Chapter Fourteen #2
He doesn't argue further, just processes the paperwork with the brisk efficiency of a man who's stopped being surprised by what people do to each other, or for each other, in the middle of falling apart.
I don't deliver it myself. I think about it, think about the version of this where I show up at the shop with the papers in hand and some part of me gets to watch her reaction, gets to be present for the moment she understands what I did, and I recognize that impulse for exactly what Preacher was talking about, wanting credit even while performing sacrifice, wanting the thing to still somehow be about my own vindication instead of just being about her.
So I drop the papers with Deb instead, at the shop's back door, brief, no lingering, no explanation beyond the basics. "For Rowan. Full transfer, no conditions. She can call the lawyer directly if she's got questions, his number's on the cover sheet."
Deb studies me a long moment, something assessing in her expression. "You okay?"
"No. But that's not really the point right now."
"Fair enough." She takes the envelope, careful. "I'll make sure she gets it. And Wyatt." Something softens slightly in her face. "For what it's worth, whatever's going on between you two right now, that was a hell of a thing to do without asking for anything back."
"Wasn't trying to earn credit. Just trying to do the one thing I actually still had control over."
"That's usually how the real ones look, actually.
The gestures that don't come with strings attached.
" She studies me a moment longer, something almost gentle underneath her usual sharp edges.
"She's not going to call you tonight. I want you to hear that now so you're not sitting outside checking your phone every five minutes.
But she's not going to just throw this away either.
I know her. This matters, even if it takes her a while to say so. "
"I'm not expecting anything. I just needed her to have it."
"I believe you. That's actually the part that surprises me most, watching you these last three weeks.
" Deb tucks the envelope carefully under her arm, glances back toward the shop's interior.
"For what it's worth, I spent a long time hoping you'd turn out to be worth all this trouble.
I'm not fully convinced yet. But I'm a lot closer than I was a month ago, and I don't say that lightly. "
"That means more than you probably realize."
I ride back to my empty house after that, the day stretching ahead of me with nowhere I'm supposed to be for the first time in three weeks, and I spend most of it doing the unglamorous, unwitnessed work Preacher talked about, cleaning the house top to bottom, clearing out the last of my own clutter from rooms that used to be shared, making space in case space is ever something she wants filled again.
I find things in the back of the closet I'd forgotten were there, a photo from our wedding day tucked into an old jacket pocket, her father's handshake still visible in the particular set of my own younger shoulders in the picture, proud and terrified in equal measure.
I sit on the floor of that closet a long while, just looking at it, before I set it on the dresser instead of putting it away again, a small, private decision to stop hiding the evidence of what we were even while I don't know yet what we're going to become.
I find her handwriting too, a grocery list stuck to the inside of a cabinet door, mundane and ordinary, milk and thread and a birthday card for somebody I don't even remember now, and I stand there a long moment just looking at her handwriting, missing something as small and stupid as the particular slant of her letters, proof of an ordinary life we used to share that I threw away for reasons that felt enormous at the time and look, from this distance, almost unbearably small.
By afternoon the house is cleaner than it's been in eight months, every room aired out, every trace of my own aimless grief scrubbed from the corners I'd let it collect in, and I stand in the kitchen doorway one more time, surveying the work, trying, with every hour that passes, to sit with the discomfort of not knowing if any of it will matter, instead of reaching for my phone to check.
Silas calls near evening with an update on Dax Cole, voice tight with the particular urgency of a man who's just gotten confirmation the meeting's still on, two days out now, location confirmed, a small window to actually do something about it before it happens.
I take the call standing in my own kitchen, the house quieter than it's been in weeks, and I listen to the plan taking shape, and some old, familiar part of me wants badly to throw myself into the tactical problem because it's easier than sitting with the personal one.
"Reina's gone dark," Silas says. "Denise thinks she left Amarillo entirely, no word to Dax or anyone else in that world. If she took anything useful with her when she went, we might be looking at a very different conversation with Dax than the one we've been planning for."
"You think she'd actually turn on her own brother?"
"I think a woman who lost her job, her apartment, and most of her friends because of him might be running out of reasons to protect him.
But I'm not banking club strategy on a maybe.
We plan for the meeting going forward as scheduled, and if something better falls into our lap between now and then, we adjust." His voice softens slightly, just barely.
"How you holding up? Preacher filled me in on the broad strokes. "
"Managing."
"That's the answer everybody in this club gives me lately when they mean the opposite. Get some rest if you can. Two days out, I need you sharp, not running on grief and no sleep."
"I'll be ready."
"I know you will. That's not actually what I'm worried about.
" A pause, something almost paternal creeping into Silas's voice, an echo of the man who's led this charter through worse nights than this one.
"You did a hard thing at church, Wyatt. A harder one today with that deed.
I want you to hear me say that clearly, because I don't think anybody's told you plain enough these last two days.
Whatever happens with Rowan, whatever happens with Dax, you've done real work this month.
Don't let tonight's grief convince you it didn't count for anything. "
"Feels like it might not, some hours."
"That's grief talking, not truth. Get some sleep."
I take my assignment, agree to be ready when Silas calls, and then I hang up and go back to the quiet, because running from the hard, formless grief of maybe having lost her for good by burying myself in a fight I can actually win, that's exactly the old pattern too, and I'm done running from anything, even the parts that don't come with a clear tactical solution.
I sit at the kitchen table a long while after the call ends, the house clean and quiet around me, a wedding photo propped on the dresser where I left it, and I let myself feel the full weight of not knowing, without reaching for anything to numb it, not the whiskey still sitting untouched in the cabinet, not my phone, not the old habit of riding until the feeling burns off somewhere down a dark highway.
Just the weight itself, sat with, all the way through, the way Preacher's been teaching me to do it for three weeks now, one hard, formless hour at a time.