5. Avery
AVERY
Declan closes the front door behind him and stays against it, one hand wrapped around the knob as if I might use the door before he lets go.
His shirt is buttoned wrong, one side hanging lower than the other, and his cut hangs over his forearm instead of his shoulders.
Yesterday, seeing him carry it through this door would have meant he was home.
Tonight, it means he dressed in that bedroom fast enough to get the buttons wrong and never stopped long enough to put the leather on.
“Give me the phone.” He looks at the freezer bag in my hand rather than my face, then corrects himself when I lift my eyebrows. “Please. Sasha’s mixed up in something with the club. That phone has records that can get people hurt.”
“You mean these records?” I pull out my phone and open the folder of screenshots.
The anniversary exchange fills the screen first, his Not enough to leave beneath the photograph of the dessert I saved for him.
“Or were you hoping to explain the club before I found the part where you showed your girlfriend my anniversary dinner?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” He makes the same stupid correction he did at the safehouse, but this time he hears it before I have to tell him.
He closes his eyes and drags both hands over his face.
“Fuck. I know that doesn’t make it better.
I didn’t love her. I never promised her anything. I was always coming home to you.”
I set the hard case on top of the suitcase, careful with the papers inside because I’m not going to ruin my own records while my husband tries to make the affair sound less like what it was.
“You paid her rent, gave her a key, kept clothes there, and let her drink from your mother’s mug.
You didn’t have to promise to leave me. You gave her a life and assumed I would stay in this one until you felt like coming home. ”
“It wasn’t a life.” He takes one step away from the door and stops when I pull the freezer bag against my coat. “The safehouse was where we met. The apartment was for the source. I paid the rent to keep her away from the clubhouse.”
“You fucked her at the apartment too?”
His face answers. He has always been terrible at lying to me after I know which question to ask, which used to feel like proof that I knew him. Now it means he counted on me never asking.
“Yes,” he says, and the word barely clears his mouth. “Avery, the source part is real. She came in with information about the faction. I should’ve taken it to Cruz, and I didn’t. I kept handling her myself, and then I crossed a line I had no fucking right to cross.”
“Don’t call six months a line you crossed.” I open the screenshot folder and hold up the payment history. “A mistake doesn’t come with monthly rent, a drawer, shampoo, a toothbrush, and six months of appointments. You moved in and sent me a heart from the bedroom.”
He looks at the screen long enough to recognize the date. His mouth opens, then closes. The man who can frighten a room into obedience has nothing to say when the proof uses his own words.
“I was an asshole about the anniversary,” he says. “There isn’t an excuse for that.”
“You weren’t an asshole. You were cruel.
” I swipe to the picture of my dessert, remembering the plastic fork beside the plate and the way I waited to eat until his heart came through.
“You knew I was home alone. You showed her what I sent you. Then you came back here, took off the sweater I bought for our dinner, and had sex with me.”
“I know.”
“No, you remember. Knowing would have stopped you before you put your hands on me.”
He takes the hit without arguing, but I can see his attention move over my face, my bandaged hand, the bags at the door.
He’s looking for the part of me he can manage.
He used to reach for my hands when I was upset, rub balm into every crack, and wait until touch did what words couldn’t.
When he steps closer, I raise the burner between us.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I’m not going to.” He stops, though everything in his body leans toward me. “Your hand is bleeding through the towel. Let me get the balm open and I’ll leave it on the table. You don’t have to let me near you.”
The offer hurts more than the order did.
I want the jar open. My skin burns, and he knows how little pain it takes before I stop using my right hand.
I also remember those same fingers around Sasha’s thigh while my balm sat unopened beside our sink.
“I managed to copy your affair with it. I can manage a jar.”
His eyes drop to my hand. “Avey?—”
“Don’t call me that.”
He has used the name since our second date, after I threatened to dump a beer over him for calling me sweetheart.
It belongs to bad dancing in this hallway and Sunday mornings when he pulls me back into bed.
