She Sat Where I Used To Belong

PROLOGUE

Three years ago

The rain in Halloway Bay doesn't fall so much as arrive, sideways off the water, cold enough to sting.

I am nineteen minutes late to a supply run I was supposed to ride backup on, and I am not thinking about the rain at all.

I am thinking about the way Thane Rourke's mouth felt against my collarbone forty minutes ago, in the dry hollow under the old fire road bridge, both of us still wearing half our leathers because neither of us could wait long enough to take them off properly.

That's the truth of it. Not a delay. Not bad luck. I chose him over the run, and I would choose him again, and that's the part I never let myself say out loud for three years.

Earlier that evening, before any of it, the clubhouse had smelled like it always did on a Sunday: coffee gone bitter on the burner, gun oil, my father's cigarettes even though he'd promised his doctor and my mother's memory both that he'd quit.

I'd sat at the corner of the long oak table doing inventory on the med kit while the men argued about a supply route, and Everhart had leaned over my shoulder to steal a swig of my coffee like he did every week, and said, low enough that only I could hear it, that he was proud of the nurse I was going to become.

I didn't know it was the last thing he'd ever say to me.

Nobody tells you which conversation is the last one.

You only find that out backward, and by then it's too late to have said something better back.

My radio crackles against my hip as I swing my leg over my bike, and I almost don't answer it, because I know Eldin's voice when it's about to yell at me for being late, and I'm braced for that, ready to take it, ready to lie a little about a stalled engine.

Instead the voice on the other end is Gunnar's, and it doesn't sound like anger. It sounds like something coming apart.

"Niamh." Just my name. Nothing after it for two full seconds, which is somehow worse than any sentence could be.

"Gunnar, what."

"It's Ev." His voice cracks on the second word. "He went down on the switchback past Miller's Creek. Semi didn't see him in the rain. Niamh, he's."

I don't remember getting back on the bike.

I remember the road blurring, headlights smearing across wet asphalt, the specific, useless prayer I kept saying under my helmet the whole way there, please, please, please, as if repetition could undo a thing that had already happened forty minutes ago while I had my hands in Thane Rourke's hair.

Everhart Sloane taught me to ride when I was fourteen, sitting behind him on his bike with my arms locked around his waist so tight he used to joke I'd crack his ribs before the road ever got the chance.

He was my father's road captain and his best friend since before I was born, the uncle who wasn't blood but was somehow more reliable than blood, the one who showed up to every school function my father missed because church ran long, the one who taught me to check tire pressure and read a room and never, ever ride a wet switchback faster than I could stop.

He was supposed to have backup. He was supposed to have me, riding rear guard on that stretch of road the way I'd done a hundred times before, watching his blind side, radioing ahead if a truck was coming too fast around the bend where the trees block the sightline.

That was my job. I'd done it since I was old enough to hold a bike steady at speed.

Everhart trusted my eyes on that road more than he trusted his own mirrors.

I wasn't there.

By the time I reach Miller's Creek there are already three patrol cars and one ambulance parked at angles that tell you everything before you're close enough to see anything, lights turning the wet trees red and blue and red and blue, rain coming down through all of it like the sky itself can't stop apologizing and doesn't know how.

Someone has put a tarp over something on the shoulder of the road, and I know before anyone tells me, the way you know your own name, the way you know the sound of your own heartbeat.

My father is already there. I don't know how he beat me.

I don't know anything except the sound he makes when he sees me get off my bike, a sound I have never heard him make before and will never fully stop hearing again, low and broken and furious all at once, because for one terrible second before he catches himself, before the grief takes over completely, I see him look at me and do the math.

Where were you. Where were you supposed to be.

He never says it. He never asks. That's almost worse.

Thane arrives eleven minutes after me, and I watch him take in the tarp, the lights, my father's face, and something shutters closed behind his eyes that I recognize because I feel the same door slamming inside my own chest. He doesn't come to me.

He goes to my father first, hand on his shoulder, voice low, president business already starting even though Eldin is the one who founded this charter and Thane is only twenty three years old and about to become the man who has to hold all of it together anyway, tonight, in the rain, because someone has to and Eldin can't.

I stand at the edge of the light with my helmet still in my hands and I understand, with a clarity that feels like ice water down the back of my shirt, that I am never going to tell anyone where I actually was.

