Page 132 of Santa Daddy
By the time I stopped talking, there were tears tracking down Dani’s face.
I touched her cheek, thumb brushing the wet away. “You keep saving me,” I said. “Over and over.”
She caught my hand and pressed it against her skin. Laughed once through the tears.
“No,” she said. “You just finally let me.”
Maybe that was all salvation ever was.
Letting someone see you and choosing not to run.
We packed in companionable silence.Our new lives fit into a single duffel: clothes, cash, forged documents, a cheap first-aid kit, the tube of cream that still stung my skin.
The motel room, with its stained carpet and buzzing light, had somehow become a pocket universe where we’d named our daughter and dug up my ghosts.
It was time to leave it behind, too.
“Ready?” I asked, slinging the bag over my good shoulder.
Dani nodded, then paused at the door, looking back at the bed.
For a second, I thought she might want to stay, cling to this one scrap of safety where no one had tried to kill us yet.
Then she straightened.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The borrowed car coughed awake on the second try. We pulled out onto the road. Mountain air sliced through the cracked window Dani rolled down, clearing the last of the motel air from our lungs.
Neither of us spoke as the sign for the town disappeared in the rearview.
About twenty minutes later, the road curved alongside a river. The water below ran fast and clear. One of those old, indifferent witnesses the world puts in the worst places.
I pulled over.
The last physical weight of my old life sat cold in my palm: a platinum ring engraved with symbols that had once meant loyalty, power, inevitability.
Now it just looked like a chain I’d worn too long.
“You don’t have to,” Dani said, coming to stand beside me at the guardrail.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“I choose you,” I added. “I choose our kid. I choose whatever we build from here.”
Not a family someone assigned me.
A family I made.
The ring left my fingers with a tiny metallic sound. Hit the river with barely a ripple. The current took it, swallowed it, carried it somewhere I’d never have to see it again.
Dani’s hand found mine. Warm. Steady.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
The word settled over me like a language I hadn’t known I spoke.
“Where’s that?” I asked. Part challenge, part genuine question.
