Chapter Ten
Wyatt
A regular named Frank comes in that afternoon for a touch-up, spends most of his appointment fishing for gossip about the Reaper who's been parked outside every night, and I watch Rowan handle it through the front window with the same brisk, controlled precision she brings to everything, deflecting without lying, protecting something private without making it obvious she's protecting anything at all.
"He's doing security detail," she tells Frank, flat, final, daring him to push further.
Frank doesn't push further. Nobody pushes further with Rowan when her voice goes like that.
I catch the tail end of it on my way past for a water break, and something in the easy, protective competence of it settles warm in my chest, watching her guard something about us, however small, however far from anything either of us has named yet, from a man who clearly just wanted a story to carry to the diner.
Frank leaves without his gossip, muttering something about tattoo artists getting territorial, and I catch Rowan's eye through the window for just a second before she turns back to her station, and something passes between us in that half-second that neither of us would call anything yet, but that I file away anyway, careful, hopeful, unwilling to read more into it than it's earned.
Four days after the clubhouse, four days into a countdown that's down to six now, and Rowan does something she hasn't done once in three weeks of this arrangement. She invites me in.
I almost don't recognize the offer at first, three weeks of careful, professional distance so thoroughly ingrained in both of us that it takes a full second for the words to register as an actual invitation and not just idle small talk on her way out the door.
The six days since the alley have settled into something that isn't quite normal but isn't quite crisis either, a strange, watchful rhythm of Deuce's morning shift and my own evening one, the whole club humming along in the background working every angle we've got on Dax Cole's meeting, and somewhere inside that rhythm, something between Rowan and me has been quietly shifting too, small and mostly unspoken, the kind of change you only notice in hindsight, looking back at how she says my name now compared to how she said it three weeks ago.
Not for anything significant, or not anything she frames as significant, just a flat, offhand comment as she's locking up that Deb left half a pot of chili going cold in the back and it seems like a waste to let it go bad, and did I want a bowl before I took up my post for the night.
I say yes before I can think too hard about what it means that she's asking, and I follow her up the narrow staircase behind the shop to the apartment I've never once set foot in since she moved into it eight months ago.
It's smaller than the house. Smaller and more entirely hers than anything about the life we built together ever quite managed to be, her own art on the walls instead of the careful, neutral compromises we used to make about decor, a worn quilt over the back of the couch that used to live in the spare room at the house, relocated here along with whatever else she needed to feel like this space actually belonged to her instead of just housing her.
There's a corkboard by the window covered in photographs I don't recognize, snapshots of a life she's built in these eight months that has nothing to do with me, Deb laughing at something outside the shop, a client's finished piece she's clearly proud of, a sunset over the water tower on the edge of town.
I catch myself studying it longer than I should, cataloging every piece of evidence of who she's become without me.
"That one's from the spring festival," she says, catching me looking, nodding at a photo of her and Deb covered in paint, laughing. "Deb roped me into the dunking booth for the shop's charity thing. I lost four hundred dollars in donations trying to stay dry and got soaked anyway."
"Looks like you had fun losing."
"I did, actually. Didn't expect to." She shrugs, something almost shy in the gesture. "Turns out I still know how to have fun. Wasn't sure for a while there."
"Sit," she says, nodding at the small kitchen table, and I do, careful not to take up more space than I'm owed in a room this size, this hers. The chair scrapes soft against the floor, and even that small sound feels loud in a space this quiet, this newly, tentatively shared.
She serves two bowls without ceremony, sits across from me, and for a while we eat in a silence that isn't uncomfortable so much as unfamiliar, two people relearning how to occupy the same small space without either the careful distance of the last three weeks or the easy, unthinking closeness of the nine years before that.
"Deb's chili needs work," I say, eventually, mostly to break the silence, and it startles a real laugh out of her, quick and unguarded.
"Don't tell her that. She's very proud of this recipe."
"I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's forgotten what heat level actually means."
"She'll fight you on that. She thinks she's got an iron palate because she grew up on her grandmother's cooking in Laredo.
" Rowan pushes a piece of cornbread across the table toward me, an old habit neither of us comments on, the way she's always given me the bigger piece without seeming to notice she's doing it. "You look tired."
Not the polite kind of noticing, I realize, watching her study my face a beat too long. The real kind, the kind that used to catalog every small change in me back when noticing was just something she did without thinking, before noticing became something she had to decide to allow herself again.
"I am tired. Good tired, mostly. Different kind than I've been carrying the last eight months."
"That's Preacher's phrase. Good tired." She studies me a moment, something curious in her expression. "He use it on you often?"
"More than you'd think. Man's got a whole vocabulary for different flavors of exhaustion. I'm starting to understand most of them."
The small talk peters out naturally, the way it does between two people who've run out of safe, surface things to say and are both circling something bigger neither's quite ready to name yet, and eventually she sets her spoon down, and something in her posture shifts, more deliberate.
"Can I ask you something?" she says, eventually, spoon resting against the bowl. "And I want an honest answer, not the version you think I want to hear."
"Always."
"Why the Nomad patch? Really. Not the story about Amarillo needing help, I know that part's true, but it's not the whole truth, is it.
I've had eight months to turn it over, and I keep landing on the same question.
We were good, Wyatt. Or I thought we were good. So why did you need a reason to leave?"
It's the question I've been circling for eight months without ever quite letting myself land on it fully, not even alone, not even at two in the morning with a whiskey I don't finish.
But she asked it plain, and she asked for honesty, and I've spent three weeks proving I'm capable of giving her that even when it costs me.
"You built something extraordinary in this shop," I say, slow, working it out loud as much as telling her.
"Watched you do it, month after month, this whole identity you were carving out that didn't need me for a single piece of it.
And some ugly, small part of me got scared standing next to something that solid, because I didn't feel solid.
I felt like gravel most days, loose, unfinished, still figuring out who I was outside of being your husband and a patch on somebody's cut.
And instead of doing the work to feel solid on my own, I took a Nomad patch and told myself it was about the club, about Amarillo needing somebody.
It wasn't. It was about running from a version of myself I didn't like standing still long enough to look at. "
Rowan's quiet a long moment, turning that over, and when she speaks again her voice is careful, not accusing, just genuinely searching.
"That's not my fault. What you just described."
"No. It's not. I want to be real clear about that, because I know there's a version of this conversation where it sounds like I'm blaming you for building something good, and that's not what I mean at all.
You didn't do anything wrong by being solid.
I did something wrong by not knowing how to stand next to it without running.
" I set my spoon down, meet her eyes straight on.
"I should have said all of this eight months ago, back when it might have actually mattered instead of just being an explanation for damage already done.
That's on me too. Not just the affair. The years of not saying the true thing out loud when it might have changed something. "
She's quiet again, and this time the quiet stretches long enough that I feel it in my chest, waiting to see which direction it breaks.
"I used to think you got bored of me," she says, finally, so quiet I almost miss it.
"That's what I told myself, some nights, before I even knew about Reina.
That the excitement of something new must have worn off, and you went looking for whatever came next.
I hate that version less than the real one, honestly.
Bored, I could have understood. Scared of standing next to me, scared of your own gravel, as you put it.
That's harder to hold. That means it was never really about anyone else at all. "
"It wasn't. I want you to hear that clean, no hedging. It was never about anyone being more than you. It was about me being less than I wanted to be, and choosing the coward's way of dealing with that instead of the hard way."