Chapter Two #2
I want to explain, for anyone who's never had this happen to them, why the seat mattered as much as the toothbrush, maybe more.
Rourke didn't just sleep with someone while I was gone.
He let the club, the whole club, every brother and every old lady who'd known me for eight years, watch another woman get folded into my life while I wasn't there to stop it, and none of them, not one, had picked up a phone to tell me.
That's a specific kind of betrayal that doesn't stop with the two people in the bedroom.
It's a betrayal that runs through an entire room of people who decided, collectively, that my absence was an opportunity instead of a tragedy they should have protected me from.
I went to the closet and pulled down the duffel bag I'd used for Bakersfield, the same one I hadn't even finished unpacking, and I started refilling it.
Not with everything. Just enough. Rourke stood in the doorway the whole time, saying my name every so often like repetition might work where explanation hadn't, and I let him say it, because stopping to argue with him would have meant giving him something I didn't have to spare.
"Where are you going to go," he said, when I zipped the bag.
"That's not something you get to ask me right now."
"Marisol, please, just let me—"
I looked at him then. Really looked, for the first time since the porch.
He looked wrecked too, in his own way, hollowed out around the eyes, and some old, stubborn part of me that had loved this man for eight years wanted to feel sorry for him.
I let that part of me sit there for exactly as long as it took to notice it, and then I set it aside, gently, the way you set aside something you know you'll need to deal with eventually but can't afford to deal with today.
"I buried my mother two days ago," I said. "I drove four and a half hours to come home to you. I am not doing this with you tonight. I am not doing anything with you tonight except leaving."
I walked past him again. He didn't try to stop me, which I noted, clinically, as the one thing he did right in the entire conversation.
I called Essie from the truck before I even had the engine started, and she picked up on the second ring like she'd been waiting for it, which, knowing this town, she probably had.
I didn't cry on that call either. I just said, "I need the guest room," and she said, "Already made it up," and something about how fast she answered, like she'd known before I did, told me the whole town had probably known before I did too.
Essie's known me since we were seven years old, since before either of us understood what it meant that her family didn't have a patch and mine, eventually, would.
She's the one person in Ember Creek who's never once treated me like an extension of the club, who still remembers me as the girl who used to do her homework at the counter of her mother's diner, and in the years since I became somebody's Old Lady she's been the one place I could go and just be Marisol, not anyone's anything.
I didn't have to explain to her on that call what had happened.
I think she understood from the sound of my voice alone, four words in, that whatever this was, it was the kind of thing you don't discuss over the phone in a gas station parking lot.
I drove to her place with the windows down even though it was cold, because I needed the air moving across my face for some reason I couldn't name, and somewhere around the second stoplight in town, past the Boneyard's dark windows, past the clubhouse gate with its familiar skull-and-wings crest lit up under the security light, I finally let myself think the sentence I'd been holding off since the porch.
I built that place. Both of them. The house and the Boneyard, six years of ledgers and long nights and turning a cash mess into something that could survive an audit, and I built the life inside that house too, every bit as much as he did, maybe more, since I was the one who kept it running while he was becoming his father's son.
And in nine weeks, without lifting a hammer or opening a single one of my ledgers, another woman had walked into the middle of it and made herself comfortable enough to leave her shoes on my porch like she lived there.
She hadn't taken it from me. I want to be precise about that, even now, even furious. Rourke had handed it to her, one tired, cowardly choice at a time, and that distinction was going to matter, eventually, to whatever I decided to do next.
But not tonight. Tonight I just drove, and let the cold air do what it could, and didn't cry, because crying was going to have to wait until I had somewhere safe enough to do it.
Essie was on her porch when I pulled up, wrapped in a cardigan against the cold, and she didn't say a word when I got out of the truck, just walked down the steps and pulled me into a hug that finally, finally, cracked something loose in my chest. I cried into her shoulder in her front yard for a long time, for my mother, for the house I'd just left, for eight years I wasn't ready yet to call wasted but couldn't quite call safe anymore either.
She didn't ask me a single question that night.
She just held on, and walked me inside, and put me in the guest room with a glass of water and a box of tissues on the nightstand like she'd been keeping them ready for exactly this kind of night, and I lay in her spare bed staring at a ceiling that wasn't mine, thinking that tomorrow I was going to have to start figuring out what came next, but tonight, at least, I didn't have to be strong for anyone.