CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Alex
Now
I went the next morning.
Not at noon. Not in the afternoon when I knew people would be coming and going. Morning. Early enough that the parking lot would be quiet.
I wore jeans. A plain shirt. The kind of clothes that didn’t announce anything. I’d spent twenty minutes in front of the hotel bathroom mirror and then walked away from it because examining myself too closely was not going to improve anything.
I drove to the clubhouse.
The lot had four bikes in it. The building was quiet. The front door was closed.
I sat in the Jeep for eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock.
I called Martina first, because I needed to hear a voice that would tell me the truth without performance.
“You haven’t gone in yet,” she said. Not a question.
“I’m working up to it.”
“You’ve been working up to it for four days,” she said. “What’s the actual thing you’re scared of?”
I looked at the closed front door of the clubhouse, one hundred feet away, a distance I had covered a thousand times without thinking about it and now could not seem to cross.
“That he’ll say it’s too late,” I said.
“And if he does?”
“Then I’ll know,” I said. “And I can stop wondering.”
“That’s not actually a bad outcome,” she said, “The bad outcome is you flying home without knowing anything at all.” A pause. “Go find out.”
I got out and started walking on legs that weren’t vaguely familiar.
The inside of the clubhouse smelled like motor oil and coffee and something underneath both of those that was specific to this building and nowhere else.
I’d walked through this door a hundred times.
A thousand times. I knew the way the light fell from the windows on the left side.
I knew the sound the floor made in the back hallway.
I stopped just inside the door.
Two men I didn’t recognize were at a table near the back. They looked up.
“Help you?” one of them asked.
“I’m looking for Riley,” I said. “Panzolini.”
They looked at each other.
“Who’s asking?” the second one asked.
“Alex,” I said. “Carver.” I paused. “He knows me.”
One of them got up and went through the door at the back without another word. The other looked at me with the expression of a man conducting a quiet assessment and not making the results available.
I looked back at him.
I was good at that.
He walked away.
I heard him before I saw him.
His footsteps. The weight of them. I’d woken up to that sound for four years and apparently I still knew it, because every nerve in my body identified it before the door opened.
He came through.
He stopped.
We looked at each other across the length of the room.
He was older the way I was older. Not drastically. Just honestly. The lines around his eyes. The slight gray at his temples. He was still the same size. Still held himself the same way.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Years compressed into the space of that look, and I felt every one of them pass across his face in whatever order they meant something to him.
I couldn’t read all of it. I could read enough.
Surprise first, unguarded for exactly as long as it took him to notice he was showing it.
Then something wary underneath that, the look of a man checking a door he thought he’d already locked.
And underneath even that, so brief I might have invented it, something that looked almost like relief, like a held breath he hadn’t known he was still holding after all this time.
“Alex,” he said.
I gave a purposeful nod. “Riley.”
A silence fell over the room. The man at the table became very interested in whatever was in front of him.
Riley crossed the room.
He stopped a few feet away. Close enough that I could see his eyes clearly. They were doing something complicated that he wasn’t going to let reach his face.
He looked me up and down. He almost nodded. “You look good.”
“Thank you.” I swallowed something hard. “So do you.”
He looked at me steadily. “How long have you been in Marana?”
“Three days.”
Something moved across his face. “Three days.”
“I was working up to it.”
He looked at me a moment longer. Then the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something smaller than that. Something private.
“You want some coffee?” he asked.
“I would love some coffee.”
He turned toward the back. I followed him through the door.
The back room was smaller than I remembered.
Or maybe I was simply larger in it now, taking up more space than the girl who used to sit at this same scarred table doing homework while club business happened on the other side of a door that was never quite soundproof.
The same calendar hung on the wall, a different year printed across the top of it but the same brand, the same faded photograph of a canyon at sunset that nobody had ever once commented on.
A coffee maker that might have been the exact one from years ago, or its direct descendant, gurgling in the corner with the same asthmatic wheeze at the end of its cycle.
He poured two cups without asking how I took mine because he already knew. Black. He set one in front of me and sat across the table and looked at me with the same directness he’d always had.
It used to make me feel known. It still did.
I wrapped both hands around the cup and let the heat of it ground me, because I needed grounding, sitting three feet from a man I had spent years constructing entire imaginary conversations with, none of which had prepared me for how it would actually feel to have him looking back.
“My husband died,” I said. “Several months ago.”
He nodded slowly. “I heard something about that.”
“From who?”
“Small world,” he said.
I wrapped my hands around the cup. “I have a son. Arthur.”
He looked at the cup. Then at me. “Okay.”
“I want you to know that before anything else,” I said. “He’s the most important thing. Whatever this is. Whatever happens. He comes first.”
“That’s how it should be,” he said.
“Are you with someone?”
He held my gaze. “No.”
“How long?”
“Long time,” he said.
I looked at my coffee. “I looked for you online.”
“And?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You don’t exist.”
“I exist,” he said.
“Not online you don’t.”
“Never saw the point.”
“I found one photograph,” I said. “From a veterans’ event.”
He said nothing.
“You looked the same,” I said.
“I’m not the same.”
“No,” I agreed. “Neither am I.”
The back room was quiet.
“I left because I was pregnant,” I said.
He went still.
“I didn’t know what to do,” I continued.
“I woke up in that hotel room and I didn’t know what happened and then three weeks later I found out I was pregnant and I panicked.
” I looked at my hands. “I couldn’t tell you.
I didn’t know how to tell you. I thought you’d think I’d cheated and I couldn’t—” I stopped.
“I made the worst decision I’ve ever made.
And I’ve thought about it every day since. ”
The room was very quiet.
He looked at his coffee cup for a long time.
“Arthur,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Ten.”
He nodded.
“Do you want to know about him?” I asked. “Really know, not just the thirty-second version.”
Something shifted behind his eyes, careful and unhurried, a man deciding how much of himself to hand over before he knew what it would cost him. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose so.”
I told him. Small things first, because they were safer.
That Arthur read constantly and finished books other kids his age hadn’t heard of.
That he had a habit of setting things by the door the night before he needed them, neat and decided, and that I’d never once had to remind him of anything twice in his life.
That he asked questions like he was building a case, methodically, one fact laid carefully on top of the last.
Riley listened without interrupting, the quality of listening I remembered from years ago, like the rest of the world had been muted for the duration of my sentence.
“He sounds like he pays attention,” he said finally.
“He notices everything,” I said. “It used to worry me. Now I think it’s just who he is.”
Riley nodded slowly. Something crossed his face that I couldn’t fully name. Not yet grief, not yet hope. Something suspended between the two, a man doing arithmetic he wasn’t ready to say out loud.
He looked up. His eyes were steady. “What do you want, Alex?”
It was the most Riley question he could have asked. No preamble. No anger. No recrimination. Just the question that cut to the center of things.
What do you want.
“I want to find out if there’s anything left,” I said. “Between us. After everything.” I held his gaze. “I want to know if it’s still there.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“It’s still there,” he said.
He said it the way he said most things. Simply. Without decoration.
I let out a breath I’d been holding for approximately eleven years.