Chapter One #2
I called him that night and he told me it was a mistake, one time, drunk, meant nothing.
I believed him for eleven days. Then Denise, the Old Lady out at the Amarillo charter, called me out of nowhere and told me the truth without being asked, because she said she couldn't watch me walk back into something built on a story that small when the real one was five months long and half the charter had known before I did.
Those eleven days, I made him breakfast twice.
Told myself we were going to get through it, that a mistake this size, made once, in a moment of weakness eleven hundred miles from home, was something a marriage could survive if we both wanted it enough.
I even scheduled a lawyer consultation and then canceled it, proud of myself for choosing hope over fear.
I think about that a lot, some mornings.
How willing I was to be lied to. How good it felt for eleven days to believe the smaller version of the truth, right up until Denise's voice on the phone took it away from me for good.
Eleven days I believed the smaller lie. That's the part that still gets me some mornings more than the affair itself does. Not the two of them. The eleven days I spent being lied to about how bad it was, while he already knew.
I put the pen down and press the heel of my hand against my sternum, hard, until the pressure in my chest evens back out. Old trick. Works about sixty percent of the time.
I'm still sitting there when Deb comes back out front, and the look on her face stops whatever she was about to say.
"What," I say.
"Come look at the front window."
I don't remember standing up. I remember the cold air hitting me first, because the front door's propped open, and then I see it, and my whole body goes very still in the specific way it does right before adrenaline catches up to what my eyes already know.
The big display window, the one with MARKED painted across it in gold script I picked out myself, is shattered from a rock or a brick, glass fanned out across the sidewalk in a pattern that would almost be pretty if it weren't glass from my shop.
And spray-painted across the brick beside the door, black paint still glossy in places where it hasn't fully dried, six feet high, is a message that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the man I haven't lived with in eight months.
GHOST OWES US.
Nobody in this town calls Wyatt by his road name.
Nobody outside the club uses it at all. Whoever did this didn't grab a rock out of frustration at a random tattoo shop.
They know exactly whose wife runs this place, and they know exactly what to call him to make sure he'd understand it was meant for him even with my name on the lease.
I crouch down at the edge of the glass, careful of my palm, and that's when I see it, tucked half under a chunk of broken window like it landed there on purpose and not by accident: a single sheet of paper, folded twice, gone slightly damp from the morning dew.
I pick it up before Deb can stop me. No note inside, no demand written out in careful block letters like something out of a movie.
Just a photocopy of a property record, this building's address circled twice in red pen, and beneath it, two names. Mine. And his.
I fold it back along the same creases and slide it into my apron pocket, because some instinct tells me not to hand it over yet, not until I understand what it means myself.
"Sheriff Dunlap's number is programmed into the register phone," Deb says quietly, watching me. "You want me to call him?"
I think about it for exactly as long as it takes to remember every conversation I've ever had about how club business and county business occupy two different worlds in this town, worlds that mostly agree not to look too hard at each other as long as nobody's bleeding out on Main Street.
A rock through a window might get a report filed and a deputy shrugging at me about kids and boredom.
It is not going to get me an answer about who Ghost owes, or why, or what happens if that debt doesn't get paid.
"Not the sheriff," I say. "Not yet."
"Rowan." Deb's voice, careful, close to my ear. "You need to call somebody."
"I know." My own voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is its own small victory. "I know who."
I don't want to. God, I don't want to. Eight months of not needing him for anything, of proving to myself and to this whole town that I was going to be fine, entirely fine, on my own, and here I am with a rock through my window and his ghost of a name written across my brick, and there's exactly one person who might actually know what this means and why.
His name is still on the deed. We bought this building together, back when we were still the kind of married that made big decisions in bed at midnight with a bottle of cheap wine between us, and I never got around to having the paperwork changed because changing it meant admitting something I wasn't ready to admit yet.
I've regretted a lot of things about not finishing that conversation with my lawyer.
This morning I regret it in a whole new, sharper way, because it means whatever this is, whoever left this message, isn't just my problem to solve alone.
I go back inside, past Deb, past the broken glass crunching under my boots, and I stand at the counter with my phone in my hand for a long moment before I let myself pull up his contact.
Wyatt Calloway. I never changed the name in my phone either.
I hit call before I can talk myself out of it, and I stand there listening to it ring, one hand flat against the counter to keep it steady, watching the black paint through the broken window catch the morning light in a way that makes the letters look wet all over again, like it happened just now instead of hours ago while I was asleep upstairs, close enough to have heard the glass break if I hadn't had the fan running.
He picks up on the second ring.
"Rowan?"
Just my name. No hello, no easy opener, just my name in that low, careful voice he's used with me since the day Denise called, like he's constantly bracing for whatever's coming next out of my mouth.
I used to love that voice. Some mornings, God help me, I still do, underneath everything else I feel when I hear it.
"Somebody put a rock through my window," I say. "And wrote your road name on my building."
Silence on the other end, just long enough that I hear him exhale, slow and controlled, the sound of a man working very hard to keep his voice level for my benefit.
"I'm coming," he says. "Don't touch anything. I'm five minutes out."
He hangs up before I can tell him not to bother.
I set the phone down on the counter and stand there a moment, staring at the black paint through the broken glass, at my own name and his sitting side by side on a folded photocopy in my apron pocket, like the paperwork itself is daring me to admit how tangled we still are underneath everything I've told myself for eight months.
Deb doesn't say anything else. She just starts sweeping glass into a neat pile by the door, giving me the five minutes I need to decide who I want to be by the time his engine sounds on Main Street.
I don't figure it out in time. I never do, with him.