She was quiet as she processed this. Then she said, "Glenn says I'm not worth being nice to." Hank's jaw tightened. He felt something rise in his chest, hot, dark, and dangerous.
He breathed through it. He had promised himself and his club that they would do this the right way, and the right way meant controlling the fire inside him and channeling it into something constructive. "Glenn is wrong," Hank said, and his voice was steady, even though his hands were not. "You are worth every bit of kindness in this world, Lily. Don't you ever let anybody tell you different."
That night, alone in his apartment above the motorcycle repair shop he owned on Cortez Street, Hank sat at his kitchen table with a beer he wasn't drinking and stared at his phone. Brooke's last text was 3 weeks old. Hey, Dad. Hope you're doing well.
He typed a response, deleted it. Typed another, deleted that, too. He thought about all the years he had missed. The school plays, the birthdays, the scraped knees he wasn't there to bandage.
He had told himself that losing Brooke was the price of the life he chose. And maybe that was true. But sitting in the silence of his apartment, thinking about a 7-year-old girl who flinched when adults raised their voices, he wondered if the life he chose had been preparing him for exactly this moment. Maybe he couldn't go back and be the father Brooke needed.
But maybe, just maybe, he could be the person Lily needed right now. The doubt came, as doubt always does, in the small hours of the morning. Who was he to intervene? A biker with a criminal record.
Two assault charges from his 20s, both from bar fights, both regrettable. A man whose own daughter lived 100 miles away and barely knew him. What would the authorities think when a man like him showed up claiming to advocate for a child? They would look at the leather, the tattoos, the wrap sheet, and they would dismiss him the way the world had always dismissed men like him.
But then he thought about Lily's question. Why are you nice to me? And he knew that the risk of being dismissed was nothing compared to the certainty of what would happen if nobody acted at all. He picked up his phone and called Margaret Foster at Yavapai County Child Protective Services.
This time, he wasn't going to let the system look away. Margaret Foster was not what Hank expected. She was a woman in her early 50s with blonde hair pulled back in a practical bun, reading glasses perched on her nose and eyes that had seen enough to fill a library of case files. She met Hank at a coffee shop downtown, listened to everything he had to say, reviewed Ruth Pennington's written log, and asked questions that were sharp without being cold.
"Mr. Mercer," she said when he finished, "I want you to understand something. The system failed this child once already. I don't intend to let that happen again. But I need more than a neighbor's notes and your observations. I need to talk to Lily directly, and I need to conduct a proper home visit unannounced this time."
"What do you need from me?" Hank asked. "I need you to keep doing what you're doing. Be present. Be consistent."