Chapter Eight #2
"Please. I've been wise about this since we were fourteen and you spent a whole summer deciding whether Danny Ruiz actually liked you or was just being nice because his mother made him.
Some things about you never change, Mars.
You'd rather build an entire spreadsheet of evidence than just ask somebody a direct question and sit with not knowing the answer for five whole minutes. "
I laughed, actually laughed, for what felt like the first time in two weeks, surprised at how much my chest needed it, and for just a moment, sitting there in Essie's kitchen with the phone warm against my ear, the whole unbearable weight of the last two weeks felt, briefly, almost carryable.
I laughed, actually laughed, for what felt like the first time in two weeks, surprised at how much my chest needed it, and for just a moment, sitting there in Essie's kitchen with the phone warm against my ear, the whole unbearable weight of the last two weeks felt, briefly, almost carryable.
I let that sit with me a long while after we hung up, staring at Essie's guest room ceiling for the second week running, thinking about my mother's hand in mine on her birthday, about a code meant only for two people opening a door for a third, about the particular, exhausting work of holding fury and reluctant respect in the same chest at the same time and not letting either one collapse into the other before I was ready.
Rourke texted me the next morning, brief and businesslike, exactly the register we'd apparently settled into by unspoken agreement: Went by Harlow's place yesterday.
Neighbor heard raised voices, men, something about a debt, about a week back.
Car hasn't moved since. Thought you should know given everything else.
I read that message three times before I set my phone down, feeling the ground shift slightly under a fury I'd been standing on solidly for two weeks.
It was one thing to be angry at a woman who'd inserted herself into my life with apparent ease and comfort.
It was another thing entirely to imagine that same woman standing in a dark parking lot a week ago while men with a grievance about money circled her, and to understand, with an uncomfortable clarity I hadn't expected to feel, that whatever Harlow had done, she likely hadn't done it entirely by choice, or with a full understanding of what she was getting herself into.
I called Rourke back, which surprised us both, I think, given how carefully we'd been avoiding anything beyond strict business for two weeks.
"Do the police know," I asked, no greeting, straight to the point.
"Not yet. Deacon wants to handle a first pass ourselves before we bring in anybody outside the club, given how much of this connects to things we'd rather not have on an official report just yet. I don't love that instinct, honestly. I think we're running out of time to be precious about optics."
"I agree with you." It surprised me, a little, how easily the words came out, how much less complicated it felt to align with him on something concrete like this than it did to sort through anything personal between us.
"Whatever she's tangled up in, whatever role she played in what happened to us, she doesn't deserve to disappear because a room full of men decided protecting the club's reputation mattered more than finding her. "
"I said something close to that to Deacon myself this morning."
"Good," I said, and meant it, and hung up before either of us could turn the conversation into something neither of us was ready to have yet.
I went back to the books that same afternoon, needing somewhere precise to put the unsettled feeling the phone call had left behind, and found, buried in a set of records I hadn't cross-referenced yet, a fourth anomaly, this one different from the others.
Not an inflated invoice this time, but a wire transfer, small, only eleven hundred dollars, routed out of the club's contingency fund to an account I didn't recognize, dated the same week the neighbor had heard those raised voices outside Harlow's apartment.
I sat with that number a long time, turning it over, and felt something shift in my understanding of the whole situation, a small crack of sympathy opening up in a wall I'd built specifically to keep sympathy for Harlow out.
Eleven hundred dollars wasn't the kind of number a person skims for greed.
It was the kind of number a person moves in a hurry, under pressure, trying to cover something fast before somebody notices it's missing.
I thought about the fear I'd caught in Harlow's face in that clubhouse lot, about the neighbor's mention of a debt, about a young woman alone in a town that wasn't hers, tangled up with people considerably more dangerous than the mess she'd made in my marriage.
I still hadn't decided what I felt about her, not fully, not with any clean, defensible category the way I liked to sort my feelings.
But I understood, sitting there with that number on my screen, that whatever she'd done, she might have been running scared the entire time she was doing it, and that understanding didn't excuse a single thing that had happened to me, but it did complicate, uncomfortably, the version of her I'd been carrying around as a simple villain in my own story.
I called Cassidy over and showed him the transfer.
He confirmed it matched nothing legitimate in the club's records, no vendor, no service, no explainable expense, and flagged it for Deacon immediately.
"This changes the shape of things a little," he said, studying the screen.
"Money moving out under pressure reads different than money moving in for profit.
Somebody wanted this specific amount, fast, and didn't much care about covering their tracks doing it, which tells me whoever was pressuring her wasn't interested in subtlety. "
"Which means they're not particularly worried about getting caught."
"Or they didn't expect anybody thorough enough to find it," Cassidy said, with the closest thing to a compliment I'd heard from him in two weeks. "Good thing you're the one looking."
I stayed late at the Boneyard that evening after Cassidy left, going through the last stretch of records alone in the quiet, and found myself, somewhere around eight, thinking less about the money and more about the woman at the center of it.
I'd spent two weeks constructing a version of Harlow that made my own anger simpler, a woman who'd seen an opportunity in my absence and taken it without a second thought for what it would cost me.
The eleven hundred dollars complicated that story in a way I didn't fully want it to.
It suggested somebody scared, somebody in over her head with people who didn't care whether she made it out clean, somebody who might have reached out to Rourke two weeks ago precisely because she'd finally understood how far past her depth she'd gone.
I didn't forgive her, sitting there in that quiet office.
I want to be clear about that. But I let myself hold a more complicated picture of her than the flattened villain I'd been carrying, and something about doing that felt less like weakness and more like the same clear-eyed honesty I'd been demanding from Rourke since the moment I found those flip-flops on the porch.
If I wanted the truth from him, unflinching and complete, I owed myself the same discipline in how I looked at everyone else tangled up in this mess, Harlow included, whether or not it made my own anger any easier to carry.
It was, I thought, closing the laptop for the night, a harder kind of fairness than righteous fury had ever required of me, and one I wasn't entirely sure yet I was equal to.