Prologue #2
It's going to start with a woman who tells me to sleep and means I love you, and has probably meant it that way longer than either of us has been willing to say out loud.
I pull into my driveway but don't go inside right away.
I sit in the truck for a minute, engine ticking as it cools, and let myself drift back to a memory I haven't visited in a while — the night of my father's funeral, the one I keep coming back to more than any other when I try to understand what Wren actually means to me.
It was raining, which felt almost too on the nose, like the sky had read the same scripts I had growing up about what a funeral is supposed to look like.
The whole club turned out in their cuts, soaked through, standing in careful formation around the grave while the club chaplain said words I don't remember a single syllable of.
Dominic stood beside me, jaw tight, doing the thing he does where grief turns into stillness instead of tears.
I don't know what I was doing. Standing there, mostly.
Existing, in the most technical sense of the word, while the actual grief sat somewhere just out of reach, too big to access in front of three hundred people.
Wren found my hand somewhere in the middle of it. I don't remember reaching for hers. I just remember, at some point, realizing our fingers were laced together, her grip so tight it left marks, and that the tightness of it was the only thing keeping me upright.
She didn't say anything platitudinous. She didn't tell me he was in a better place or that time heals or any of the things people feel obligated to say at funerals.
She just stood there, soaked to the skin in a black dress that wasn't warm enough for the weather, holding my hand hard enough to hurt, present in a way that asked nothing of me and gave everything anyway.
Afterward, at the compound, with the wake in full swing around us — the particular loud, defiant grief of bikers who process loss by getting louder instead of quieter — she found me sitting alone on the back steps, away from the noise, and sat down next to me without a word.
We didn't talk for a long time. She just sat close enough that our shoulders touched, and eventually, when I finally started talking, she listened to every disjointed, half-formed thing I had to say about my father and never once tried to fix any of it. She just let me say it.
That's the thing about Wren I've never fully articulated, not even to myself. She doesn't try to fix me. She doesn't try to manage me or improve me or turn me into a better version of myself. She just shows up, exactly as I am, in whatever state I'm in, and stays.
I think about all the women I've dated over the years — decent people, mostly, women who wanted good things for me and occasionally got frustrated, not unreasonably, that Wren always seemed to be somewhere in the picture.
I remember one relationship in particular, three years back, a woman named Alexis who finally sat me down and said, not unkindly, "I don't think you're actually available.
Not really. I think you already gave the best part of yourself to someone else a long time ago.
" I argued with her at the time. I told her that was ridiculous, that Wren was just my best friend, that friendship and romance were two entirely separate categories that didn't bleed into each other the way she was implying.
Sitting in my truck tonight, replaying that conversation for the first time in years, I'm forced to admit that Alexis was probably right, and that I was too oblivious, or too scared, to hear it at the time.
I finally go inside, shower, lie in bed staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping. My phone sits on the nightstand, screen dark now, Wren's last text still glowing faintly in my memory even though the actual light's gone out. Get some sleep, Voss.
I think about tomorrow's physical, about walking into her clinic and sitting on that exam table and letting her check my blood pressure and lecture me about self-care in that particular tone she's used since we were teenagers.
I think about how much I'm looking forward to it, which is a strange thing to look forward to, and how that strangeness itself feels like a clue I've been ignoring for a very long time.
Fifteen years is a long time to love someone without saying it. Long enough to build an entire structure of denial sturdy enough to survive almost anything — except, maybe, the accumulated weight of every small moment finally becoming too heavy to keep pretending isn't there.
I don't have the language for it yet. I don't have the courage for it yet, either, not fully.
But lying there in the dark, listening to the far-off sound of the harbor, I know something has shifted tonight that isn't going to shift back.
Some quiet, patient part of me has finally started paying attention to a truth that's been waiting fifteen years for me to notice it.
Tomorrow, I tell myself, I'll go to my physical.
I'll let her check my blood pressure and write something sarcastic in my chart.
And somewhere in that ordinary, familiar routine — one we've repeated more times than I can count — something in me is going to keep looking at her a little differently than I have before, whether I'm ready for that or not.