Chapter Thirteen #2
"It was exactly like that. That's what it looks like from where I'm standing, and I don't have the energy left tonight to go digging for the version of it that makes you feel less like a man who still, after everything, thinks his judgment matters more than my right to be included in decisions about my own life.
" She wrapped her arms around herself, the old, familiar posture of self-protection, and felt something in her chest close that she hadn't realized was still open until this exact moment.
"I asked you, at that kitchen table, to be someone who tells me things.
Not someone who solves them alone and hands me the tidy result.
I thought you understood the difference. I actually believed you did."
"I do understand it. I understood it when I decided to do this anyway, which should tell you something about how much I wanted this specific problem gone before it touched you at all.
" Cole's composure was cracking now too, something raw and desperate bleeding through.
"I wasn't trying to prove I know better than you, Rowan.
I was trying to make sure that whatever happens to me, whatever this costs me, it never lands on your license or your business or your life again.
I've already cost you enough. I couldn't sit still and let this cost you one more thing, even if the only way to stop it was to spend the last thing I actually had left to give. "
"You keep talking about cost like it's yours alone to spend, Cole.
That's the whole pattern, right there, in real time.
You decide what you're willing to sacrifice, you decide what protects me best, you decide when the conversation's over and the action needs to happen, and I'm supposed to just receive the result and be grateful for it.
" Her voice cracked on the last word, the first real fracture in the composure she'd been holding since the garage door.
"I don't want a man who sacrifices everything for me in the dark where I can't see it happening.
I want a partner. I told you that in different words a hundred times over the last three weeks, and I thought, for a few days, that you'd actually started to hear it. "
"I heard it. I hear it right now, standing here, watching what I did land on you exactly the way you're telling me it landed.
" His voice had gone rough, raw in a way she'd rarely heard from him even at his worst. "I don't have a version of last night I can go back and redo differently, Rowan.
I can only tell you that the impulse that drove me out to that truck stop with my bike's title in my pocket wasn't the same impulse that drove five months of lying to you.
It came from a different place. That doesn't make it right.
I understand now that it doesn't make it right.
I just need you to know I wasn't hiding it because I thought you couldn't handle the truth.
I was hiding it because some old, broken part of me still thinks handling hard things alone is what love looks like, and I hate that about myself as much as you're about to hate it about me. "
"That's not not knowing, Cole. That's love that decides for someone instead of with them, and I told you already, that's exactly the shape of what broke us the first time.
" Her voice had gone quiet now, worse somehow than the shouting, the particular flat finality of a woman who'd run out of anywhere else to put the feeling.
"I need you to understand something, and I need you to actually hear it this time.
I don't think you're lying to me anymore.
I believe every word you've told me for the last three weeks.
That was never the problem. The problem is that you're still, underneath all of it, a man who solves things alone and calls it protection, and I don't know how to build anything real with someone who does that, no matter how good his reasons are. "
"Rowan."
"I need you to stay away for a while." The words cost her something physical to say, a tearing sensation low in her chest, but she said them anyway, because she'd promised herself seven months ago she was done saying things weren't fine when they weren't, and this, whatever this was, was very far from fine.
"Not the terms. Not the security work, that's done anyway, the debt's paid, there's nothing left to trace.
I mean you, personally, staying away from the Yard, from me, until I can figure out whether there's actually anything left here worth rebuilding, or whether I've been mistaking a man who's very good at consequences for a man who's actually changed the thing that matters. "
Cole stood very still, and something in his face, some last fragile hope he'd apparently been carrying since the kitchen table two nights ago, went out like a light switched off.
"Okay," he said finally, voice hoarse. "I'll stay away."
"I need you to actually mean it. Not three feet inside a doorway, not a compressor relay you happen to have on hand, not a working session you show up early for.
Away. Until I tell you otherwise, and I don't know yet when that's going to be, or if it's going to be at all.
" She heard her own voice shaking now, the composure finally failing her the way it hadn't failed her once in the whole conversation until this last, hardest sentence.
"I need that, Cole. I need to know what my life feels like without having to guess, every single day, whether you're managing something on my behalf that I don't know about yet. "
"You'll have it." He didn't argue, didn't reach for one more sentence to soften the distance she was asking for. "Whatever you need. However long you need it."
She left before either of them could say anything else, walking back across the lot in the fading afternoon light, and didn't let herself look back to see whether he watched her go, because she already knew, with the same bone-deep certainty she brought to every hard truth in her life, that he would be standing exactly where she'd left him, watching, for as long as she gave him the chance to.
She made it as far as the loading dock steps before the composure finally broke entirely, and she sat down hard, the same steps where two weeks ago they'd sat pressed close together in the aftermath of the break-in, his hand finding hers, the last inch of distance nearly closing between them, and cried the particular exhausted, furious tears of a woman who'd let herself hope again and had watched that hope collapse under the weight of an old pattern neither of them had fully outrun.
She thought of the eggs at two in the morning, the ice against his swollen eye, the true answer he'd finally given her about two years of silence, all of it real, all of it true, and none of it, apparently, enough to stop him from doing the exact same thing one more time when it mattered most.
She sat there a long while, until the light went fully gray and the first stars came out over the mill district, and did not call Deb, and did not call Preacher, and did not do anything except let herself feel, fully and without managing it into something smaller, exactly how much it hurt to lose something for the second time that she'd only just started letting herself want back.
Somewhere in the dark building behind her, the framed liquor license still hung exactly where Walt had made sure it got hung straight, her name on it, hers alone, and she thought, distantly, that it should have felt like enough of a victory to hold onto tonight.
It didn't. Not completely. Not the way she'd once believed it would