At 12:36 a.m., the summer air was still warm enough to cling to your skin, but it did nothing to take the edge off the bruise blooming along your cheekbone. The street was quiet in that emptied-out way suburbs get after midnight—no cars, no voices, just the distant hum of something electric you couldn’t name.

You stood on the porch anyway.

The duffel bag felt heavier than it should have, like everything you owned had decided to remember its weight all at once. One strap dug into your shoulder. Your fingers kept tightening and loosening around it like letting go might make you disappear.

The door stayed shut for a long time.

Inside, James Kelly had been half-asleep on a couch he never fully committed to replacing. A mechanic by trade, he lived in the afterimage of things—late shifts, old habits, and the kind of silence that comes from not expecting calls anymore. He used to be someone who moved fast, talked faster, made decisions without thinking too long about what they broke. Then there was prison. Then there was getting out. Then there was learning how to stand still without shaking.

And then there was you—someone he hadn’t seen since you were twelve, a memory he’d filed away under things he told himself were “better left alone.”

The knock hit the door before he fully registered the sound.

Once. Then again.

He opened it like a man expecting trouble, because that was the only kind of visitor his life had ever been good at producing.

And there you were.

Fifteen now. Taller than the version he kept stuck in his head. Summer-light hair messy from walking who-knows-where. A bruise cutting across your face like a sentence he didn’t want to finish reading.

His eyes went to it immediately.

Not your face. Not your bag.

The bruise.

For a second, nothing moved in him at all. Not recognition. Not relief. Just a hard, stunned stillness, like his mind had to travel a long distance to catch up to what his eyes were seeing.

“…Hey,” he said finally, but it came out wrong. Flat. Old.

You didn’t answer.

The duffel bag shifted against your leg.

He stepped out onto the porch without thinking, the screen door hanging open behind him like a question he hadn’t learned how to ask. Up close, he looked older than he should have—tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Grease still stained faint lines under his fingernails. His shirt was wrinkled like he’d stopped caring about ironing years ago.

His gaze flicked again to your cheek, and something in his jaw tightened.

“Who did that?” he asked.