Hearing it now feels like he reached into my suitcase and claimed something I forgot to pack.
“Avery,” he says, and my full name sounds wrong in his mouth for the opposite reason. “I love you. I know you don’t want to hear that, but it’s true. Sasha meant nothing beside you. I wasn’t leaving. I wasn’t replacing you.”
“Then why her?” The question gets out before I can stop it, and I hate myself for asking the one thing that gives him room to explain. “If she meant nothing, why was humiliating me worth six months?”
“It wasn’t worth it. I was selfish, and I thought I could keep it away from home.”
“You brought my sheets there. You took your mother’s mug out of our kitchen. You stopped bringing me the Tuesday papers and handed them to her. There was no away from home, Declan. You took pieces of our home to her one at a time.”
His jaw locks when I mention the papers. Shame tightens his face, and I know he wants to shut down the moment Sasha brings up his reading. He looks toward the kitchen table where our Tuesday stack used to wait, then back at the burner.
“She helped with a few manifests,” he says. “I didn’t give her everything.”
“She asked you for visitor logs and route notes. You told her not to touch family sheets, which means you knew she wanted papers she shouldn’t have. Did you give her the route notes?”
“I gave her copies connected to the information she brought in.”
“Did you hand her the route notes?”
“Yes.” He rubs the back of his neck and looks toward the floor. “I brought them to the safehouse. I didn’t know she was using me to get inside the club.”
“You knew she was asking. You wanted to fuck her more than you wanted to ask why.”
His head comes up. Anger appears for the first time. It’s aimed at the accusation instead of me, but I have named the choice he was trying to make sound smaller. “I didn’t trade club papers for sex.”
“Then you endangered everybody for free. I’m sure Cruz will feel better.”
He swears under his breath and turns away, taking two steps toward the kitchen before checking himself.
Declan has never known what to do when he can’t control the people around him.
He fills space, moves people, plants himself between exits and calls it instinct.
I watch him look at the table, the stairs, and the burner, measuring every route except the one where he lets me leave.
“How much did you take?” he asks.
I know he means money, but I let the question sit between us for a moment with the suitcase and the boxes at my feet. “Half of the available joint checking balance. I saved the confirmation. The other half is untouched, and I didn’t close anything.”
“That money isn’t what I meant when I asked for the phone.”
“You were going to tell me it was yours.”
“Most of it came from me.”
I knew he would say it, and the old hurt is still there.
I left paid work fourteen years ago and spent most of our marriage managing the house, accounts, insurance, club dinners, his mother’s care, and every page he put on my table.
Declan never called the money his when he wanted me to pay bills or stretch it across another safehouse month.
It becomes his tonight because I used it to make leaving possible.
“You had no problem calling it ours while I saved it,” I say. “You had no problem taking it from the crib fund to pay Sasha’s rent. If you want to argue that I own nothing because your name brought the money in, save it for my attorney.”
“That’s not what I meant. I don’t give a fuck about the money right now. Take all of it if you need it.”
“I’m taking what I can account for. You don’t get to call yourself generous because you let me take my own money.”
He grips the back of the kitchen chair but doesn’t pull it out. “Attorney?”
“Yes.”
“You’re filing for divorce today?”
“I caught you this morning. I found six months of rent and meetings this afternoon. How much more information do you think I need?”
“You need the whole truth before you end six years.” He releases the chair and comes toward me again, keeping enough distance that he can pretend he’s obeying.
“I’ll tell you everything. Every question.
Every date. Give me tonight. Don’t make this permanent while you’re bleeding and scared and carrying our kid. ”
I shift the hard case higher on my shoulder while anger burns through the last of my exhaustion. He has turned the baby from something he missed into leverage before the first day is over, and I won’t let him finish building the argument.
“You don’t get to put our child between me and the door.” I lift the hard case from the suitcase and hook its strap over my shoulder. “You don’t get to use the pregnancy to keep me here while you explain why I should hate you less.”