Chapter Thirteen
Rowan
The morning starts ordinary enough, a walk-in client, a supply order I need to call in, a text from my lawyer gently asking, again, whether I've made any decisions about the paperwork still sitting in my nightstand drawer.
Three days out from whatever Dax Cole's planning, and the whole town seems to be holding some collective, unspoken breath, waiting to see which direction the next week breaks.
I've been better since the patch, since the deed conversation started, since the honest, careful mornings on the front step have started to feel less like an anomaly and more like something I could maybe get used to, if I let myself.
I catch myself humming while I work sometimes now, a small thing, but a thing I haven't done in eight months, and I've stopped examining it quite so hard for hidden meaning.
Denise calls on a Wednesday afternoon, two days after the patch, and I answer without thinking twice about it, because Denise has earned that much trust from me by now, a woman who told me the truth once when it cost her nothing to stay quiet and has kept doing it since.
"Just checking in," she says, warm in a way I've come to associate with her particular brand of Amarillo bluntness, no wasted time on pleasantries. "Preacher mentioned things are getting close on your end. Figured you could use a friendly voice that isn't currently drowning in club business."
"I could, actually." I lean against the register, grateful for the interruption, for a voice that doesn't carry the weight of everything else pressing in on me this week. "How are things down there?"
"Quiet, for now. Dax has gone dark the last two days, which either means he's finalizing whatever he's got planned or he's gotten spooked that we're onto him.
Preacher thinks the former. I'm hoping for the latter.
" A pause, easy, unhurried. "How's Wyatt doing?
I heard about the patch. That's not a small thing, giving that up. "
"He's doing okay. Better than okay, honestly. It's been..." I search for the right word, surprised by how much warmth creeps into my voice without my permission. "It's been a lot, this last month. But he's showing up for it. All of it."
"That's good to hear. I mean it. I've known a lot of Reapers over the years, patched men from half a dozen charters passing through, and I don't say this lightly, Rowan, but Wyatt's one of the harder-working ones I've watched try to turn himself around.
Doesn't mean the work's finished. Just means it's real, which is more than I can say for some men who talk a good game and never follow through. "
"You've seen a lot of men try and fail, then."
"More than I can count. It's part of why I noticed the ones who actually stick with it. They're rare enough to stand out."
I let that settle warm in my chest for a moment, unguarded, before the rest of the conversation takes the turn that undoes it.
"Good. I'm glad. God knows it took him long enough to figure out how to choose you for real, instead of just whenever it was convenient.
" Denise says it easy, conversational, the kind of comment meant as a compliment, and it takes a full beat for the wrongness of it to actually land in my chest. "I mean, better late than never, right?
At least he came back for good this time instead of just deciding at the last minute again. "
Something in my stomach goes very still and very cold.
"What do you mean, deciding again?"
I hear my own voice ask it from somewhere slightly outside myself, the particular dissociation of a body bracing for a blow before the mind has fully caught up to why.
Silence on the other end, just long enough that I know, with the particular sick certainty of a woman who's learned to read silences the hard way, that Denise has just said something she assumed I already knew.
"Rowan." Her voice changes, careful now, the particular carefulness of someone realizing too late they've stepped somewhere they shouldn't have. "You know about the visit. The one back in March, right before things really started falling apart down here."
"I know he came home in March. I remember it.
" My voice comes out flat, careful, holding very still around a memory I've turned over a hundred times in the last eight months, one of the few good ones I let myself keep.
"We had a good weekend. He seemed present, really present, for the first time in months.
We talked about trying again, about him maybe cutting the Nomad assignment short.
I thought that weekend was the start of something turning around. "
"Oh, honey." Denise's voice goes soft, and I hear, underneath it, the specific dread of a person realizing she's about to break something she can't take back.
"That weekend, Reina had given him an ultimatum a few days before he flew home.
Told him to choose, her or you, for real this time, no more going back and forth.
He flew home undecided, Rowan. He told me that himself, later, after everything came out.
Said he spent that whole weekend with you trying to figure out if he could actually stay, or if he was just going to end up back here anyway.
And then a week after he flew back to Amarillo, he was back with her, like nothing had changed.
I always figured he'd told you that part.
I'm so sorry. I never would have brought it up if I'd known he hadn't. "
The shop goes very quiet around me, Deb's voice somewhere in the back going distant and unimportant, the same way it did the morning Colton Reyes walked through that door, except this time there's no stranger to blame, no obvious villain standing in front of me.
Just a memory, one of the last good ones I had left from before everything broke, curdling in real time into something I don't recognize anymore.
That weekend. I remember exactly how it felt, Wyatt cooking breakfast Saturday morning for the first time in months, the two of us driving out to the lake in the afternoon, him reaching for my hand at a red light like it was the easiest, most natural thing in the world.
I remember thinking, that Sunday night before he flew back, that we were going to be okay.
I remember telling Deb, actually, in this exact shop, that I thought Wyatt and I had turned some kind of corner.
I remember the specific quality of light in our kitchen that Saturday morning, gold and ordinary, Wyatt humming something off-key while he burned the eggs slightly the way he always does, and how I'd laughed at him, easy, unguarded, the particular laugh I hadn't managed in months by then.
I remember him kissing my temple on his way past with the coffee pot, casual, the kind of small affection you only give freely when you're not performing anything for anyone.
I believed every second of it. I've spent eight months believing every second of it, replaying it on the hardest nights as proof that whatever else was broken, that weekend had been real.
He was auditioning me. That's what it actually was.
A man standing at a fork in the road, using our marriage, using me, as one option on a scale he was weighing against a woman six hundred miles away, and I spent that whole weekend believing I was watching my husband come home, when really I was watching him decide whether I was worth staying for.
"Rowan?" Denise's voice, careful, distant. "You still there?"
"I have to go." My voice comes out steady, distantly, the particular flat calm I recognize now as the sound of something in me shutting down to protect whatever's left. "Thank you for telling me. I mean that. I'd rather know."
"I really am sorry."
"I know you are. It's not your fault." I hang up before she can say anything else, and I stand there at the register a long moment, phone still in my hand, feeling something inside my chest that's worse than the day the window broke, worse than the day Colton Reyes said Ghost's name like a threat, because this isn't fear.
This is grief for a memory I don't get to keep anymore.
Deb finds me there ten minutes later, still standing in the same spot, and takes one look at my face before she's moving toward me.
"What happened?"
I tell her, flat, mechanical, the words coming out easier than I expect them to, maybe because some part of me has already gone somewhere numb and distant to survive telling it.
Deb's face goes through several things while I talk, sympathy and fury and something like helpless grief on my behalf, and when I finish she doesn't say anything for a long moment, just pulls me into a hug I don't fight, the first time in eight months I've let myself be held like this without some careful, guarded piece of me holding back.
"I'm so sorry, Ro."
"He never told me." I pull back, wiping my face with the back of my hand, angry at the tears I can't quite stop.
"Eight months of him telling me everything, unprompted, proving how different he's become, and this whole time there was still something he was letting me believe was better than it actually was. "
"Maybe he didn't fully understand it himself."
"That's not an excuse, Deb. That's the same pattern.
Deciding what version of the truth I can handle instead of just giving me all of it.
" My voice cracks, and I let it, too exhausted to hold the crack together anymore.
"I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if there's a bottom to how much of this story I still don't know. "
Deb doesn't try to fix it, doesn't offer easy reassurance the way a lesser friend might, just sits with me on the stool behind the register while I cry the particular ugly, unglamorous tears I've been too proud to cry in front of anyone this whole ordeal, and when I finally quiet, she squeezes my hand once, hard.