The Club Girl Who Replaced Me

Chapter One

Rourke

I stood in the kitchen at four in the afternoon holding a hair tie that wasn't Marisol's, and I still hadn't figured out what to do with it.

It was a small thing. Black elastic, a little stretched out, the kind you buy in a twelve pack from the drugstore.

I'd found it wedged behind the coffee maker, and I'd been standing there long enough that the coffee I'd started had finished brewing and gone cold in the pot.

I turned it over in my fingers like it might tell me something useful, then I shoved it in my jeans pocket because throwing it in the kitchen trash felt like something a coward would do, and putting it in the outside can felt like something a man who actually understood the size of what he'd done would do, and I couldn't get my legs to walk that far.

I'd already done three sweeps of the house.

Found a phone charger that wasn't mine on the second one, in the drawer by the bed, which was its own special kind of gut punch since I hadn't put it there and didn't remember it being pulled out either.

Found a tube of lip gloss under the bathroom sink on the third.

Small things. The kind of things a person leaves behind not because they're trying to mark territory, but because six weeks of living somewhere does that whether you mean it to or not.

Six weeks. I kept doing that math like it would come out different if I checked it enough times.

I found myself thinking, standing there with that hair tie, about the day Marisol and I first walked into what would become the Boneyard.

It was a wreck back then, a cinderblock garage with a leaking roof and a bar bolted to one wall that some previous owner had installed and abandoned halfway through.

She'd stood in the middle of that mess in her work boots, hands on her hips, and instead of seeing what it was, she saw what it could be if somebody with a spreadsheet and a stubborn streak got hold of it.

That was six years ago. She'd spent every weekend for the first year doing the books by lantern light because we hadn't gotten the electrical sorted yet, teaching herself commercial licensing law out of library books, arguing with contractors who thought a woman half their age didn't know what she was talking about until they learned better.

She built that place into something that could survive a health inspector, an insurance audit, a federal agent with a badge and a bad attitude, and she did it while also building a life with me in a falling-down rental we fixed up room by room on weekends.

I used to tell her she could run a Fortune 500 company if she wanted to.

She used to tell me she didn't want to run anything but this, this town, this club's front business, this life, and hearing her say that used to be the thing that got me through the worst of my father's demands on my time.

I thought about that version of us, the two of us covered in drywall dust and paint, laughing about something stupid one of the contractors said, and I thought about the drawer upstairs that wasn't hers, and the distance between those two things felt less like a gap and more like a canyon I'd dug myself, one shovelful at a time, over nine weeks.

Marisol had been gone nine. Her mother's cancer had moved fast at the end, faster than anybody warned her it might, and she'd packed a bag for what she thought would be two weeks and ended up staying two months, sleeping in a recliner next to a hospital bed in Bakersfield, watching a woman who raised her disappear a little more every day.

She called every night those first few weeks.

I remember standing in this same kitchen listening to her voice go thinner and thinner, telling her I was fine, telling her to stay as long as she needed, telling her not to worry about anything back here.

I want to be able to say I don't know how it happened.

That would be easier. It would let me stand in this kitchen and tell myself I was swept up in something, that grief did something to my judgment I couldn't have predicted.

But I know exactly how it happened, because I made the same choice about nine separate times, and every single one of those times I could have made a different one.

My father had been dead six months when Marisol left for Bakersfield.

Cormac Callahan ran Death Souls for twenty-six years, and in the last six months of his life the club had already started leaning on me the way you lean on a chair before you're sure it'll hold your weight.

When he died, the leaning turned into a full collapse, and I was the one standing under all of it.

Books I didn't fully understand yet. Territory disputes he used to handle with a phone call I didn't know how to make.

Brothers who looked at me like I was supposed to already be him.

Marisol would have helped me carry it. She'd carried harder things.

But she was three hundred miles away holding her mother's hand while I let myself believe I had to handle mine alone, because that's what a man in my father's chair was supposed to do, and somewhere in there Harlow started staying later at the Boneyard after close.

It wasn't a decision at first. That's the part I keep circling.

She'd tend bar some nights when we were short-staffed, she'd stick around after to help me close out the register, and closing out the register turned into sitting on the tailgate of my truck in the parking lot for an hour because neither of us wanted to go home to an empty house.

Mine because it wasn't supposed to be empty.

Hers, I found out later, for reasons that had nothing to do with me and that I never once bothered to ask about, because asking would have meant treating her like a person instead of a problem I was letting solve itself.

An hour on a tailgate turned into her staying over because it was late and she'd had two beers and I told myself that was the only reason. That happened once. Then it happened again, and again, and by the fourth week she had a drawer.

A drawer. In the house I built with Marisol. That's the detail that still gets me, more than anything physical that happened, more than any of it. I gave a woman who wasn't Marisol a drawer.

By week six, when she started showing up at church, I'd stopped being able to pretend I didn't know exactly what I was doing.

I watched her sit down in the folding chairs we kept along the back wall for prospects and hang-arounds, and instead of walking over and telling her that wasn't her seat to take, I let Dutch's wife pour her a coffee like she belonged there.

I let three separate brothers make some version of a joke about Rourke finally settling down again, and I laughed along instead of correcting a single one of them, because correcting them meant saying out loud what I was doing, and saying it out loud was the one thing I couldn't make myself do.

Dutch had come by that morning. Let himself in without knocking, the way he's done since we were nineteen, found me in the kitchen holding a garbage bag full of things I'd been quietly clearing out of the house for four days straight.

"She call you yet?" he asked.

"Funeral ended yesterday. She's driving back today."

Dutch nodded slow, looked at the bag in my hand like it disgusted him, which it should have. "You know this isn't going to work the way you think it's going to work."

"I know."

"I don't think you do. I think you're standing in your kitchen throwing away evidence like that's the same thing as fixing it."

I didn't have an answer for that because he was right, and there's not much to say to a man who's right about the worst thing you've ever done.

"Harlow still coming around?" he asked.

"Not since I told her to stop, four days ago."

"You told her, or you asked her?"

I didn't answer that one either.

Dutch set the garbage bag down on the counter, gentler than I expected, like even he couldn't quite bring himself to treat it as trash instead of evidence of something that mattered.

He and I go back to before either of us had patches, back to riding dirt bikes on the ridge behind my father's property when we were still kids who thought the club was just where our dads disappeared to on weekends.

He was there the night I got my full patch.

He was there, three years before that, the night I met Marisol at a benefit run for a burned-out family two towns over, watched me trip over my own boots trying to talk to her, never let me live it down since.

"You remember what you told me the day you two moved into that house together," he said. "Said you finally understood what your old man meant when he talked about an Old Lady being the one thing that made all the rest of it worth carrying."

"I remember."

"You want to explain to me how a man who said that let this happen."

"No," I said, honestly, because I didn't have an explanation that wouldn't sound like I was trying to talk my way out of the size of it.

"I don't have a version of this that makes sense out loud, Dutch.

I know exactly what I did and exactly how long I did it for, and none of it adds up to something I can defend. "

That seemed to be the only answer that satisfied him, or at least the only one that stopped him from pushing harder.

He left about twenty minutes after that, told me he'd see me at the clubhouse, told me to be smarter than I'd been acting the last two months.

I stood at the window and watched his bike pull out and felt the particular kind of sick that comes from knowing a friend is disappointed in you and knowing he has every right to be.