Chapter 7 #2
"It doesn't go anywhere." I take his face in my hands, the way I did upstairs in the studio, and I make him look at me.
"Listen to me. You've spent your whole life learning that good things get taken back and the only dignity left is not fighting when they go.
I know that lesson. I watched you learn it on the dock in the storm — no, that hasn't happened yet, I —" I lose the thread for a second, the grief making me clumsy.
"The point is, I'm not the club. I'm not a thing that gets taken back.
Whatever happens with Theo and the patch, I am not behind a door that closes.
Do you understand me? You can fold up the club if you have to.
You don't fold up me. I'm staying out where you can see me.
Permanently. That's not negotiable and it's not reversible and you don't get a minute to put it away. "
He looks at me for a long time, and I watch the still flat bracing place fight with something else, something newer, the thing I put there with three months of charcoal lessons and one night in the studio — the dangerous, destabilizing belief that maybe, this once, the door stays open.
"Okay," he says, rough. "Okay. I won't put it away."
"Good." I kiss him, hard, once. "Now eat a cardamom roll. He bought them for me and he's not getting them back, and I'm not letting them go to waste out of grief. That's letting him win twice."
Kieran laughs — a real one, startled out of him — and we sit at my small table in the wreckage of the morning and we eat my brother's peace offering between us, the apology he couldn't finish, and it's the saddest breakfast of my life and somehow also one I'll always keep.
The fallout splits the club down the middle.
I hear about it sideways, the way I hear about everything — Griffin tells Kieran, Kieran tells me.
Some side with Theo: a sponsor's word is a sponsor's word, a line is a line, a prospect who can't hold a boundary can't be trusted with a patch.
Some side with Kieran: the kid does the work of three men, took a drunk off Freya without a thought, and whatever he did wrong, you don't un-sponsor a man over who he fell for.
Most stay out of it entirely, which in club terms means watching very carefully to see which way the wind settles.
It's the kind of split that can fracture a charter if it's handled wrong, and everyone knows it, and that's why Dominic calls a meeting.
The week before the meeting is the worst week of my adult life, and I've had some.
Kieran insists on showing up for prospect duty every single day, even un-sponsored, even with half the club not speaking to him — especially with half the club not speaking to him.
"If I hide, I prove Theo right," he says, lacing his boots in the gray dawn.
"A man who can't keep a boundary, who runs the second it costs him.
So I don't run. I show up and I do the work and I let them watch me not run.
" And he does. He hauls and scrubs and fixes under the cold eyes of men who taught him everything, and he comes back to the studio every night wrung out and silent, and he draws until his hand cramps, and he doesn't complain, not once, and I lie awake beside him listening to him not-sleep and I want to drive to the compound and burn it down.
Theo and I don't speak. He leaves a voicemail on the third day — I can hear him breathing into it for nine seconds before he hangs up without a word, which is the most Katsaros voicemail in history, an entire apology and an entire refusal to apologize compressed into nine seconds of breath.
I don't call back. I don't know what I'd say.
I love you and you broke something and I'd do it all again doesn't fit in a voicemail.
Griffin's the one who keeps the channel open.
He comes by the shop twice that week, ostensibly for a touch-up on a piece that doesn't need touching up, actually to sit in my chair and tell me, in the sideways way of these men, that it's not as lost as it feels.
"Dominic's not Theo," he says, the needle humming.
"Theo's looking at a broken rule. Dominic's looking at a broken charter, and he's looking ten years down the road at what kind of club we are if we start eating our own over this.
Different altitude. You'll see." He's quiet a moment. "Kid's holding up?"
"He shows up every day," I say. "Even though it's killing him. He won't let them see it kill him."
"Yeah," Griffin says, like that confirms something. "That's the answer, then. That's the whole answer, right there." And he won't explain what he means, and I don't understand it until later, until the storm and the dock and the leather.
I'm not there for the meeting — I'm not club, that's the whole point of my life — but Kieran is, and he tells me after, sitting on the studio couch with his head in his hands, his voice flat with exhaustion.