Chapter Fifteen #2
I tell Deb about the flash drive after we hang up, the two of us closing up together in the last light of evening, and she goes quiet a moment, processing it with the particular thoroughness she brings to anything involving Reina Cole.
"So the mistress just handed the club everything they need to end this whole nightmare, and asked for nothing in return.
" Deb shakes her head, something almost admiring underneath her usual skepticism.
"I really don't know what to do with that woman.
Every time I've got her filed away as one thing, she does something that doesn't fit the file. "
"I know the feeling."
"Doesn't mean you have to forgive her. I want to be clear I'm not saying that." Deb locks the register, methodical. "Just means the world's more complicated than the story we tell ourselves about who deserves what. Doesn't make the hurt less real. Just makes the villain less simple."
I think about the woman on the other end of that first phone call, scared and human and trying, badly and too late, to be someone slightly better than the choice she made, and I find, to my own surprise, that I hope she finds whatever she's looking for wherever she's going.
I sit with the phone in my lap a long while after Denise hangs up, watching the evening settle over Main Street through my apartment window, and I think about everything that's shifted in the last two days, a deed with only my name on it, a fuller picture of a man torn instead of calculating, a woman I spent eight months hating in the abstract finally choosing, in her own quiet way, to do one decent thing before disappearing.
None of it undoes March. I keep circling back to that, testing the thought for weakness, and it holds.
None of it undoes March. But it changes the shape of what I'm actually deciding, from a binary question of whether I can ever trust him again to something messier and more honest, whether I can trust the specific, unglamorous, ongoing work he's actually doing, day by day, even knowing there might be more buried truths I haven't found yet.
I call Wyatt that evening, the first time I've reached out since I sent him away, and he picks up on the first ring, careful, like he's been waiting by the phone without letting himself admit it.
"Denise says Reina's gone," I tell him, no preamble. "Left everything she had on Dax with the club. Says she's done being leverage."
Silence on his end, absorbing it. "That's good news. Real good news, if it's as solid as it sounds."
"I talked to Denise about March too. Got some context I didn't have before.
" I pause, choosing my next words carefully, because I want them exact.
"It doesn't fix it, Wyatt. I need you to hear that clearly.
But it's different, knowing you were actually torn instead of just coldly comparing options.
I still don't know what I'm doing with any of this.
But I wanted you to know I called, and I wanted you to know why. "
"Thank you for telling me." His voice comes out rough, grateful in a way that costs him something to show. "I got the deed transfer confirmation from the lawyer. Assume you got the paperwork."
"I did. I read it three times looking for the catch."
"There isn't one."
"I know. That's what made it hard to keep reading it and not..." I stop myself, not ready to finish that sentence, not tonight, with two days left before whatever's coming for Dax Cole and a wound between us still too fresh to build anything solid on top of.
"You don't have to finish it," he says, gentle. "I didn't do it so you'd owe me a reaction."
"I know that too. That's actually the strange part. If you'd done it wanting something back, I think I'd know exactly how to feel about it. This is harder, somehow. A gift with no strings is its own kind of complicated when you're not sure yet what you're allowed to feel grateful for."
"You're allowed to feel whatever you actually feel. I'm not going to sit here and tell you gratitude's the right response, or relief, or nothing at all. Whatever it actually is, that's the correct one, because it's yours and you don't owe me a curated version of it."
Something in that lands harder than I expect, the particular relief of being told, plainly, that I don't have to manage my own reaction for anyone else's comfort, not even his.
"I talked to Preacher a little too," he adds, after a moment.
"Not about March specifically. Just about the general shape of things.
He said something that's stuck with me the last two days.
Said the person I wronged is the only one who gets to decide when the clock runs out on trying.
Said my job's just to keep giving you something worth counting. "
"That's very Preacher."
"It is." A small, tired laugh, the first lightness either of us has managed in days. "Doesn't make it wrong, though."
"Take whatever time you need," he says, quiet. "I mean that. However long it takes, I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not going to make my patience your problem to manage on top of everything else."
We hang up without resolving anything, without either of us pretending the distance has closed, and I sit with my phone in my hand a long while after, thinking about a flash drive somewhere at the clubhouse that might finally end this whole nightmare with Dax Cole, thinking about a deed with my name alone on it, thinking about a man who spent a whole weekend in March genuinely torn between the life he had and the life he thought he wanted, and choosing, in the end, wrongly, but not coldly.
There's a difference. I'm only now starting to let myself believe it matters.
Two days left. Whatever's coming for Dax Cole is coming fast now, and somewhere underneath all my grief and anger and grudging, complicated understanding, I find myself hoping, quietly, that whatever's left of Wyatt and me gets the chance to survive it.
I set my phone down and sit alone in the apartment a long while, listening to the ordinary sounds of Larkspur settling into evening below, and I think about my father, about the club he rode with for thirty years, about the particular Reaper code that says a man's worth shows clearest in a crisis, not in how he behaves when everything's easy.
I think about a compass rose inked into skin years ago, four hidden coordinates marking the exact spot where two people first found each other.
I don't know yet if that map still points anywhere worth going.
I know, for the first time in two days, that I want to find out, and wanting to find out feels like its own small, fragile kind of progress, whatever else is still broken between us.