Chapter 14
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— Bea —
I ndira suggested coffee three weeks in.
Not at the clubhouse — she named a place on the other side of town, a small bakery with good lighting and no connection to anyone either of us knew from the MC.
I understood the choice without her explaining it.
Neutral ground. A conversation that didn’t have anything attached to it except two people sitting down.
I got there first and grabbed a table. She arrived five minutes later, ordered without looking at the menu, and settled into the chair across from me with the ease of a woman who’d finally found her footing as Venom Riders First Lady.
“How are you actually doing?” she said.
“I told you on the phone—”
“I know what you told me on the phone.” She wrapped her hands around her cup. “I’m asking you here, where there are no brothers anywhere nearby and you don’t have to perform anything.”
I looked at her. “I’m angry. I’m sad. I miss him. I’m angry that I miss him.”
“That’s four things.”
“Yes.”
She nodded, unfazed. Indira had been part of the MC world long enough to know what she was looking at — what it looked like when a woman who’d chosen one of those men was sitting across from her, trying to figure out what was left.
She wasn’t going to romanticize it, but she wasn’t going to condemn it either.
I’d always trusted her for that. The refusal to simplify.
“Can I tell you something?” she said.
“Okay.”
“You know most of this already. From when I was your client.” She gave me a small, wry smile.
“The move back. Nashville. The job. The conditions I set. You sat across from me while I walked through all of it — how I was returning for the work and not for him, how I was going to hold the line.” She turned her cup slightly. “There was a piece I never told you.”
“Go on.”
“Before the move, I spent weeks making a list. Every reason I wasn’t going to let him near the life I’d built in Nashville.
Everything he’d done, everything he was.
You and I talked about most of what was on it.
All of it was real. The list was accurate.
But I was using it as a reason, and it wasn’t really the reason. ”
“What was the reason?”
“I was afraid of letting him try.” She met my eyes.
“Staying gone was clean. I knew how to be the woman I’d become in Nashville — on my own, on my own terms, with a life I’d made from nothing.
If I let him anywhere near me again, even with conditions, even with him on his best behavior, I was putting the person I’d just finished becoming back in reach of a man who’d already done the worst thing he could do to me.
And I didn’t know if I could come back from it if he turned out to be the same man underneath.
” She paused. “It’s easier to make a list of his flaws than to say I’m afraid of what it’ll cost me to let him in again.
I couldn’t quite say that out loud in your office. I’m saying it now.”
I considered that.
“I’m not afraid of how much it costs,” I said. “I’m angry that he cost me something I didn’t consent to losing.”
Indira nodded as she sipped her coffee.
“He made a unilateral decision about our relationship. About what I could handle. About whether I got a say.” I put my coffee down.
“Four years I said no to him. Four years of thinking through every complication, every professional boundary, every reason it was a bad idea. And then I finally said yes because I believed he understood what that meant — that I’d thought about it carefully.
That I was choosing deliberately.” I stopped.
“And then he took the choice away the moment things got hard.”
“Yes,” Indira said. “He did.”
“I’ve been building the case for him. He was in shock. He was protecting me. He wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“All of those things are probably true.”
A chair scraped nearby — someone leaving, someone arriving. I registered it without turning. My coffee had gone cold at some point without my noticing.
“And it still happened.”
“Yes.” She was quiet for a moment. “But here’s the thing that I’ve had to sit with, in my own version of this.
The way they love you and the way they hurt you — those come from the same place.
Dutch tried to keep me at arm’s length for months because he was terrified of what loving me meant, what it exposed him to.
And that same impulse — that drive to control what he allowed himself to want — is part of what makes him who he is.
It’s not separate from the thing I love. ”
I thought about Holden. About the Road Captain brain that never stopped running contingencies. About the way he’d always known where the exits were, in every situation, in every room. “He ran an exit on us,” I said.
“Yes.” Indira held my gaze. “That’s what he does. He plans the exit before he has to use it.”
“I know that.” I looked at my coffee. “And that’s what I can’t get past. He did something terrible, yes. But what stays with me is that when his worst moment came, his instinct was to remove himself from the equation before I could choose to stay.”
“He didn’t trust you to make that choice.”
“No.”
“Or,” she said carefully, “he didn’t trust himself to deserve it.”
I sat with that one for longer than the others. “That’s not my problem to solve,” I said finally.
“No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”
The bakery had filled around us without my noticing. The morning traffic of a Thursday — people getting coffee, a table of older women with a spiral-bound notebook between them. Ordinary, unhurried.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said.
“You don’t have to have everything worked out.” Indira reached across the table and covered my hand for a moment.
“I’m a therapist. I know exactly how this is supposed to work. Give it time. Follow the process. Don’t force the conclusion.” I shook my head slightly. “It’s a lot easier to believe from the other side of the desk.”
We sat there for another hour. She didn’t tell me what to do. She didn’t defend him or condemn him or give me a timeline. She just sat across from me, drank her coffee and let me be in the middle of it without trying to locate the end.
Walking back to my car, I thought about what she’d said — he didn’t trust himself to deserve it. I turned it over. It didn’t soften anything. It just sat down next to the anger and took up its own space.
I had a client at two. A woman working through something not entirely different — a man who’d hurt her, the question of whether the hurt was the whole story.
I knew exactly what I’d say to her. The same careful, true things I always said.
The same things I’d just told Indira I needed to do myself.
Give yourself time. Don’t force the conclusion. Trust the process.
I got in the car and took the long way without meaning to — down Garrison, past the turn for the clubhouse, the route I used to take when I was heading to him.
I caught myself three blocks in and corrected, but the fact that my hands had known the way before my brain did told me everything I wasn’t ready to hear.
I believed in all of it. I just didn’t believe it would work on me.