Declan's Ruin (Iron Gospel MC #3)

1. Avery

AVERY

Two pink lines appear before I finish washing my hands, and I stand over the bathroom sink with water dripping from my fingers while the second one darkens into something I can’t blame on bad light, a faulty test, or wanting this too much.

The wrapper lies open beside Declan’s razor, the little foil edge caught under the jar of balm his mother made for my hands, and the coffee waiting downstairs has already become a problem I know how to solve.

Everything else is too large to touch yet.

I count backward anyway, tapping dates into the calendar on my phone even though I know them better than my own number.

Five weeks and six days. Fourteen months of tracking every rise in temperature, every strip, every hopeful cramp, every bathroom door I locked before letting myself cry, and now the answer has arrived on an October morning while Declan is at the safehouse and the skin across my knuckles is cracked badly enough that the tap water burns.

I laugh with one hand pressed over my mouth, which turns into a wet, ugly sound halfway through, and when I look at the test again, it hasn’t changed its mind.

“You’re real,” I whisper, then wipe my fingers on my pajama pants and pick up the stick as though I might frighten the line away if I move too fast. “You’re actually real.”

The woman in the mirror looks the same as she did yesterday: hair that needs washing, faint purple smudges beneath her eyes, and hands roughened by eczema.

Nothing about her announces that the life she has wanted badly enough to hide the wanting from her own husband has finally begun.

I touch two fingers to my lower stomach anyway and picture something smaller than a blueberry holding on.

Downstairs, I pour my coffee into the sink and watch it disappear.

The smell alone makes me mourn it, which is ridiculous when I’d give up every cup I’ve ever had for the test wrapped in a clean paper towel beside me.

Declan would tell me one cup won’t hurt anything, then read twelve websites and throw out the coffee himself.

He’d pretend the second part never happened.

I know the man well enough to see the whole argument before I tell him there’s one.

The jar of balm waits beside the kitchen sink because I carried it down two nights ago and couldn’t get the lid open.

Declan had screwed it shut the last time he used it on my hands, turning until the metal caught hard, then left before dawn without noticing what he’d done.

He usually remembers things like that. He usually burns the first batch of pancakes every Sunday too, eats the black ones before I can stop him, and tells me the good stack came out that way because he respects me more.

Six years of marriage have taught me he can dismantle a handgun in the dark but treats the stove like an enemy he can intimidate.

Our child is going to think smoke alarms announce breakfast.

That thought makes me laugh again, and this time the sound holds.

I brace the balm jar in a dish towel and work the lid until the split at my thumb opens.

Declan’s mother used to slap his hand away when he overtightened her jars, calling him a thickheaded show-off while he grinned and did it anyway.

She has been gone four years, but her balm remains in our cabinets, and the man who guards every memory of her is going to have a child.

He’s going to lose his fucking mind. I can see him at our kitchen table, big hands wrapped around a baby he refuses to pass to anyone, his cut thrown over the back of the chair and his face set in that warning he gives club brothers who get too close to what belongs to him.

The baby will sleep through it. I’ll tell him he looks deranged.

He’ll say our child likes him best and eat another burned pancake to prove he can provide.

The picture settles somewhere so deep inside me that the kitchen blurs.

I grip the counter and let myself have it: Declan coming home before midnight, Declan’s phone left lit instead of facedown, Declan at the table with me instead of sending a prospect to collect papers he once trusted me to read.

A baby can’t live in the safehouse. A baby needs a father home, and Declan wanted this before I let myself believe we could have it.

He told me so in bed fourteen months ago, his hand on my hip and his face hidden against my neck, asking for a child with my brain, my mouth, and none of the parts of his childhood that taught him love could be used to humiliate a person.

I said yes. We stopped preventing it, and when it didn’t happen the first month, I started tracking.

When it didn’t happen by the fourth, I bought the thermometer.

By the seventh, his safehouse rotations had grown longer and his answers had gotten shorter, so I stopped laying the charts in front of him.

I told myself I was protecting us from turning sex into work.

The uglier truth was that asking my husband whether he knew I had cried in another bathroom had begun to feel like begging him to care as much as I did.

Now there are two lines, and I can pretend all that distance has an ending.

I hate how much hope I place on a child too small to make promises, but I place it there anyway.

Declan will come home. He’ll have to. We’ll sit at the kitchen table again, and if he puts his phone facedown, I’ll turn it over and ask who keeps calling.

I’ll stop accepting the word club as an answer to every question I’ve been too afraid to finish.

The green blouse comes out of the closet after three changes.

Declan watches me whenever I wear it, never in a way polite men would admit to, and today I want that look before I ruin whatever sentence he’s in the middle of.

I pull my hair up, take it down, then put it up again, annoyed with myself for behaving like I have a first date instead of a husband who has seen me vomit through food poisoning and once held my underwear while I peed behind his motorcycle on a road with no gas station for forty miles.

The test goes inside a fresh paper towel, folded once instead of wrapped into a bulky little package.

I slip it into the inside pocket of my coat and press my hand over it, checking that the stick lies flat.

There will only ever be one first time I tell him, and I want him to hold the thing himself.

I want to watch him realize what I’m telling him.

For weeks I’ve imagined telling him with a little box or some clever shirt, but all of that feels wrong now.

Declan hates performances, and nothing between us has ever needed an audience to matter.

Before I leave, I stop at the kitchen table.

The Tuesday stack used to live on the corner nearest the window, club contracts and insurance forms placed face down until after dinner so nobody walking past could see what they were.

