Chapter 22 #2
“Eden.” Mia did not lower her voice for the room, and that was the point of it.
“I will finish today. I will not represent you through a second one of these. If a blade comes out at a proceeding I arranged, you get a different lawyer, and you start again with somebody who has to be taught what he did to you from the beginning.”
There are four people alive who know everything about my life, and one of them holds the sealed key to my house in an envelope with her own signature across the flap.
I put the knife in my bag. I did not apologize and she did not ask me to, but my fingers kept finding the closed spine through the leather for the rest of the afternoon.
Ryder had put both hands flat on his thighs. “Jess chooses the order.”
“I didn’t ask whether you agreed with me,” I said.
Mia started the recorder.
Jess took it back and went through the rest herself — the rented room with the door propped open, the marked places, the hand on the stomach before the word, the six questions he had written answers for.
She got to the part where I looked at him and stopped and pressed her thumb into the seam of the cup.
“He told me you’d look at him before you believed me. I thought that meant you’d ask him whether I was lying.” Her voice went rough in the middle of it. “You didn’t. You looked at him like he could end the whole thing by saying your own name. I lost my next line. He fed it to me anyway.”
I put my hands flat on the table, which is what I do so nobody can watch them shake, and I had learned in July that Ryder knows that about me, and I did it in front of him regardless.
“The smoke,” I said.
“I was against the wall by the bar.” Jess turned the cup a quarter turn on the table.
“You were pushing other people toward the west door before you’d say one word about yourself.
I had the jacket in my hands because I’d just got it off again.
When Leah reached you I dropped it on a chair and told him out loud to end it, in front of two prospects. ”
“What did he say.”
“Nothing that night. He didn’t offer to put me in a vehicle to the hospital and I wouldn’t have got in one. When he came back he told me the contact needed one more day. He said I didn’t have to let him touch me. I had to sit where you could see me and answer him when he asked about the baby.”
“And the trip.”
“I’d already told him I was finished once the cover confirmed.
He asked for the appointment anyway. I wouldn’t go inside a clinic and I wouldn’t put my name on anything medical, so he built it out of a blank card, a real envelope, two vehicles and a transfer.
” She looked at her lawyer. “He rode with me. I didn’t trust Ryder to hold a boundary once a convoy was moving.
I asked to move the seat because my knees hit the dash, and he never put it back afterward. ”
That is my seat. The runner sticks at the third notch and you have to lift and shove at the same time, and he has known that about that truck for five years.
“You told him to turn around.”
“In the yard, and again after the county turn. He said finishing it would end it. At the transfer property I told him he was still driving because stopping would mean he’d done all of that to you for nothing.”
“Did you ever enjoy any of it?”
“No.” She made herself hold my eyes. “But shame didn’t make me stop.
You deserve that one straight. I could’ve crossed the room any day that week and told you.
I was afraid of Dez, of Silas, of the club finding out, of losing the papers, of being the reason that photograph mattered again.
I kept picking the fear I already knew over what the lie was doing to you. ”
“I don’t forgive you,” I said.
Her chin came down about an inch. She didn’t tell me she understood and she didn’t ask me to change it.
“I don’t hate you the way I hate him.” I let my eyes go to Ryder long enough for the distinction to do its work. “That isn’t friendship, and I’m not taking responsibility for whether you recover from this.”
“I don’t want you to.”
Jess asked for the apology through her lawyer, and made him confirm the request out loud, which told me somebody had taught her that in the last six weeks and that she had needed teaching.
Ryder didn’t stand, didn’t come closer, and didn’t turn any part of it toward me.
“I found you when Dez had made your body the debt, and the way out I offered ran through your fear,” he said.
“I wrote an agreement that left me deciding when you’d done enough to get the future I promised you.
I ordered you to hurt my wife, put you where she had to watch, and kept going after you refused, because finishing the route mattered to me more than either of you saying no.
Paying you and keeping my hands off you don’t touch any of that.
I should have taken you to independent counsel and protection and not bought a part of my lie from you. ”
Jess listened to all of it and gave him nothing back. “I accept that you said it. I don’t accept it as enough.”
“You don’t have to.”
The lawyers ran the closing records. Her cash sits in a protected trust while the tax and criminal questions get answered.
Housing, documents, treatment and transport come through people who have never met Ryder.
Bear funds her security out of a separate restitution order; Ryder pays her legal fees and the relocation balance and gets no claim on her for any of it.
I asked to see the clause confirming that none of it required her to stay available for his defense. Mia found it and I read it myself.
“Your brother,” I said.
Jess’s hands went still on the cup. “Nineteen. He’s in a place outside Bloomington. Ninety days, then a house with rules. The debt got paid out of the money in July and Dez has no paper on him at all now.”
“Does he know how you got it?”
“He knows I took money to lie to a woman. He doesn’t know your name and he isn’t going to.”
I wrote nothing down. He was the one fact in that room I wanted left alone.
When the recorder stopped she stood up first. I did not offer her a hand, a number, work, or the absolution she had never once asked me for.
“If another fact about me turns up in your records, it goes to your lawyer and then to Mia,” I said. “You don’t take it to him first.”
“I won’t.” She pulled the sweater off the back of the chair and held it against her. “I’m sorry I came to your house and made you believe it.”
“I believe you’re sorry. I don’t know yet what that’s going to be worth to me.”
“You don’t owe it anything.” She went out with her lawyer and the two men from the elevator, and the doors closed on her, and nobody in the room moved for a moment.
Ryder was still in the chair at the far end. I watched the thing come up behind his face — the one fact he has been carrying since July like a receipt in a shirt pocket. No kiss. No sex. Never wanted her. He has never once said it to me and he has never once put it down.
“Don’t,” I said. “I know what you think it buys you.”
He waited.
“You copied the way you loved me and you put it on a woman you felt nothing for, and then you set every piece of it down where I had to look at it. If you had wanted her, it would have been ordinary. Men want people. That would have been a thing that happened to you.” I got my bag onto my shoulder.
“You didn’t want her. Which means every single thing I watched for six days was chosen, and arranged, and cost you nothing at all while you did it.
It doesn’t make it cleaner. It makes it deliberate, and it makes it mine, because you took it off my life to build it. ”
He didn’t answer. Whatever he had in his mouth stayed there.
Mia held the door. Down on the second level of the structure the thermos was still on the dash, and Colin got out when the elevator opened, and stood by the passenger door of the shop truck with the keys shut up in his fist, waiting for a man with two hours of interstate in front of him and no say in when it started.