Chapter 2
Rafferty
I've broken exactly one rule of my own making in six years, and I broke it over a cup of coffee I paid two dollars for.
I knew it while I was walking over to her table.
I knew it while I was saying the words. I've spent six years building a wall between watching a problem and touching it, because touching it is how you end up trusting a man who sells your brothers out for money, and I told myself a long time ago that I'd rather be the guy in the corner who sees everything and does nothing than the guy who reaches in and gets it wrong again.
And then I watched her flinch at a car door slamming two blocks away, watched her map every exit in a diner like her life depended on knowing them, which — I'd put money on it — it did, and something in me that I thought I'd sealed shut for good just decided the rule didn't apply this time.
I don't examine that decision too hard. I've learned examining a good instinct too hard is how you talk yourself out of it.
I've spent the walk back to the clubhouse running the whole exchange over in my head, the way I run everything over, looking for the crack in it, the part where I overstepped, the part where I should have just kept watching from a careful distance the way I've watched everything else in this town for six years.
I can't find the crack. That should worry me more than it does.
Her face when I said it — that's the part I keep coming back to.
Not fear, exactly, though there was plenty of that underneath.
Something more like disbelief, like a person hearing a language they used to speak fluently and forgot they knew.
Like kindness with no strings attached had become a foreign concept to her somewhere along the way, and I'd just spoken a few words of it without meaning to test whether she still remembered how to receive it.
I know that particular kind of disbelief.
I wore it myself for a long time after Deacon, waiting for the other shoe to drop on every decent thing anybody offered me, certain there was an angle somewhere I just hadn't spotted yet.
It took me years to stop flinching at kindness.
I don't know how long it's taken her, or what put it there, but I recognize the shape of it well enough to want to be careful with it.
So now I'm doing something I have never done in six years of watching this town: I'm attached to an outcome.
I want June Kelly — that's not her real name, I'd bet the clubhouse on it, but it's the only name I've got so I'll use it — to be safe, and specifically I want to be part of the reason she's safe, and that second part is new enough that it rattles around in my chest like a stone in a boot.
I try to talk myself out of it on the walk home, the way I've talked myself out of plenty over the years.
She's a stranger. I don't know her real name, her real story, whether the danger following her is the kind that can be handled quietly or the kind that ends up on the news.
I don't know if she's the kind of person worth the risk I'm about to take with six years of careful discipline.
The talking-out-of-it doesn't take. It never really had a chance.
I've been reading people long enough to know the difference between a con and a person who's genuinely, quietly drowning, and June Kelly is drowning in a way no grifter has ever bothered to fake, because faking it costs nothing and this is clearly costing her everything.
I don't tell her any of this. I don't tell her much of anything else either.
I decide, walking back to the clubhouse with my hands in my pockets and the spring evening doing its slow gold thing over Main Street, that the play here isn't confession.
It's construction. You don't tell a spooked animal it's safe.
You build the fence quiet enough that she doesn't notice until she's already standing inside it.
Knox catches me at it inside a week.
"You've got a face on," he says, dropping into the chair across from mine at the clubhouse bar. Knox has run this club for going on a decade and reads people almost as well as I do, which is either a compliment to him or an insult to me, depending on the day.
"I don't have a face."
"You've got a face like you're solving a math problem with your eyebrows. What is it."
I think about how much to say. Knox has earned more trust from me than almost anybody alive, which still isn't the same as unlimited trust, because I don't have unlimited trust left in me for anyone, even him. But this one, he needs to know at least the shape of.
"Woman came into town last week," I say. "Rented the room over the hardware store. She's in trouble. Real trouble — not bar-fight trouble, not ex-boyfriend trouble. The kind where she's got one bag packed and her back to every wall in every room."
Knox doesn't ask how I know. Nobody asks me how I know anymore; it's one of the few genuine perks of the reputation. "You keeping an eye out?"
