Chapter 12 #2
I picked the photograph up. The decoy had been on the card eleven days and she was off it now.
She had crossed two state lines under a name that wasn’t hers, and every man Dez had on the trail had followed the card, not the woman holding it — a card that moved, bought fuel, and stopped where a frightened wife would stop.
I had built her as corroboration, because a story about a wife who ran needed a wife who was actually gone.
Looking at the picture in the table light, I could see the truth the other way around.
The card had done the work. The card had always been doing the work.
I could have run the whole trail west and left Eden asleep in our bed on the fifth of July and told her about the laser dot over breakfast.
I put the photograph back in the folder.
Hindsight was cheap, I told myself. The rumor still had to come out of this compound to be believed, and a wife who stayed put would have been a hole somebody eventually walked through.
It was a good argument. I have never been able to say how long I had to work to make it.
“Who is she?” Bear said.
I moved the account page back toward Jax. “Not somebody under club protection.”
Gage pushed himself up, favoring the bad leg, and came around the table. He stopped where Bear could see both of us. “Eden nearly died with your name on every piece of this, and you’re hiding a second woman behind privacy.”
“The cardholder isn’t an affair.”
“Say what she is.”
Her name in this room went onto a page, and a page in a building with an unidentified leak in it had a way of reaching Dez. She had been doing seventy on I-70 with my card in her hand and no idea whose money was behind it. “No.”
Bear gathered both folders and pulled them out of my reach. “Sunrise tomorrow, Jax verifies every card, vehicle, and phone attached to this. You answer him, or I suspend you from road authority until you do. The gate opening doesn’t change the fact that somebody knew where Eden was going to be.”
I nodded and started working out how to finish the trail before Jax got to Denver. Another deadline had arrived and I took it the way I had taken every deadline since the fifth: as room.
Jax stopped me at the door with one fact. “The refill in Eden’s glove box was dispensed the day before the porch.”
Nobody in the room needed the rest of it read out.
Bear’s jaw moved. Gage looked at the ceiling.
I gave them the piece that fit the lie. “I wanted her out before Jess spoke to her. I prepared the car and told Dez’s people she might leave, because I didn’t want them using her against me during the breakup. ”
“You told Dez where your asthmatic wife would be driving alone?” Gage said.
“I fed Dez a route that never put Eden on it.” The truth came out before I could hold it. Jax’s head came up. Bear’s attention fixed on the word fed. “The car was serviced. The route was a possibility. Eden chose to stay.”
“The gate chose for her,” Bear said. “Now it opens and she chooses. If she keeps the house, you stay in the bunk until she tells me otherwise.”
“She keeps the house.”
The gate briefing filled the common hall before noon.
Families came down with bags packed for visits they had put off, prospects carried written route sheets, and men stood at the front windows watching the outer barricade.
Eden came in from the house in jeans and boots with the hospital bracelet still on her wrist. Leah walked beside her and didn’t touch her.
June carried a folder instead of Eden’s purse.
Tessa had already put herself between Jess and the nearest exit.
Eden carried no bag. I checked her hands first, then her shoulders, then the porch behind her for luggage, and the relief that came when I found none was the most honest thing I felt all week and the worst. I had spent eleven days engineering her departure.
Two attacks had made leaving impossible, and somewhere in the middle of them I had started wanting the closed gate to keep her where I could see her.
I told myself I needed her route. That wasn’t it.
Bear stood at the front with the notice.
“Anyone leaving today gives Jax a destination and takes an escort to the county line. Anyone staying goes back to ordinary movement with perimeter restrictions. Infirmary stays active. North wall stays closed.” He looked at Eden. “First route is yours if you want it.”
The room turned to her. Every person in it expected her to take the Civic and go. I had manufactured that expectation before the first shot. Eden let them hold it until the discomfort belonged to everybody.
“I’m not leaving,” she said. Her voice still carried the damage. “This is my home. My work is here, my medication is here, and the people I love are here. Ryder started another family. He can build it somewhere else.”
Somebody near the bar said my name like a warning and Tessa turned her head to find him.