Chapter Three #2
"Then go find out." I nod toward the door, arms still crossed, and make myself hold his eyes instead of looking away first. "But Wyatt, I need you to understand something.
I'm not scared of Blackthorn because I'm helpless.
I've spent eight months learning how to handle things without you standing behind me.
I'm scared because whatever this is, it followed you home, and I don't like being collateral in somebody else's grudge against a man I'm not even sure I still know. "
That last part costs me more than I want it to, saying it out loud, and I watch it cost him something too, watch him take it exactly the way it's meant, square on the chin, no flinching.
I stand there for a second, taking that in, feeling the whole architecture of the last eight months, the careful, hard-won distance I built one boundary at a time, start to buckle under the weight of a problem I didn't create and can't solve alone.
I hate this. I hate every part of needing him for anything, hate that some small, treacherous corner of me is almost relieved to have him standing here filling up the doorway like he used to, solid and present in a way I've spent eight months teaching myself not to need.
My father used to say a man's worth shows clearest in a crisis, not in how he behaves when everything's easy.
I always took that to mean club loyalty, brothers riding into danger for each other without hesitation.
Standing here now, watching Wyatt's jaw work through the math of what Blackthorn's capable of, I wonder if he meant something closer to this.
Whether a man shows you who he really is in the quiet after he's already failed you, in whether he shows up anyway and does the unglamorous work of cleaning up a mess with no guarantee it earns him anything back.
"I need to take this to Preacher," Wyatt says. "And Silas. Today. They need to know Blackthorn's moving, and they need to know it's tied back to me."
Something in the way he says it, tied back to me , sits differently than the rest of what he's told me this morning.
Not an excuse. Closer to an accounting, a man laying his own ledger out flat on the table for anyone to add up.
I don't know yet what he's willing to do about any of it.
I'm not sure he knows either. But I notice, filing it away somewhere I don't examine too closely, that he doesn't once mention his Nomad patch, doesn't mention Amarillo, doesn't ask whether any of this changes his standing at the charter.
He's talking about Silas and Preacher like a man bracing for consequences, not negotiating around them.
"Fine." The word comes out clipped, final.
"Take it to whoever you need to take it to.
But hear me right now, Wyatt Calloway, because I'm only going to say it once.
" I make myself look straight at him, chin up, voice steady even though my hands aren't quite.
"This doesn't mean anything's changed between us.
I'm not doing this because I want you back in my life.
I'm doing this because I built something here that matters to me, and I'm not going to lose it because you couldn't keep it in your pants in Amarillo for five months.
Whatever you do to fix this mess, you do it because it's yours to fix.
Not because you think it buys you anything with me. "
Something moves behind his eyes, quick and painful, gone almost before I catch it.
"Understood," he says.
"Good." I turn away first, because I need to, because another second of him looking at me like that and I'm not entirely sure what my face is going to do.
"Deb's got the insurance company. I need a board for that window before we open again, and I need you to figure out exactly what Blackthorn thinks they're owed, because I'm not running a shop with a target painted on the brick and no idea why. "
"I'll find out." A pause, longer than it needs to be. "Rowan."
"Don't." I know exactly what's coming, can hear it forming in the careful shape of my name, and I'm not ready, not standing in broken glass at nine in the morning with my hand freshly bandaged and his ring still visible on his hand when he reaches up to push his hair back.
"Just go find out what they want. That's all I need from you right now. "
He nods once, holds my eyes a second longer than the moment calls for, then turns and walks back out through the broken door, boots crunching over glass on his way to the bike.
I watch him go from just inside the doorway, arms wrapped around myself against a cold that has nothing to do with the morning air, and I don't let myself exhale properly until I hear the engine turn over and pull away down the street.
Behind me, Deb comes off the phone and leans in the back doorway, studying my face with the particular expression she gets when she's deciding how hard to push.
"So," she says. "That happened."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying, for a man you claim not to want back in your life, you sure let him stand real close to you for a real long time."
"Deb."
"I'm ordering a new window and I'm not saying another word about it.
" She holds both hands up, already turning back toward the phone, and just before she disappears into the back she adds, quiet enough that I almost miss it, "For what it's worth, Ro.
He looked wrecked. That's not nothing, coming from him. "
"Wrecked doesn't fix a window," I say, but there's less heat in it than I mean for there to be.
"No," Deb agrees. "But it's not nothing, either.
I've known you nine years. I've watched you build this place up out of spite and stubbornness and a loan you were scared out of your mind to sign.
I'm not telling you to forgive him. I'm just telling you I saw his face, and it wasn't the face of a man performing guilt for an audience.
It was the face of a man who's been carrying it alone for eight months and just got handed proof it's about to get worse. "
I go back to the register and start pulling up contractor numbers for the window, because there's work to do, and work has always been the thing that keeps me upright when everything else wants to knock me flat.
But some part of my brain keeps circling back to that folded paper, our two names side by side in red ink, and the plain fact that whatever's coming for this shop isn't finished with either one of us yet, no matter how badly I want it to be.
I don't answer Deb, because I don't trust what I'd say, and because some small, exhausted part of me already knows she's right, and I am not, under any circumstances, ready to let that matter yet.