19. Wren
WREN
The girls bring me to a trailer that's bigger than Rowe's and looks like a magician robbed a hardware store.
Chains hang in loops from hooks by the door. There are padlocks and keys everywhere, playing cards, scarves, even two doves in a cage in the corner. And a couch that swallows me whole the second Jules pushes me into it.
“Sit. Stay. Good vet.” Jules opens a cabinet and surveys the bottles inside like a general reviewing troops. “Nova, your fiancé is obsessed with fine booze.”
“He's not my fiancé.” Nova lowers herself into the armchair across from me. “Neither of them is. I'm keeping my options open.”
“You're living with them and growing their baby,” Jules says deadpan.
“A baby. Ownership pending.” She catches my expression and grins, freckles scrunching. “Oh, honey. Your face. Drink up, this is going to take a while.”
Jules puts a glass in my hand. Whatever's in it is amber and smells like a bad decision. I sip it anyway, because a man tried to rape me this afternoon and my body still hasn't unclenched, and because these two women closed ranks around me like they'd known me for years instead of hours.
“So,” I say, and my voice only wobbles a little. “Both of them. Silas and Teddy.”
“Both of them,” Nova confirms.
“The Teddy who looks like a...”
“FBI. Had an actual badge and everything.” Nova says it the way other women say he golfs. “He came here to investigate us.”
I choke on the drink. Jules thumps my back, delighted.
“Investigate you for what?”
“That's a later-tonight story.” Nova waves it off, silver rings flashing. “We're doing origin stories first. I bet Jules made a schedule.”
“I did make a schedule,” Jules confirms, folding herself onto the floor with her own glass. “Trauma, then romance, then the goat story. Structure matters in storytelling.”
Nova pulls her knees up as far as the little bump allows and rests her chin on them, and I can see her deciding how much to hand me.
“I was married,” she says. “Before this. Roman Miller. He started sleeping with me when I was fifteen and ran away from home.”
The glass in my hand suddenly feels very heavy.
“He was thirty-two.” She says it flat, like reading a chart.
“He waited until I was eighteen to marry me so it would look right, and by then I didn't know there was any other kind of life.
He'd built the walls around me so slowly I thought they were mine.” Her thumb finds the little key on her choker and rests there.
“You know the funny part? I'm an escape artist. Locks, chains, straitjackets… I can get out of anything. Took me twelve years to get out of him.”
“Nova.” My eyes are stinging. “I'm so sorry.”
“Don't be sorry.” The grin comes back, sharp as a blade. “Because when I finally ran, I crashed into this carnival like a raccoon into a dumpster. Silas found me before I could even hound Elias for a job.”
“And then the Fed showed up,” Jules prompts, clearly working the schedule.
“And then the Fed showed up.” Nova rolls her eyes at the ceiling, but her hand drifts to her belly and stays.
“With his irresistible jawline and golden boy morals.
Silas and I broke them down piece by piece.
Now there are two of them, and they bicker about crib brands, and I'm having a baby with a criminal and the man who was supposed to arrest him, and I have never once in my life been this happy.
I can't wait for her. Or him. I keep telling Marek not to tell me what the cards say.”
I blink. “He knows?”
“He always knows.” Both of them say it at the same time, and then look at each other and cackle, and something in my chest loosens another notch.
I turn to Jules. “And you?”
“Me.” Jules stretches her long legs out and crosses her boots at the ankle, blue hair falling over one eye. “I'm a journalist. Investigative. Small-town corruption, crime, bikers. I came to the carnival to do an exposé.”
“On what?”
“On them. Men were disappearing in towns this carnival passed through. Older men. Pillar-of-the-community types.” She swirls her glass, watching me over the rim, gauging how much I've already guessed. Plenty, my face probably says. “So I bought a ticket, and I snooped, and Elias caught me.”
“Caught you how?”
“She fucked him on all the rides while he chased her wearing his performance mask,” Nova supplies.
“I do not recommend fucking in the mirror maze, you see yourself from angles God never intended.” Despite her words, Jules’s grin is gleeful.
She enjoyed it. “Anyway, somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped writing the exposé and started wanting the truth, and the truth was that I was in love with a man who carries a garrote, and instead of running, I stayed.”
“He proposed a few months ago,” Nova says.
Jules holds out her left hand, and a sapphire surrounded by rubies catches the light.
“We still haven't picked a where or a how. He wants something with the whole carnival lit up. I want to elope on my Harley. Cole has volunteered to officiate, which is a threat, not an offer. Marek says the cards show a tent. Marek can mind his business.”
“You could do it in the Big Top,” I say before I can stop myself. “After a show. When the crowd's gone and it's just yours.”
Both of them stare at me.
“Oh no,” Nova says. “She's a romantic.”
“She's ours now,” Jules says. “That settles it. You're invited.”
I smile into my glass.
“And I thought fucking him in the Big Top in front of everyone was the main event,” she adds under her breath.
I choke on my drink.
They refill my glass twice. They tell me about the goat—I laugh until I wheeze—and about the time Jonah got stuck in the mirror maze for an hour because he was too polite to break anything.
The carnival noise outside thins as the night deepens, and I'm shocked to realize my cheeks actually physically ache from smiling, on the same day a man pinned me to my own exam table.
Jules drapes a blanket over me at some point. I don't remember agreeing to lie down, but the couch has me now, and Nova's dimmed the lamp, and the two of them are murmuring in the kitchenette about wedding stuff while obviously keeping watch.
I drift and I wonder what my life is going to look like now.
I can't go back to the practice. Even if Vance never came back, even if tomorrow the clinic was just Paige and the coffee maker and Dixie's follow-up, I'd stand at that exam table and feel the steel edge against my spine every day for the rest of my career.
And Vance is not coming back. Four men are making sure of that right now, somewhere out in the dark, and I gave one of them my okay before he left.
I wait for the guilt.
I dedicated my whole life to keeping things alive.
I've done CPR on a kitten. I've sat up three nights running with a colicky foal because losing her wasn't an option I'd accept.
And tonight a man is going to die because I said okay, and I search every corner of myself for the horror I'm supposed to feel, and I find—
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Because I grew up here. I know exactly how this town works.
I was sixteen when Katie Ford told the school counselor what the quarterback did to her at the lake, and I watched what happened next: nothing.
Less than nothing. Katie moved schools. The quarterback got a scholarship.
The golden boys of small towns don't get punished; they get the benefit of the doubt in bulk, on credit, forever.
Howard Vance has a diploma on his wall and a pew at church and half the county calls him Doc, and if I walked into the sheriff's office tomorrow with my torn blouse in a bag, I know—I know—which one of us would be on trial by Sunday.
And he'd do it again. I know that too. A man doesn't say girls like you always want it the first time he corners someone. He'd heal up, and simmer, and wait, and some other woman would be alone in a building with him. Some tech working late. Some client's teenage daughter.
Paige.
The thought makes my eyes burn. Paige, who brings him coffee and calls him a miserable little man behind his back and stands two feet from him every single day.
No. I don't feel guilty. Maybe that should scare me more than anything else that's happened today—that the woman who does CPR on kittens can lie on a couch surrounded by magic trick paraphernalia and feel nothing but a grim, tired relief.
Maybe I'll feel it tomorrow. But tonight I’m just waiting for Rowe to come back to me.