Chapter Four #2
Rooster leans forward, not done yet. "Answer me something, Wyatt, straight, since we're doing straight today.
If Rowan hadn't found that photo, if that woman had just kept her mouth shut and stayed six hundred miles away, were you ever going to tell her yourself?
Or were you planning on riding out that Nomad patch a few more years and calling it a life? "
The question lands exactly the way he means it to, a blade instead of a question, and the room goes quiet waiting to see if I'll flinch from it.
"I don't know," I say, because it's the truth and because Preacher already told me lying wasn't an option today, not even to make myself look better in front of men I respect.
"I'd like to say I would have. I'd like to sit here and tell you I was working up the nerve.
But I can't swear to that, because I don't actually know what I would have done if I hadn't gotten caught, and pretending otherwise just to make this room feel better about me isn't something I'm willing to do anymore.
What I do know is I got caught, and everything since then, every hard conversation, every night sitting alone in a house I don't deserve to still be paying the mortgage on, that's all been real, whether or not I'd have found my own way to the truth without it. "
Rooster doesn't say anything else, just sits back, arms still crossed, unconvinced but apparently satisfied he got an honest answer instead of a comfortable one, which seems to be the most any of us can ask for today.
Silence sits in the room a moment, and I feel every eye at that table land on me at once, weighing, judging, and I make myself sit still under it instead of looking away, because Preacher's right, and because I don't get to flinch from this any more than I got to flinch from what I told Rowan this morning.
"Wyatt's on protection detail at Marked, effective today," Silas says, finally, gavel still untouched in front of him.
"Deuce runs point on gathering everything we can on Blackthorn's movement through Clearview and the county line.
Preacher, you and I take point on reaching out to Amarillo, see what Denise and the rest of that charter can tell us about Dax Cole's standing and what he might actually be after here.
And Wyatt." He looks at me, direct, no softness in it.
"You do not make one move on this without running it through the club first. Not because we don't trust your instincts.
Because you don't get the benefit of acting alone on this, not after what your acting alone already cost everybody in this room. Are we clear?"
"Clear."
The gavel never comes down. It doesn't need to.
Church ends the way it started, quiet and heavy, and men file out one at a time, a couple of them clapping a hand on my shoulder on the way past, more out of old habit than any real absolution, and Rooster doesn't clap me on anything, just gives me one long look on his way out the door that tells me exactly where I still stand with him and probably will for a good while yet.
Tank pauses at the door on his way out, hangs back long enough that I know he's got one more thing to say.
"For what it's worth," he says, low, just between us, "I don't think you're a lost cause.
I think you're a man who's got a long road ahead of him and no shortcuts on it.
Just don't go looking for one. Rowan will know the difference, and so will the rest of us. "
"Wasn't planning on looking."
"Good. Keep it that way." He claps my shoulder once, harder than the others had, and follows the rest of them out.
Preacher's the last one left in the room besides me, gathering papers he doesn't actually need to gather, giving himself a reason to linger.
"You did good in there," he says, not looking up. "Telling it straight. That's step one, and it's a smaller step than you think it is, so don't go feeling proud of yourself for it."
"I don't feel proud of anything right now, Preacher."
"Good. Keep it that way a while longer." He finally looks at me, and there's something almost gentler underneath the hard set of his face, the kind of look a man gives another man he's known since before either of them had gray in their beard.
"You want to know if you can fix this, the answer's not up to me and it's not up to Silas and it sure as hell isn't up to that table in there.
It's up to her. All we did today was make sure the club's not standing in the way of you finding out. What you do with that is on you."
I ride back into town with that sitting heavy behind my ribs, past the diner, past the courthouse square, and I don't go straight to Marked, not yet, because showing up twice in one day feels like exactly the kind of pressure Rowan doesn't need from me right now.
Instead I pull my phone out at a red light on Main and type out something short and plain, no more explanation than the situation calls for: Club's putting me on protection detail at the shop, starting today.
Not asking permission. Just letting you know so it's not a surprise when I'm there tonight.
She doesn't answer right away. I don't expect her to.
But three minutes later, while I'm still sitting at that same red light longer than the actual light requires, three dots appear and disappear twice before her answer finally comes through, four words, nothing more, exactly the kind of controlled, exact reply I should have expected from her.
Fine. Don't hover.
I put the phone away and ride on, and for the first time in eight months I have somewhere to be tonight that isn't an empty house, and I hate how much relief that thought brings me, because relief isn't something I've earned the right to feel yet, not by a long way, and I know it.
I stop at the house first, long enough to grab a duffel with a few changes of clothes and a spare charger, because if I'm going to be sitting outside that shop every night for the foreseeable future I'd rather not be doing it in yesterday's shirt.
Standing in the bedroom doorway with the bag half packed, I catch myself looking at her side of the closet again, still half empty, and I think about what Preacher said, about small omissions piling up until a woman's gone before you ever worked up the nerve to say the thing that mattered.
I think about Rooster's question, the one I couldn't answer clean, and I sit with how much I still don't like the honest answer to it.
I don't know if I'd have told her. That's the truth sitting under everything else tonight, uglier than the affair itself in some ways, because at least the affair I can point to as a single bad choice compounding into worse ones.
The not-telling, the years I might have spent letting that lie just quietly exist underneath a marriage I still would have called happy on the surface, that's a different kind of rot, slower, and I don't have a clean answer for how far it would have gone if Denise hadn't done what I didn't have the spine to do myself.
I zip the bag, kill the lights, and head back out to the bike.
Whatever tonight turns into, watching that street, keeping my word to a club that's decided to trust me exactly as far as they can verify and not one inch further, it's a start.
Not a fix. Preacher made that plenty clear.
Just a start, and I intend to keep showing up for it, one quiet, unglamorous night at a time, whether it ever earns me anything back or not.