Declan would pretend to hate the red pen I used while shifting his chair closer to mine, close enough that his thigh stayed against mine under the table.

The first time he told me the words moved on him, he stared at the page instead of my face and waited for the laugh his father had taught him to expect.

I turned the contract around, read the first paragraph the way the firm trained me to read one, and asked whether the cancellation clause sounded as crooked to him as it did to me.

Every Tuesday after that, he brought me whatever he couldn’t get through alone.

His mother’s hospice letter. Loan terms. Club agreements he wasn’t supposed to let me see.

Then, at the end of April, the stack stopped appearing.

He said he had the paperwork handled, kissed my forehead, and took a call on the porch with his truck idling in the drive.

I never asked who handled it. I wanted to be a wife who trusted her husband, not one who searched his pockets for proof that she shouldn’t.

The empty corner of the table bothers me this morning, but I refuse to carry the feeling into the best day of our lives.

He has been gone eleven days this time, sleeping at home twice and leaving before sunrise both mornings.

Our anniversary disappeared into that same excuse two months ago.

I wore the green blouse under a grey sweater, waited beneath the restaurant awning until the reservation passed, called him at four to hear that he couldn’t leave the safehouse, then drove home and ate leftovers at the counter.

He came home the next afternoon with his phone facedown and sex on his mind, and I let wanting him make the questions feel petty.

Tonight, I tell myself, we’ll go somewhere.

I’ll put the test in his hand, let him react, and then I’ll make him explain why our life has been happening around the spaces he leaves behind.

The baby doesn’t fix anything. The baby only makes pretending impossible, and I believe that all the way to the gas station near Route 9.

The breakfast cooler is full of sandwiches I don’t trust, so I stand there reading labels while a cashier with silver braids watches me reject turkey, ham, and something described only as breakfast meat.

A banana wins by being too simple to frighten me.

Beside the register, three pairs of tiny socks hang in a clear sleeve: grey, white, and yellow, plain enough that nobody can tell me what they’re supposed to mean before the baby is even here.

They cost four dollars. I pay for them, a bottle of water, and the banana, then walk back to the car with the bag held against my coat like someone might steal it.

A man crosses the lot ahead of me carrying a little girl on one hip.

She has frosting across her cheek and both fists in his collar, shouting into his ear while he searches for his keys, and he looks tired enough to sleep standing up.

I want that exhaustion. I want Declan complaining that the baby only cries for him while walking the hallway at three in the morning because he won’t admit he likes being needed.

I eat beside the car, slide the socks into my inside pocket with the test, and call June before I can stop myself. The call rings once. I hang up before she answers.

She calls back before I get the door open, and her name fills the screen while I stare at it.

June has listened to every month of disappointment I allowed anyone to hear.

She knows about the locked drawer, the apps, and the morning I threw a thermometer at the wall hard enough to break it.

She should know first. The thought lasts until I picture Declan learning that somebody else knew before he did, and I let the call stop.

“Sorry,” I tell the phone, putting it facedown on the passenger seat, then catch myself and turn it back over. I’m not hiding harmless things simply because I’ve spent the months since spring wondering whose name Declan keeps turning facedown.

The highway stretches grey beneath a sky threatening rain.

I turn the radio down and rehearse, trying each version aloud until they all sound foolish.

I could give him the socks first and make him work for the answer.

I could hand him the test and say nothing.

I could tell him at the door, before he has time to notice my blouse, or wait until I get him alone and place his hand where there is nothing to feel yet.

“You’re going to be a father,” I say to the windshield, then hate how formal it sounds. “We’re having a baby.”

That’s closer, putting us in the sentence together where we’ve always belonged, and I hold on to those four words as the highway opens ahead.

I sing badly when an old song comes on, wiping tears from my face at a red light and laughing when the driver beside me looks over.

For most of the drive, joy wins. It sits above the canceled anniversary, the empty Tuesday corner, and every time Declan said later and left the date blank.

It carries me past the county line with one hand checking the pocket over my heart whenever the road gets rough.

The safehouse turn appears between two fields cut down to dead stalks.

Declan’s truck is parked nose-out beside the porch, ready to leave the way he always is, with Trigger’s patched tailgate farther down, a third truck near the fence, and a small silver car I don’t know pulled tight against the shed.

I pull behind the tree line according to the protocol Declan taught me, then sit with the engine running and look at the low grey house where my husband has spent more nights than he has spent at home this month.

For the first time all morning, I don’t believe the baby will pull Declan home. I’m carrying our child toward a question I should have asked before now, and the thought keeps me in the car after the engine dies.

I take the side-door key from my ring and walk across the gravel with the test and three pairs of socks over my heart. The key turns easily. Declan gave it to me and said I never needed permission to enter this house, so I ignore every warning that followed me from the car and go inside.

Three jackets hang near the door. Two plates sit on the coffee table.

A woman’s bottle of water rests beside a stack of club mail, but I tell myself a source could be here or one of the prospects’ wives could have driven the silver car.

Any number of people could own a bottle of water.

Declan gave me this key for emergencies and told me there wasn’t any part of his life where I didn’t belong.

The hallway bends beyond the kitchen. I walk toward the bedroom, already reaching into my coat for the test, already smiling as I imagine his face, and then a woman makes a sound behind the partly open door.

My hand stops inside my coat while the smile remains on my mouth, and for one stupid, precious second I stand there holding our child’s first gift and try to make the sound belong to anything except my husband.