The moving truck arrived at seven in the morning, its engine rumbling through the quiet Oceanside neighborhood like a warning. Pope stood at the kitchen window, coffee cooling in his hand, watching two men in gray shirts muscle a couch up the ramp into the cottage next door. He set the coffee down and moved to the living room where his mother sat reviewing accounts on her laptop, her reading glasses perched on her nose.
"Who's moving in next door?"
"Mm." Smurf returned to her papers. "Single woman. Four-month-old baby."
Pope went still. "How do you know that?"
"Asked the realtor about her before she moved. The woman's got herself into some trouble." Smurf waved her hand dismissively. "Ran away from the baby's father. Heard he's a real piece of work. Hit her bad enough she had to leave in the middle of the night." She shrugged. "Sad story, really. But that's her problem."
The information settled into Pope's mind like stones dropping into still water. He thought about the baby's cry—that thin, helpless sound. He thought about his sister Julia, about the things she'd survived that no one ever talked about, about the silence that had swallowed her whole.
The drugstore in town was bright and fluorescent, and Pope felt distinctly out of place among the pastel wall of baby supplies. A teenage cashier stared at him openly as he browsed, clearly trying to reconcile his imposing frame with the tiny onesies he held at arm's length.
He didn't know what size a four-month-old wore. He didn't know if they needed blankets or bottles or something called a "pacifier"—though he gathered from the packaging that it was some kind of soothin thing. In the end, he bought one of everything: a soft blue blanket, a stuffed elephant with button eyes, a set of tiny socks, a plastic ring with colorful shapes, and a card that said "Welcome to the Neighborhood" with a picture of a cartoon sailboat.
He wasn't sure what he was offering. He wasn't sure he had anything to offer except the weight of his presence and the skills his mother had taught him—skills that had nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with violence. But he knew what it felt like to need help and have no one come.
The house next door looked the same as it always had, except for the mismatched curtains in the windows and the crib visible through the glass door. Pope stood on the porch for a long moment, the bag in his hands suddenly feeling impossibly heavy.
The door opened before he could knock—and there she was. For a moment, neither of them spoke. She looked at him—really looked, taking in his height, his breadth, the intensity in his eyes—and something flickered across her face. Fear, maybe. Or the memory of it.
"I'm Andrew," he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended, and he cleared his throat. "Pope. People call me Pope. I live next door." Her eyes dropped to the bag in his hands. Curiosity replaced some of the wariness.
"I brought these," he said, holding them out. "For the baby. I didn't know what you needed, so I got—it's probably too much. Or the wrong thing."