Chapter Three #2
He was right, and it stung exactly as much as everything else that day had, a small, precise cut on top of a wound that was already bleeding plenty on its own.
Church broke up not long after that. Most of the room cleared out fast, the way it does when nobody wants to be the one to linger and say something to the guy everybody's disappointed in.
Dutch stayed. So did Deacon, for a minute, standing near the door with his arms crossed, looking older than he had a week ago.
"You want to tell me you didn't know Harlow had a thing for trouble before all this," he said, not quite a question.
"I didn't ask enough questions to know one way or another. That's on me too."
He studied me a second, then nodded, like that answer was at least honest, even if it wasn't good enough. "Get your head right, Rourke. Whatever's actually going on with those books, we're going to need you clear-eyed to deal with it, and right now you look like a man who hasn't slept."
I hadn't. I told him so. He clapped me once on the shoulder on his way out, which was more grace than I'd earned that morning, and left me standing in the empty clubhouse with Dutch.
"She's not going to want to hear from you today," Dutch said. "But you should know, since it's going to come up eventually. Harlow's outside. Been sitting on her bike across the street for the better part of an hour."
I went to the window. She was there, exactly like he said, helmet in her lap, not coming any closer, just watching the clubhouse like she was waiting for something, maybe an invitation, maybe just a chance to see my face.
I felt a lot of things looking at her from that distance.
Anger at myself, mostly. A little pity, which I didn't trust, because pity had been part of how this whole mess started in the first place, me mistaking her loneliness for something that excused mine.
And under all of it, a small, hard resolve I hadn't felt yet in the last twenty-four hours, the first thing that had felt less like drowning and more like a decision.
I walked out to the lot. She sat up straighter when she saw me coming, something hopeful crossing her face that made this harder, not easier.
"Rourke, I know this is bad timing, I just wanted to see if you were okay, I've been worried about you—"
"You need to go home, Harlow."
"I just want to talk for a minute, that's all, I'm not trying to cause more trouble, I just—"
I looked at her, really looked, in a way I hadn't let myself do in weeks, because looking too closely had always meant reckoning with what I was doing, and I'd been avoiding that reckoning for two months straight.
She looked tired. Not glamorous, not calculating, just a young woman sitting on a bike in a gravel lot who'd clearly convinced herself, somewhere along the way, that whatever we'd been doing was heading somewhere real.
I didn't know then whether that made what happened between us better or worse. I still don't, fully.
"I'm not asking," I said, and I kept my voice even, because losing my temper at her would have been the easy way out, a way to make this about her instead of about the choices I'd made.
"Whatever this was, it's done. It should have been done the second Marisol's truck came up the road, and the fact that it took me standing here right now to say it plainly to your face is one more thing I've got to live with. I need you to go home."
"Is that it, then," she said, and something in her voice cracked a little, not performative, as far as I could tell, just tired and small. "Two months and that's the whole conversation."
"There isn't a version of this conversation that's fair to either of us right now, Harlow. You deserve better than getting used as a place for me to hide from my own life. I know that now. I should've known it a lot sooner."
She looked like she wanted to argue further.
For a second I saw something flicker across her face that wasn't hurt exactly, something closer to fear, gone before I could name it, quick enough that I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it.
I filed it away anyway, some instinct telling me there was more sitting under her than I understood yet, some pressure on her I hadn't bothered to ask about in two months of late nights on that tailgate.
But she didn't push further. She put her helmet on, started her bike, and pulled away without another word, and I stood in that lot a long time after she was gone, thinking about the invoices Cassidy had flagged, about the timeline that lined up too neatly to be nothing, and about the fact that I had absolutely no idea yet how deep any of this actually went, or how much of it might still be sitting undiscovered, waiting on somebody, probably Marisol, to find it.
In my jacket pocket, my fingers found the hair tie again.
I'd forgotten it was still there. I stood in the empty lot outside the clubhouse my father built, and I finally threw it away, in the can by the door, where it should have gone from the start, and it didn't fix a single thing, but it was the first honest thing I'd managed to do since Marisol's truck came up that road.
I got on my bike and rode out toward the Boneyard instead of going home, because home didn't feel like anywhere I had a right to be yet, and because Cassidy's numbers were sitting in my head demanding attention I didn't have room for on top of everything else.
The place was locked up tight, quiet in that particular way it only gets on a weekday afternoon before the evening crowd rolls in, and I sat on my bike in the empty lot for a long while, looking at the sign Marisol had picked out herself, hand-painted lettering over a garage door she'd talked me into replacing three separate times before it looked right to her.
Whatever had happened to those accounts, whoever was behind it, I understood standing there that fixing it wasn't optional anymore, not just for the club, but as the first real piece of proof I could offer that I was capable of protecting something instead of quietly letting it fall apart around me.