CHAPTER ELEVEN
What Dice Told Me
Nadia
Dice Reeves had a habit of feeding Knox.
She had not asked him to develop this habit and she was not entirely sure how it had developed, but somewhere in the first week of compound life it had become a thing — Dice appearing at the back room door at the specific times in Knox's schedule that corresponded to solid-food introductions, sitting across from her while she spooned the small amounts of pureed food that Knox was still mostly examining rather than eating, and talking in the low continuous way of a man who was comfortable with silence but also comfortable with filling it when filling it served a purpose.
He talked about road navigation. He talked about two specific cats that had lived at the compound for five years and had complex territorial arrangements with the garage.
He talked, once, about a woman in Flagstaff he had not seen in three years with the matter-of-fact quality of a man who had decided the facts of his regrets without dramatizing them.
She listened and she appreciated it because it was company that did not require anything from her and Knox had started doing the face where he opened his mouth for the spoon and then blew raspberries at the pureed sweet potato, which was messy and funny and she had not had many funny things in the compound so far.
On the eighth day, Dice stayed after Knox had been put down for his nap.
She was cleaning the small plastic bowl and spoon at the utility sink. She heard him behind her, still in his chair, not leaving. She finished the washing and dried her hands and turned around.
"You're going to tell me something I may not want to hear," she said.
"Probably," Dice said. "And I want to say first that I'm telling you because I think you should have it, not because Cade asked me to. He didn't. He'd actually prefer I didn't."
She sat back down.
"The night you called him," Dice said.
She kept her face neutral.
"I was in the bar. I was present for the whole sequence — the call, the phone going back in his pocket, what he did after.
" He looked at his hands. "He didn't go to Dani because he wanted to.
I want to be precise about this because the difference matters.
He didn't want her. He wasn't looking for her.
He sat at the bar for eleven minutes after the call — I counted, not at the time but in hindsight I've recounted it enough to be sure — and then he went to her. "
"I know it was deliberate," Nadia said. "That's not better."
"No. But I want you to understand what the deliberate decision was about, because I don't think he's said this to you yet and I think you're making assessments without it.
" He paused. "He told me the morning after.
First time he'd talked to me directly in two days.
He said — and I'm giving you the substance of it, not the exact words — he said he went to her because he knew he was going to lose you anyway.
He said you were a nurse in Elko with a life outside all this and a pregnancy meant you'd eventually decide the club world wasn't what you wanted for a child, and he was going to lose you by degrees, and he decided to end it before it ended itself. "
She was quiet.
"He decided your future for you," she said.
"Yes."
"He decided what I would choose, and then he used that decision as a reason to—"
"Yes."
She breathed.
She thought about the nine-thirty call. She thought about the eleven minutes — the bar, the beer, the specific silence of a man sitting with news that should have changed everything and instead sending him to the worst version of himself.
She thought about what it meant to decide someone else's future for them, to preemptively end a thing based on a conclusion you had reached alone without consulting the person most centrally involved.
It was not better.
It was worse, actually. Not worse than the original act in terms of the damage, but worse in terms of the architecture of it — the certainty, the arrogance, the specific failure to ask.
He had looked at her and her life and her choices and decided he knew what they would mean, and then he had used that decision to justify destroying the thing he was afraid of losing.
She had spent fourteen months being angry about the betrayal. She had not known to be angry about the decision.
Now she was.
"Thank you for telling me," she said to Dice. Her voice was steady because she had practice with this, with receiving information that needed to be metabolized rather than performed.
"There's one more thing," Dice said. He looked directly at her.
"He knows he did both of those things. He knew the next morning.
The reason he hasn't gone to you with the full accounting is not because he doesn't know what he owes.
It's because he doesn't know if there's a way to say it that doesn't reduce what you went through.
" He paused. "That's not an excuse. I'm just — telling you what I know about what's in his head. "
She nodded.
She sat for a moment with her hands on the table and the compound quiet around her and Knox's breathing from the next room even and slow.
Then she got up.
"Where is he?" she asked.
"Garage," Dice said. Not surprised.
* * *
He was at the bench. Not working — sitting on the stool with a coffee that had been cold for a while and his forearms on the bench and his eyes on the middle distance.
He heard her come in and didn't look up, which meant he had already heard from Dice that she was coming, or he had heard it from something else.
She stood across the bench from him.
"Did you ever ask me if I wanted to leave?" she said.
He looked up.
She held his gaze. She kept her voice level because the level voice was the truest one right now, not because she wasn't feeling it but because the feeling was too precise for anything louder.
"Did you ever ask me — once, in the year we were together — if the Brotherhood's world was something I couldn't live with?
Did you ask me what I wanted for a child, if we had one?
Did you ask me anything about the future before you decided what I'd say? "
He said, "No."
Single syllable. Clean. No qualifier.
"You decided I would leave," she said. "You decided I would choose a different life and take the baby and go, and you decided you would rather destroy it first than be left." She paused. "That's not love. That's ownership with a self-destruct mechanism."
Something moved across his face. Not flinching. Something that was closer to the specific expression of a man receiving an accurate strike in a place he had not protected because he had not expected to be hit there.
"Yeah," he said. "That's — yeah. That's what it was."
She looked at him.
The fury was still present. It had not resolved into anything softer.
But underneath it was the thing she had named two nights ago and refused to name too quickly: the recognition that the man in front of her had the correct accounting, had not defended against it, had not redirected it. Was sitting with it.
"I wanted to stay," she said. "I don't know what I would have decided, long-term, about the club world and Knox. But I wanted to stay with you. You didn't ask."
He said nothing.
"Don't tell me you're sorry," she said. "Not yet. Sorry is just weather. Show me something different."
She walked out of the garage.
The desert air hit her face and she stood in the yard for sixty seconds and breathed, and then she went to get Knox from his nap.