"Keeping an eye out" is the polite version of what I've actually decided to do, which is closer to unilaterally appointing myself her personal security detail without informing her, but I let Knox have the polite version.
"Yeah."
"She dangerous? To us, I mean."
"No." I'm sure of that one in a way I'm not sure of much else about her. "She's the one in danger. I don't know from what yet. I intend to find out before I do anything else."
Knox studies me a beat longer than the conversation strictly requires. "You need the club, you've got the club," he says finally. "Whatever this is."
"I know."
"I mean it, Rafferty. You've spent six years handing this club information and never once asking for anything back. You need something back, you ask."
That lands somewhere I don't examine too closely either. I nod, and Knox lets it go, because Knox is smart enough to know that pushing me is the fastest way to get me to clam up entirely, and he's patient enough to wait for the pieces to come to him instead.
"You know," Knox says, before I can get up from the table, "six years I've watched you take care of this whole club without ever once asking anybody to take care of you back.
I always figured that was just who you were.
" He studies me, not unkindly. "Watching you get twitchy over a stranger's diner seating is the first time I've thought maybe it was a choice instead. "
"It was both," I admit, because Knox has earned the honesty even if I'm stingy with it elsewhere.
"Well." He claps a hand on my shoulder on his way past. "Choices can get unmade, brother. Just saying."
I don't answer that, because I don't have an answer yet, but it sits with me longer than I expect it to, rattling around next to the stone that's already taken up residence in my chest since the diner.
So I get to work, quietly, the way I do everything.
I don't follow her — following is clumsy, following gets noticed, and the last thing a frightened woman needs is a second person she has to add to her exit math.
Instead I make sure the places she's already going are places where she's covered.
The diner's back booth, the one against the wall with a clean sightline to both the front door and the kitchen exit, is somehow always open when she comes in around nine.
I have a word with Rosalind, who runs the diner and doesn't ask why the club's quietest brother suddenly cares about seating charts, and Rosalind, God bless her, doesn't ask twice, just says "consider it handled" and goes back to her coffee pots.
The walk from the diner to her room isn't well lit past the second streetlamp, so I have a word with the town about that too — turns out an anonymous complaint to the town council about safety on Main gets a streetlight fixed inside four days if the person making the complaint happens to know the guy who does the town's electrical work, which I do, because I make it my business to know things like that.
I also spend an evening quietly confirming what I can about the car she came in on — not to invade anything that isn't mine to invade, just enough to know it isn't stolen, isn't registered to anyone with an active warrant, isn't the kind of thing that would bring trouble to this town beyond whatever's already following her.
It comes back clean, as clean as a car with three different states' worth of gas receipts stuffed in the glovebox can look, which tells me she's careful and thorough and has been doing this a lot longer than a few weeks.
I check on Marge, too, casual, over coffee, to make sure June's rent is paid up and there's no reason for anybody to come knocking about a lease.
Marge, who's rented that room to more runaways and hideaways than she'd ever admit to a stranger, just says, "She's quiet.
Pays on time. Keeps to herself. I like her," and goes back to her crossword, and that's the whole conversation, and it's exactly what I needed to hear.
I don't crowd her. I make sure of it every single day, because crowding her is the fastest way to undo every quiet, careful thing I'm building.
I take my coffee at the counter most mornings instead of near her table.
I nod, once, if our eyes catch, and then I look away first now — deliberate, a small signal that I'm not a threat, that I see her and I'm choosing not to close the distance.
Rosalind, for her part, has apparently appointed herself an unofficial co-conspirator in the whole operation, though I never asked her to be one.
"You want I should send her a slice of pie on the house?" she asks one morning, wiping down the counter in front of me with more attention than the counter requires. "Girl looks like she hasn't had a treat in months."
"That's your call, not mine."
"Mm-hm." Rosalind gives me the specific look she reserves for men she thinks are being deliberately obtuse. "And the back booth being magically empty every night she comes in — that's coincidence too, I suppose."
"Coincidences happen."