Chapter 12 #3
“Here’s the order I gave the men last night, and June has my signature on it as of an hour ago.
” Bear didn’t look at me while he said it.
“Eden controls entry to that house. Fire, gunfire, gas, or a medical call she makes herself. Everything else comes to her first. Any man who treats her staying as permission to carry messages between them answers to me.”
“Add this.” Eden spoke to the members, not to me.
“I’m separated. If you ask me why, I’ll tell you.
I won’t protect Ryder from people knowing he moved our savings, lied to me about my own house, and brought the woman carrying his child onto my porch.
If that embarrasses him, talk to the man who did it. ”
Men I had led on routes found somewhere else to look.
Their partners didn’t. Colin stood by the officers’ hall with the last sealed bin against his chest, waiting for the meeting to end so he could carry it across the room in front of everyone.
I had told Eden the club would choose the baby over her.
The club watched her keep the house and left me standing in the open with nothing to hold.
The mechanical lock rolled back on the outer gate and people started moving toward approved vehicles. Eden took her key from June and turned toward the house, and stopped only because I had put myself in the path between the common hall and the yard.
I moved before she had to make me. “The road’s open if you need anything from town.”
“I needed it Sunday.” She put the key in her pocket. “It being open now doesn’t make you generous.”
“Take an escort the first time.” The order was out of my mouth before I caught it, and the men closest to us heard it. “Ask Bear for one if you want it. I won’t choose the person.”
“I’ll drive my own car, choose who sits in it, and tell June where I’m going.
You’ll find out I left if you happen to be watching the gate.
” She looked toward the corridor where Colin waited.
“Your things are ready. Don’t leave them in the common hall.
Nobody else should have to trip over your marriage. ”
She crossed the yard with Leah and June and didn’t hurry.
The open gate stood to her left with sunlight coming through the bars and forty miles of clear county road behind it.
She climbed her porch steps and unlocked her door.
I had built the whole deception on the certainty that enough pain would drive her off every place attached to me, and I had never once considered that her love for the house might outlast her love for me.
Jess caught my sleeve in the corridor after the door closed and let go immediately, unwilling to give the room another touch to report. “I’m not doing that again.”
I followed her into the infirmary hall and left the door open. “Doing what?”
“Sitting beside you. Carrying your jacket. Letting you ask me about a baby that doesn’t exist while she’s standing there with a hospital band on.” She stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked back at the closed table-room door. “You said the gate ended this.”
“I said the Denver handoff ended it. They need one public departure to commit to the west.”
“Go alone.”
“The proof requires you.” I kept my hands at my sides.
She had agreed to a porch, a set of messages, and a relocation route.
Everything after the attack had been taken from her fear instead of negotiated.
“No touching. You ride to the second property, transfer, and come back after dark. Jax feeds the report.”
Jess backed toward the door. “And Eden watches us drive off to a prenatal appointment through a gate she could walk out of.”
“Eden is staying.” I used my wife’s refusal to leave as though it reduced what she would have to watch.
“That isn’t permission.” Jess looked through the doorway at the house. “One departure, if it ends this and Mia knows where I’m going. I won’t wear your jacket, I won’t let you touch me, and I won’t answer another question about my body. You change the deal again and I go to Bear myself.”
The threat should have made me angry. What I recognized instead was the shape of every boundary Eden had put in front of me since Sunday.
Jess named what she would do and required witnesses.
I had given a frightened stranger more of the truth than I gave my wife, and I had broken that too as soon as the plan needed another scene.
“Mia reviews it. Jax drives the follow car. No contact. One departure.”
“That ends it. You don’t get one more day after that.”
She left me in the corridor. Out past the common room, the gate kept opening for families and deliveries and men going back to work.
Bear had removed the last circumstance I could blame for keeping Eden beside the lie, and I stood there building the reason I would need it one more time.
Across the road she passed behind her kitchen window and reached up for a cabinet.
Colin came out of the common hall with the last bin. “Where do you want this?”
The gate stood open. Eden went farther into the house.
“My bunk,” I said, and carried the rest of my belongings the other way.