A deputy asks me my relationship to the deceased and I hear myself say family friend, which is such a small, insufficient word for what Everhart Sloane actually was that it feels like a second betrayal stacked directly on top of the first. Behind me, someone has turned off the ambulance lights, and the sudden absence of that red and blue pulse makes the dark feel heavier, like the night itself has exhaled and given up on softening anything further.

I tell the sheriff's deputy I was running late from the clubhouse, a stalled bike, a delay I couldn't help.

It isn't even a lie built carefully. It's the first thing that comes out of my mouth and it's small and stupid and it holds, because nobody is looking hard enough at the grieving girl to question her.

Grief is a good hiding place. I learn that fast and I keep the lesson for three years.

The funeral is eight days later, and I stand between my father and Thane at the graveside in the rain that still hasn't fully let up, three of us not touching, not looking at each other, holding some kind of formation like we're guarding something even though the thing we were supposed to guard is already six feet down in the ground of the cemetery that overlooks the bay.

Gilda sings something low and old in a language I don't know, and half the club is crying openly the way men who never cry in front of anyone allow themselves to cry exactly once, at exactly this, and I don't cry at all.

I stand very still and count the number of wreaths propped against the headstone, seventeen, and I think, if I feel this, if I let even a piece of it in, I will have to tell them why, and then everyone will know it wasn't a stalled engine.

That's the moment the plan forms, fully, without my permission.

Not a decision so much as a landslide. I am going to leave.

Not today. Not even this month. But soon, before the guilt finds a crack to get out through, before Thane looks at me one more time with that steady, waiting patience of his and I break and tell him the truth and watch him understand that his best friend's death has his fingerprints on it too, mixed up with mine, forty minutes we will never get back and can never explain to anyone without destroying exactly what we were trying to protect.

In the weeks between the funeral and the Tuesday I finally leave, I watch Thane become someone else in real time.

He stops laughing at Gunnar's jokes. He starts sitting in Eldin's old chair during church even before my father formally hands him the gavel, not out of ambition, I understand later, but because someone has to sit there and my father, grieving and guilty in ways he'll never name, has gone quiet in a way that frightens the whole table.

Thane never once looks at me like he blames me.

That's what I can't survive. If he blamed me I could argue with it, defend myself, maybe even confess just to make the accusation match the crime.

Instead he looks at me like I'm something fragile he's trying not to startle, and I understand that he's protecting me from a truth he hasn't said out loud either, and I can't tell if that makes what we did forty minutes long feel more forgivable or less.

I leave six weeks later on a Tuesday, which feels wrong even now. Grief should have better timing than a Tuesday.

I don't tell Thane I'm going. I tell my father the night before, standing in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, both of us stiff and careful, and he doesn't ask me to stay.

I think now that not asking cost him something enormous, and I think then that it confirmed what I already believed: that I was right to go, that my presence in this family, in this club, was optional in a way I'd never let myself examine before, that the seat I'd occupied at that oak table my whole life had only ever been mine on loan.

I pack one bag. I take my mother's small gold cross, my nursing textbooks, and, in a moment of theft I've never confessed to another living soul, the spare cut my father keeps in his closet with the old road captain patch still stitched to it, Everhart's patch, the one that should have gone to whoever took over his position and instead sits folded at the bottom of a drawer in every apartment I've lived in since, three years running, untouched, unexplained, mine the way guilt is mine.

I don't say goodbye to Thane. I leave him a note instead, four sentences, none of them true in the way that matters, all of them technically accurate. I need space. I need to figure out who I am outside this club. I'll call when I'm settled. Take care of my dad.

I drive out of Halloway Bay in the rain, same rain, always the same rain in this town, and somewhere past the county line I stop counting the miles and start counting my own breaths instead, in for four, hold for four, out for four, a trick a paramedic taught me years later that I don't have yet on this particular Tuesday, so instead I just cry, finally, alone, safely unwitnessed, three hours from anyone who might ask me why.

I don't call when I'm settled. I don't call at all. I build a life instead, careful and clean and entirely mine, in a city that has never heard of Everhart Sloane or Miller's Creek or the forty minutes I have never once said out loud to another living soul.

I tell myself this is healing.

It takes three years and a phone call I can't ignore to find out how wrong I was.