Chapter Eight
Marisol
I sat at my desk a long time after Rourke left, staring at the wall of my own small office, feeling several things at once that didn't fit together easily.
Anger, obviously, a fresh, sharpened version of the anger I'd been carrying for two weeks, because if what Rourke suspected was true, this wasn't just a betrayal that had cost me my sense of safety in my own home.
It was a betrayal that had cost the entire club a hole in its security wide enough for a rival organization to drive a truck through.
But underneath the anger, something more complicated, a reluctant, unwanted flicker of respect for the fact that he'd walked into my office and told me the ugliest version of it himself, instead of letting me find it in a spreadsheet and wonder, forever, how long he'd known and stayed quiet.
I didn't trust that flicker. I want to be honest about that.
I'd trusted plenty of things about Rourke for eight years, and every one of those trusts had turned out, in the end, to be conditional on circumstances I hadn't fully understood at the time.
So I filed the flicker away, the same clinical way I file away everything else, and went back to the numbers, because the numbers, unlike a man's expression in a doorway, couldn't lie to me twice.
I thought, too, about Harlow, in a way I hadn't let myself before that afternoon.
It would have been easy, and in some ways satisfying, to hold her as the singular villain of this entire mess, the woman who took my seat, my house, my sense of safety.
But sitting there turning over what Rourke had told me, about the urgent text she'd sent and never followed up on, about the strange, unexplained fear I'd apparently seen cross her face days ago in that clubhouse lot, I found myself unable to keep her flattened into something that simple.
She'd made choices too, choices I wasn't inclined to forgive easily or quickly.
But somewhere underneath those choices sat a young woman who might, right now, be in real danger because two people who should have been paying closer attention, myself included, in a different way, had each been too consumed by their own private disasters to notice hers building alongside them.
I drove out to the Boneyard Monday morning determined to trace the full timeline properly, cross-referencing every account access against the exact dates I'd been gone, and it was somewhere in that careful, methodical work that the second real gut punch of the week landed, quieter than the wall, quieter than the eighty thousand dollars, but somehow no less brutal for how small it was.
Cassidy had pulled the security system's full access log going back to the start of my absence, standard building entry records nobody usually bothers checking unless something's gone wrong, and buried in three months of routine data was an entry I almost scrolled past entirely: a code used to open the Boneyard's side door on a Tuesday afternoon in early October, a date that landed, when I checked it against my own calendar, exactly on my mother's birthday.
I'd have been sitting in a hospice room that day, holding my mother's hand while a nurse adjusted her morphine drip, the day itself soft and terrible and entirely devoted to trying to make her last months feel less like an ending.
And on that same afternoon, three hundred miles away, someone had opened my business with a code I'd personally set up years ago, one I'd only ever shared with Rourke and with our part-time weekend manager.
I called Cassidy over. "Who else has this code."
He checked his records, frowned, checked again. "Should just be you and Rourke. Weekend manager's got her own separate one."
I didn't say anything for a moment, doing the same silent, careful math I'd been doing for two weeks now, except this time the answer landed somewhere I hadn't let myself fully consider before.
Rourke hadn't just let Harlow into the house.
At some point, in some unguarded, careless moment I could only imagine, he'd let her into this too, into the business that had my name stitched through every inch of its foundation, on a day that should have belonged entirely to my mother and to me.
I found Rourke in the office twenty minutes later, going through delivery paperwork, and I didn't bother softening the way I opened the conversation.
"October eighth. Your code opened the side door here.
My mother's birthday. I was sitting with her in hospice that whole afternoon, and somebody used your code to walk into my business. "
Rourke went very still, the color draining slightly from his face in a way that told me, before he said a single word, that this wasn't a memory he'd already reckoned with.
"I don't remember that specific day," he said slowly, working through it in real time, the particular strain of a man trying to reconstruct a version of himself he'd been actively avoiding looking at too closely.
"But I remember, around then, letting her borrow my code because the weekend manager called in sick and I didn't want to drive out here myself to open up.
I told myself it was practical. I didn't think about what it meant that I trusted her with something that specific, something that was supposed to only ever belong to the two of us who actually built this place. "
"You gave her my mother's birthday," I said, and I heard my own voice go thin in a way I hated, because I'd promised myself I wasn't going to let this become about grief again, not here, not in the middle of a legitimate investigation into missing money and a rival club's involvement, and yet here it was anyway, the two things bleeding together the way they apparently always would from now on.
"Of all the days, Rourke. You handed her the door to something I built on the exact day I was losing the only other person who ever believed in me the way you were supposed to. "
"I didn't know the date meant anything at the time. That's not an excuse. I know it's not an excuse. I'm just telling you the truth of it, because you deserve the truth even when it makes me look worse instead of better."
"Do you understand what it's like," I said, my voice shaking now despite every effort to keep it level, "to find out, weeks later, that the worst day of your entire life was also just an ordinary Tuesday to the person who was supposed to be missing you as much as you were missing him?
That while I was memorizing the sound of my mother's breathing because I knew I only had so many more of them left to hear, you were handing your access code to a woman like it was nothing, like the date on the calendar didn't matter at all? "
"I understand it now. I didn't understand it then, because I wasn't paying enough attention to anything outside my own grief to notice what day it even was, and that failure is exactly as damning as it sounds, Marisol. I'm not trying to argue it into something smaller."
"Then stop talking," I said, "because every word out of your mouth right now is making it worse, not better, and I need you to just let me be angry about this without trying to manage how angry I'm allowed to be."
He went quiet at that, and I gave him credit, small and grudging, for actually doing it, for not pushing past the boundary I'd just drawn the way he'd apparently pushed past so many others over the last nine weeks.
I turned and walked out of the office without answering, because I didn't trust myself to say anything else that wouldn't come out as something closer to a scream than the calm, controlled voice I'd been maintaining for two straight weeks.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot for a long while, hands gripping the wheel, not driving anywhere, just breathing, and I thought about all the small, careless choices that had apparently stacked up over nine weeks into something this large, this public, this thoroughly woven through every part of a life I'd built to be untouchable.
Deb came out to the lot at one point, saw me sitting there, and didn't say anything, just set a to-go cup of coffee on the hood of my truck through the cracked window and went back inside without a word, the kind of quiet, undemanding kindness that asked nothing of me in return, and I sat there another twenty minutes with that coffee going cold beside me, unable yet to make myself drive anywhere at all.
I called Essie that night and told her about the door code, about the date, and she was quiet on the other end of the line for a long moment before she said, carefully, "Mars, I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually think about it instead of deflecting.
Every single time you find something new, it seems to make you more determined to keep digging instead of less.
Is that the accountant in you needing to see the full picture, or is some part of you using the digging to avoid deciding anything else? "
"Maybe both," I admitted, which was more honest than I'd managed with her in days. "I don't know how to stop until I understand the whole shape of it. I never have. You know that about me."
"I do know that about you. I just want you to notice, at some point, that understanding the whole shape of it and deciding what to do about him are two separate projects, and you're allowed to finish the first one without automatically knowing the answer to the second."
"When did you get so wise about all this," I asked, half joking, needing the small relief of levity after a day that had held almost none.