CHAPTER EIGHT
Standing Up
Cade
Dice found him in the garage at ten o'clock the next morning.
Not unusual. The garage was where Cade went and Dice knew it and had always treated it as neutral ground — the place where conversations happened that were not club conversations, not because the garage was outside the Brotherhood's architecture but because Dice was smart enough to understand that some conversations required a different kind of space.
He came in with two coffees in the chipped mugs from the bar and handed one to Cade and leaned against the bench in the posture of a man who had something to say and was picking his angle.
Cade was doing brake pad work on the Road Captain's personal bike.
He accepted the coffee and did not stop working.
This was the established grammar of conversations with Dice: Cade worked, Dice talked, and the work kept Cade honest because it occupied the part of him that would otherwise be managing his presentation.
"The Wells run is set," Dice said. "Thirty-six hours. Harker and Briggs on the back-road approach, you and me on the primary. Ox is staying compound with Cal and Trey."
"Lev?"
"Lev is coming. Cal's call." A pause. "I think Cal wants him where he can see him."
Cade considered this. It was sound strategy and also a specific kind of message from Cal to Lev that Cade could read without being told the text of it.
"Good," he said.
Dice drank his coffee. The brake pad came free. Cade examined the rotor, which was at the edge of serviceable and would need attention within the month.
"She talked to you," Dice said. "Yesterday. In here."
"Yes."
"What did she say?"
"What she said is between her and me."
"Okay." Dice set down his coffee. "I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to hear it as the man who was in this garage the night you came back from that call, not as the Road Captain talking to the Sergeant-at-Arms. Can you do that?"
Cade set down the rotor.
"Yeah," he said.
"You've got fourteen months to account for," Dice said.
"Not just the night. The night is the worst part, but it's not the whole thing.
The whole thing is the night plus fourteen months of knowing she was in Elko with a baby and not going.
Fourteen months of her nursing alone and working nights and figuring out how to keep herself and Knox alive on a CPN salary without any help from you.
" He paused. "You're going to have to account for all of it. Not just the one thing."
Cade picked up the coffee mug. Drank.
"I know," he said.
"Do you know how to do that?"
"I'm working it out."
"Work it out faster," Dice said. "She's not going to wait around for you to find the language.
She'll assess what she sees and she'll make a decision on that basis and she will be gone before you finish the sentence.
" He picked up his mug. "I've seen her operate for four days.
She doesn't wait. She decides. You need to give her something to decide about. "
Cade looked at the brake assembly.
"You were here the night I went to Dani," he said. It was not a question.
"I was in the bar," Dice said.
"You didn't say anything."
"No."
"Why not?"
Dice was quiet for a moment. Then: "Because I knew you were doing something terrible and I also knew that if I said anything you'd just do it faster to prove you were going to anyway.
You were that far gone." He paused. "I should have said something.
I've thought about it." He looked at the floor.
"I think I was also afraid that if I named what you were doing, you'd have to name it too, and neither of us were ready for that conversation. "
Cade absorbed this.
It was the specific honesty of a man accounting for his own part in a disaster he hadn't caused but hadn't stopped. Dice carried that the way Cade carried the original act — not as guilt that immobilized but as a fact that was part of the record.
"She asked me why," Cade said. "In here yesterday. I told her I wasn't going to give her a version that was less than what it actually was."
Dice looked at him.
"That's — yeah," he said. "That's the right thing."
"I don't have the full accounting yet," Cade said.
"I'm close. But I needed to tell you I saw her face when she said the same night.
" He stopped. He very rarely said things out loud that did not have a destination, but this one didn't. It was just a fact that needed to exist in a space outside his own head. "I saw her face."
Dice said nothing for a beat. Then: "I saw her face when she came back through the gate with Knox. She didn't come back for you, Wreck. She came back to survive. Don't confuse those two things."
"I'm not confusing them."
"Good." Dice picked up his mug. "Because the way you get from survival to something else is a very specific road and it requires you to be standing up the whole way.
Not on your knees. You go to her on your knees and she's going to see a man who feels bad, not a man who changed.
Those are different things to a woman who's been deciding everything alone for fourteen months. "
Cade reassembled the brake unit.
He thought about standing up. He thought about what it meant to stand up inside an accounting rather than in spite of it — to hold the full weight of what he had done without collapsing under it, because collapsing was its own form of making her carry his guilt on top of everything else she was carrying.
He thought: she is sixty feet away. She is in the back room feeding Knox his morning bottle and she is going to look at me in thirty minutes when I walk past the door and she is going to be assessing what she sees, and what she sees needs to be a man who is standing up.
"Wells tomorrow," Dice said, moving toward the door.
"Wells tomorrow," Cade confirmed.
He finished the brakes.
He walked past the back room door. He did not stop. He did not look in.
He felt her, behind the door, the specific quality of her presence that he had always been able to identify through walls and across rooms and at the kind of distances that should have been too far.
He kept walking.
He was standing up.