3. Declan #2
Every week gave me another place to stop.
Avery’s anniversary reservation. The night she called while I was here and told me she had saved dessert.
The morning I found her fertility app open on the bathroom counter and knew she was doing the work alone.
The Tuesday I sent Trigger for contracts so I could hand them to Sasha instead.
I chose every part. I just never chose the consequence, as if a man gets to separate those things.
“If you’re done confessing to yourself, call me when you have the phone.” Sasha grabs her jacket and reaches the door. “If Avery gives it to Cruz, all of us have bigger problems than your marriage.”
“There is no us.” I step into her path, and she halts before we touch. “You come near Avery, you call her, you breathe her name to anybody, and I will make you regret it.”
“She came near me.” Sasha looks past my shoulder toward the ruined bed. “Maybe you should threaten the person who had a key.”
I want to hit something. That’s what I do when I’m the problem. I use my hands until everybody in the room looks somewhere else, then I call their fear respect. Avery has seen me bloody and has never once looked away. Today she backed from my hand like I was about to use it on her.
Sasha slips past while I let her, and the front door closes behind her.
Her engine starts beside the porch. I tell myself I let her leave so I can reach Avery faster, not because searching her might delay me or expose what I have ignored.
Both reasons are true. All I can feel is losing my wife, and the club will pay for everything I refuse to think about before the day is over.
I find my boots beneath the bed. When I reach for the second one, yellow shows against the dark floorboards near the wall.
The sock is so small it fits inside my fist, yellow knit marked with dust along one edge and a single loose thread where it tore from the package.
Avery bought this while she was happy, and the thought gets through everything else.
She stood in some store believing she knew me, chose three pairs of socks, and carried them over her heart while I was here with Sasha.
I’ve spent six months telling myself the affair never changed what I felt for my wife.
Avery walked into the room and learned I could love her and do this anyway.
I put the sock in my pocket beside the test. They don’t belong in the same pocket as my keys and cash, but I have nowhere clean to keep them.
I dress around them, pulling on my shirt and boots, then take my cut off the hook by the door and carry it over my arm instead of putting it on.
I walk through the safehouse looking at what Avery photographed.
The shampoo. The second toothbrush. The open drawer.
My hoodie on the floor. The blue mug with Sasha’s lipstick on it.
In the office, the eastern route cabinet is unlocked.
I know I closed it last night. The top binder sits crooked, and the slot for safehouse logs is empty except for a torn corner of paper caught beneath the divider.
Sasha was in here while I showered, slept, or took calls from Avery.
Maybe all three. I grab my phone to call Cruz, then Avery’s face fills my head again, her cracked hands fighting the keys, the blood on the white sock, and I call her instead.
She answers on the fourth ring but says nothing. Road noise fills the line, steady enough that she’s moving fast.
“Pull over,” I say, already striding toward my truck. “Avery, listen to me. Pull over and tell me where you’re going.”
“You had six months to tell me where you were.” Her voice is scraped raw now, no longer the cold one she used in front of Sasha. “Don’t call me again.”
“You’re bleeding, you’re pregnant, and you’re driving too fast. I can see your location if you let me?—”
“Try it and I will throw this phone out the window.”
“I need to know you’re safe.”
“You needed me ignorant. You got what you wanted, Declan. Now leave me alone.”
The call ends. I hit redial before the screen clears, but it goes to voicemail. I call again while climbing into the truck. Voicemail. On the third attempt, the call fails before it rings. She has blocked me.
I sit behind the wheel with the keys in my hand and every club instinct telling me to send Trigger after her, ping her phone, call the clinic, or put a man at the house before she arrives.
All of those things are available to me.
That’s the problem. Power has let me turn what I want into what happens for so long that I can’t tell where protection ends and ownership begins.
I don’t start the truck. I don’t send Trigger after her either, and I tell myself that means I listened to Avery, but I’m already planning to follow her home, and there’s no honesty in giving up one order while ignoring the one she said to my face.
Instead, I go back inside and search the house because I can’t put a man on Sasha and drive off blind at the same time.
I take every binder off the shelf and go through it page by page, touching each sheet because I’ve never trusted numbers I only glanced at.
I strip the bed and bag what she left. I empty the bathroom cabinet into a trash sack and check the burn barrel behind the shed for paper that isn’t there.
I send Trigger to sit on her apartment, tell him to ring me the second her car appears, and then wait on a call that doesn’t come until half past two, when he says the windows are dark and the mailbox is full.
Afternoon light reaches the office wall by the time I lock the side door behind me.
The road back takes forty minutes if a man cares whether he arrives alive.
I make it faster, passing on blind stretches and gripping the wheel whenever the test presses against my thigh.
The burner waits beneath a shop rag in the red toolbox.
Avery knows that garage better than I do.
She taught me where every tool belongs, and if she reaches the house first, she’ll notice anything that doesn’t.
I could call Cruz now. I could tell him the logs are gone, the cabinet was open, and Sasha wants the phone. Instead, I drive toward my house as if saving my marriage is the first job of the Enforcer, even after the affair has made it a threat to everybody else.
When I turn onto our street, Avery’s car is in the drive. The garage door stands open. One suitcase waits beside the trunk, and boxes stand in the open front hall behind it while my wife moves through the house alone with every secret I thought she would never find.