Chapter Two
Wyatt
I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of whiskey I haven't touched in twenty minutes when my phone finally rings, and some part of me already knows before I look at the screen that it's going to be her, because that's the kind of night it's been.
The kind where every quiet minute feels like it's waiting on something.
My hand's pressed over my eyes when the phone lights up on the table, tattoos running down my forearm to a wrist that still wears the same watch she gave me for our first anniversary.
I haven't taken the ring off. Haven't put it anywhere, haven't talked myself into a reason to, even eight months into a separation that both our lawyers keep gently suggesting I make peace with in more permanent terms.
I look at that watch a lot, lately. I look at a lot of things on this arm.
The whiskey in front of me is two fingers, poured an hour ago and touched exactly once since, ice long gone to water at the bottom of the glass.
I don't even want it, not really. I poured it because pouring it gave my hands something to do besides sit still in my lap, and now it's just sitting there next to my elbow going warm, evidence of an evening I can't account for in any way that makes me look better than I am.
I press the heel of my hand against my eyes and hold it there until the pressure behind them backs off some.
This is what most of my nights look like now.
Not dramatic. Not a man falling apart in any way you could point a camera at.
Just a house too big for one person, a drink I don't finish, and a version of myself I don't much like keeping me company until I'm tired enough to sleep.
The compass rose sits just below the crook of my elbow, four coordinates worked into the linework so fine you'd need a magnifying glass to read the numbers, and Rowan spent three hours on it herself, that third anniversary, humming under her breath the way she does when she's deep in a piece she cares about.
I used to catch myself looking at it during long rides, tracing the line with my thumb at a red light, thinking about the exact spot on a map where I first got up the nerve to ask a woman with paint under her nails and no patience for bullshit for her number.
I don't trace it much anymore. Now I mostly just look at it and feel sick.
This house is too quiet at night. Always was, some, even before, because Rowan and I were never the type to fill silence just to fill it, but there's a difference between comfortable quiet and a house with half the closet cleared out and a coffee mug she left behind still sitting in the cabinet because I can't make myself use it or throw it away.
I've lived alone in this house for eight months and I still open the wrong side of the closet some mornings out of habit, reach for a robe that isn't hanging there anymore, and stand in the doorway a second too long before I remember.
There's a specific kind of quiet in a kitchen that used to have two people moving through it at six in the morning, her at the counter grinding coffee beans loud enough to wake the dead, me pretending to read the paper while I really just watched her work.
I used to think that was boring. God help me, I used to feel some restlessness creeping up my spine on ordinary Tuesday mornings, watching the best thing that ever happened to me pour coffee, and some broken part of my wiring registered it as a cage instead of what it actually was, which was a life.
I'd give anything now for one more boring Tuesday.
I earned every bit of that quiet. I know that. Doesn't make it easier to sit in.
Fourteen months on a Nomad patch, riding between charters, helping Amarillo stand back up after their old road captain got popped on a federal supply charge that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with why I ended up there in the first place.
I told myself it was duty. Silas needed someone Amarillo would respect fast, and I fit the bill, patched in eleven years, clean record, good with new charters that don't trust outsiders easy.
That was true. It just wasn't the whole truth, and I knew it wasn't the second I put in for the patch.
I wanted out. Not out of the marriage, not then, not consciously, but out of something.
Some itch under my skin I didn't have a name for, some fear that I'd become a man who sits still his whole life and calls it contentment when really it's just fear dressed up nice.
Rowan built something extraordinary in that shop and I was proud of her every single day, and some ugly, small part of me was also scared to death of standing next to something that solid while I still felt like I was made of loose gravel.
So I took the Nomad patch and I told myself it was for the club, and I rode.
Silas didn't fight me on it much, figured a road trip might do me good, burn some of the restlessness off on asphalt instead of taking it out on the people closest to me.
He wasn't wrong that I needed something.
He just didn't know, and neither did I, not in words I could've said out loud back then, that the something I needed wasn't distance from Rowan.
It was the guts to sit still next to her and let myself be loved by someone who'd already decided I was worth staying for, instead of constantly waiting for the day she figured out different.
Reina worked the bar at Amarillo's clubhouse.
Good at her job, quick with a joke, the kind of easy company you fall into without meaning anything by it the first few times.
I'm not going to sit here in my own head and pretend I don't remember exactly how it started, because pretending is the thing that got me into this mess in the first place, one small lie at a time until the lies had a shape of their own I couldn't climb back out of.
It started as talking too long after last call. It became something else inside of six weeks, and it didn't stop for five months after that, not once, not even the two times I flew home and lay next to my wife telling myself this trip would be the last one.
I remember the exact night it stopped being something I could call an accident, sitting in the back office of that clubhouse at two in the morning, Reina's hand on my arm right over the compass rose, and some part of me registering, clear as a bell, that I had a choice standing right there in that moment and I made the wrong one on purpose.
Not drunk enough to blame the whiskey. Not confused enough to blame the distance.
I made a choice, and then I made it again the next week, and the week after that, until choosing it stopped feeling like choosing anything at all and started just feeling like the shape of my life down there.
I've stopped trying to find a version of that story that makes me less of what I am.
There isn't one. I did it, I knew what I was doing while I did it, and I lied about the size of it the second Rowan found out, because in the moment, telling her the smaller lie felt like the only way to keep something I already knew I'd thrown away with both hands.
Denise fixed that for me, calling Rowan with the truth I didn't have the spine to give her myself. I don't blame Denise. I blame the man who made it necessary for someone else to do that job.
I've had eight months to sit with exactly what I am now, on paper and off it.
Not a monster, I don't let myself hide behind that word either, because a monster doesn't get to feel this much regret, and monsters don't spend eight months actually trying to become someone worth trusting again.
Just a man who made a real, damaging choice with his eyes open, more than once, over months, and who doesn't get to call it anything smaller than what it was.
Silas called an hour before that, actually, though I didn't know yet how the two calls would end up sitting together by morning.
He wanted to know if I'd heard anything out of Amarillo lately, said one of the prospects thought he'd clocked a couple of Blackthorn colors parked outside the diner two towns over, nothing confirmed, probably nothing, but Silas has run this charter long enough to know Blackthorn doesn't send colors anywhere by accident.
"You still got people down there you trust?
" he'd asked, and I'd said yeah, meaning Denise mostly, and he'd said keep your ear to that ground, and we'd hung up, and I'd sat here with my whiskey telling myself it was nothing, some scouting run, some posturing that would blow over the way most of it does.
I think about that call a lot in the seconds after Rowan's voice comes through the phone, because some ugly, fast part of my brain has already done the math before she even finishes her sentence, already knows exactly what a rock through her window with my road name painted six feet tall beside it actually means.
My phone rings and it's her name on the screen, and something in my chest goes tight and cold all at once.
"Rowan?"
"Somebody put a rock through my window." Her voice is doing the thing it does when she's furious and scared and refusing to let either one win, flat and controlled, every word set down like a brick. "And wrote your road name on my building."
I'm on my feet before she finishes the sentence.
"I'm coming," I say. "Don't touch anything. I'm five minutes out."