laughing at something Sable said, and you didn't look anything like the woman in my father's file."
His thumb drags across the knot again. "Bringing you back to Adler territory would have been the same as putting you back in that flat. Different walls, same cage."
My teeth find each other and press until my molars ache. "That's a convenient answer, Rhys."
"Convenient doesn't mean untrue." He holds my gaze, and the steadiness in it is either the most honest thing I've seen in months or the best performance.
"It also doesn't mean true. It means convenient." I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them. "Pretty words are cheap in your family—Callum had a whole warehouse."
His hand tightens on the knife handle—not a flinch but something slower, deeper, the kind of reaction that lives in the bones. "I know."
The door creaks behind me and a small, determined body barrels past my knees. Ash—of course it's Ash, because Ash has never met a boundary he didn't consider a personal insult—is across the porch and down the steps before I can grab him, his fat hands closing around Rhys's knee.
Rhys pockets the knife in one smooth motion—the reflexes of a man who grew up knowing what blades do to small fingers. Ash hauls himself upright against Rhys's leg, wobbling, triumphant, and reaches for the half-carved wood with the focus of a toddler who has identified his next meal.
"That's not food," I tell my son, who ignores me with the dedication he brings to ignoring everything I say.
Rhys holds the piece out and Ash takes it with both hands, immediately shoving one end into his mouth. Rhys watches him—eyes tracking the boy's grip, the way Ash's fingers curl around the wood, the spit already darkening the pale grain—with an expression I can't read.
Rowan appears in the doorway, slower, quieter, his body framed by the door he hasn't decided to walk through yet. He watches Rhys with steady, unblinking assessment—the same look he gives strangers, stray animals, anything that hasn't proven itself worth trusting.
"Rowan doesn't warm up to people easily." I reach back and brush my fingers through his hair, and he leans into my hand but his eyes don't leave Rhys.
"I understand that." Rhys's gaze shifts to Rowan, and something passes across his face—not the charm he deploys like a tool, but recognition, one guarded thing seeing itself in another. "Takes me a while too."
Ash bangs the wood against Rhys's knee and shrieks with delight. Rowan stays in the doorway, one hand on the frame, conducting his silent evaluation, and the light goes gold and long across the dirt while my son chews on wood carved by the man who was sent to take him from me.
My throat works around three different sentences before I find the one I can stand behind. "You can stay for dinner. Not forgiveness—just dinner."
Rhys nods once. He gently extracts the wood from Ash's mouth—Ash's face crumples, Rhys hands it back, face uncreases—and the entire emotional cycle takes two seconds, the compressed drama of a toddler who experiences every loss as permanent and every return as a miracle.
I carry Rowan inside to start the rice. Through the window, Rhys lifts Ash onto his knee, and my son settles there like it's a place he's been before—and the ease of it presses against a bruise under my ribs that I keep checking to see if it still hurts.