Epilogue
BANDIT
Icount nineteen motorcycles before I stop counting.
That's the first wrong thing. Bones took me out this morning — breakfast on the water, a long ride up the coast road, no reason he'd give me — and, only now, do I understand the no reason.
He was getting me out of the house. We come back through the gate and the gravel inside the wall is a sea of chrome, trucks in the fir line I don't know, plates from places I've never been, and a banner strung between two posts, hand-painted, the letters going downhill toward the end like whoever made it ran out of space.
CONGRATULATIONS NURSE BANDIT.
I stand at the edge of the yard in the dress Sweetheart lent me for graduation and I can't make my feet go.
There are too many people. The whole Seattle chapter, sure, but more than that. Faces I half-know from photographs on the common-room wall.
Bones comes up behind me. Sets his hand on the back of my neck, big and warm, the way he does when he wants me to know where he is without saying it.
"You said small," I tell him.
"I lied."
They come at me all at once.
Phoenix gets to me first, all that red hair tied back off her face, and hugs me hard enough to bruise, then holds me out by the shoulders and tells me I'm too thin, which is what she tells everyone, including the men who weigh three hundred pounds.
She presses a plate into my hands before I've said a word, because in Phoenix's world an unfed girl is a problem she can fix in one move.
Birdie loops her arm through mine and won't give it back, and Sweetheart appears on my other side already mid-sentence, the two of them passing me between them like I'm the prize at a fair.
"Do you know Cash ironed his shirt this morning?" Sweetheart says. "Tell him it's insane."
"It's a celebration," Cash says, unbothered, sleeves rolled over the ink. "She graduated. We dress for it."
Smoke watches Birdie talk to me with a look on his face I'd be embarrassed to catch if I didn't have the same one half the time.
At the head of the long table, in the good chair, Darling sits like a benevolent queen. Her iron-gray braid pulled over one shoulder, she holds a cigarette she's not smoking, because Bones took her real ones away and she likes to make a point.
Across the whole length of the table from her, Bishop sits in the matching chair, and the two of them preside over the chaos like the parents of an enormous, armed, ungovernable family.
Which is what they are.
I never had Sundays like this before I moved in here. I want to be normal about it and I am failing.
Bones mingles and comes back to me when the plates are mostly bones and the light's gone gold over the Sound. He's got a flat wooden case in his hand, the kind that latches.
"Sit," he says.
I do. The yard hushes a little, the way a loud crowd does when it decides to pay attention, and I want to tell all of them to look somewhere else.
He puts the case in my lap. "Open it."
A stethoscope. Not the forty-dollar student one I've been juggling since I started school. A real one, heavy, the tubing the deep oxblood I'd never have paid for in a hundred years. I lift it out and the weight of it sits right in my hands, like it was made for me.
"Turn it over," Bones says.
On the back of the chest piece, engraved small and neat: BENNETT, RN. And under my name, a tiny lightning bolt. The same dumb design as the cheap charm that rode on my lanyard not so long ago. The one he's not allowed to call a piece of junk ever again.
And under the bolt, three more words, so small I have to tip it to the light.
Never alone. — B.
I don't make it through reading it twice.
"Hey." Bones goes down on those bad knees in front of my chair, right there in the gravel in front of everybody, and takes my face in both hands. "It's a stethoscope. People are gonna think I bought you a puppy."
"You ruined it," I tell him, wet. "It was a perfect gift and you ruined it with the words."
"I'll have 'em sanded off."
"You touch it and I'll stab you."
He laughs, and I hear the whole yard laugh with him, warm, and Phoenix says oh, let her cry, it's good for the skin, and someone passes me a napkin down the table hand to hand like a bucket brigade, and I press it to my eyes and I let them all see me do it.
Later, when the noise has loosened and people have drifted, I notice Angel.
He's not gone off alone, not exactly. He's at the far table with Glitch and a sharp-eyed woman everyone calls Trouble. She's got Glitch's phone confiscated in front of her and keeps batting his hand when he reaches for it.
Glitch came up for the rescue — he was the ghost in the wires that night, the one who opened every door at once — and he came back for the ribs. But Angel isn't laughing with Glitch. He's looking at something on a laptop.
Darling crosses the yard to him and lowers herself onto the bench at his side. She puts one hand on his arm and sighs.
"It's done, baby," she says. "Brightmoor's shut down, Beacon's under new management, Kessler's going to die in a cell. We won."
Angel covers her hand with his.
"No," he says. "We didn't win yet, Darling."
"Jericho …"
"They were the hands. I want the head."
She doesn't argue. She sits with him while he goes back to the laptop with Glitch.
"What was that about?" I ask Bones.
He's quiet long enough that I think he won't answer, but then he does.
"Darling took Angel in when he was ten," he says.
"Don't know the whole of it and never asked.
But she fed him. Kept him. Stood between him and every bad thing that came looking.
She's the only mother that man's ever had.
" His hand spreads over my ribs, slow. "You understand what that makes her to him. "
"Everything," I say.
"Everything." A beat. "So the money, the land, the conspiracy, we all cared.
The entire club cared. But Angel cared more than all of us together.
" His voice drops. "He wants the person at the top of all of it, the hand that signed the paper that tried to erase Darling's mind to take land they thought was hers.
And Angel is not the kind of man who lets a thing like that keep breathing the same air as her. "
"So it's not over," I say.
"For us it's over." He turns me in his arms so I'm facing him, and tips my chin up with one knuckle. "You're a nurse." He nods toward the yard. "Tonight's about you."
I look back at Angel one more time and decide that Bones is right. Not tonight.
Darling, laughing at something Bishop's growled down the length of the table. Birdie with her head on Smoke's shoulder, Sweetheart on Cash's lap stealing his churros, Phoenix finally taking a break and holding her spatula like a scepter.
And there's all those people who showed up. Some even drove from other states.
Not so long ago, I had nobody.
And then an old woman grabbed my wrist and made me promise.
Bones' arm comes around me from behind and I lean back into him.
For the first time in my whole life, I'm somewhere I belong.
I'm not going anywhere.