8. Declan
DECLAN
Four weeks after Avery left me, I sit in a conference room without my cut, my gun, or the knife I have carried since I was seventeen.
Her attorney’s assistant asked me to empty my pockets into a plastic tray at reception, then checked the tray twice before returning my wallet, keys, phone, and the yellow sock folded inside my wallet.
I should have left it in the truck. I haven’t left it anywhere since I found it beneath the safehouse bed, and I can’t explain why I carry it without sounding like finding it gave me a claim on her or the baby.
My attorney has arranged provisional support forms along one side of the table.
Avery’s attorney left the chair opposite mine empty and put a box of tissues near it, which feels insulting until I understand they may be for Avery.
I move the box toward the wall. If she cries, I won’t pass her anything.
I won’t reach across the table, tell her to breathe, or touch the back of her neck the way I did whenever she was scared.
Those comforts belonged to the husband she trusted, and I stopped being him long before she caught me.
“You understand the meeting ends when she says it does,” my attorney tells me while checking the time.
He has already said it in the lobby and again when we sat down, but men who have spent their careers watching me ignore limits tend to repeat themselves.
“You sign what you agreed to sign. You can request a communication channel concerning the pregnancy. You can’t request her address, compel medical disclosure today, or argue the divorce. ”
“I heard you.”
“Hearing people hasn’t been your strong point this month.”
I look at him. He is old enough to remember me as a prospect sleeping above the clubhouse kitchen, and he has enough work from Iron Gospel that most men would be careful with me. He opens his pen and waits. I turn toward the door instead of giving him the fight he expects.
Avery enters with her attorney and closes the door behind herself.
The first thing I notice is that her hands are worse.
Red skin shows around two fingers despite the cream worked into them, and her nails are cut short where they used to click against my Tuesday papers.
Then I see the charcoal trousers, the cream blouse under her coat, and a narrow leather folder held against her stomach.
She looks like the woman in the photograph from her first firm, older and sharper.
I can’t connect those clothes to a single memory because she bought them after she left me.
I know every sweater she wears when she is cold.
I know which jeans pinch after dinner and which black dress she claims is too old even though I lose my fucking mind whenever she puts it on.
I’ve never seen this blouse. She bought it while I was gone from her life, and the fact hurts worse than the empty side of our bed.
“Avery.” I rise, then stop with both hands against the table so I don’t go farther. “You look?—”
“Don’t.” She takes the chair beside her attorney, places the folder in front of her, and removes her coat with her eyes on the table between us. “We’re not doing that.”
“All right.” I sit after she does. Her wedding ring is gone. I knew it would be, but I stare at the pale line until she lays her injured hand over it.
Her attorney opens the meeting by repeating Avery’s conditions: no address, no appointment schedule, no direct calls outside the channel they agree to today, and no discussion framed as a request to remain married.
Avery watches me rather than the papers, and I understand the rules aren’t only legal.
She wants to see whether I can sit across from her while she closes doors and keep my hands to myself.
I sign the temporary support order first. The amount is less than I offered and more than Avery wanted, calculated from the household she stopped being paid to run.
The next page blurs beneath my eyes. Lines crowd together, and the words at the bottom won’t stay in their places long enough for me to catch them before everyone notices.
My attorney turns the page toward himself without comment.
He reads the clause aloud in a low voice: Avery controls her address, Declan receives no key or entry right, each party keeps counsel informed for service, and neither may hide or sell marital property outside the temporary order.
I follow with my finger, find the marked signature line, and sign.
Avery’s gaze rests on the page. She knows why he read it. For six years, she was the person who slid a ruler beneath the line and made the letters stop moving without making me feel like a fool. Her folder stays shut. She lets me struggle with the same words I took to Sasha instead of her.
I sign the medical waiver confirming I won’t seek records or billing information.
I sign the order that bars me from using club contacts to find her home.
I accept service of the divorce petition, initial the receipt, and sign that I won’t contest the minimum schedule, though the word dissolution takes three attempts to hold.
Each signature looks like the one I put on the false route sheet after Sasha read it to me.
My name is the easiest part. I learned young how to make it look sure even when I had no fucking idea what sat above it.
“The communication request,” my attorney says when the signed stack reaches Avery’s side.
“My client is asking for one email address for information you choose to share regarding the child. No location tracking, read receipts, direct calendar access, or contact outside issues concerning the pregnancy and later co-parenting.”
Avery removes a sheet from her folder and slides it across the table.
The new address contains the word baby, not her name or mine.
“That inbox is for necessary information. Appointments stay mine. Apologies, photographs, gifts, and questions about where I live all fall outside it. If you misuse it, my attorney takes over the channel.”
I read the address twice and type it into my phone under a contact named BABY because putting Avery’s name beside it would feel like stealing. “I’ve got it.”
“Do you?” Her thumb presses against the edge of the folder, leaving a pale mark in the red skin. “You understood that I didn’t want you following me on October seventh. You almost did it anyway.”
“I did follow you home.”
Her eyes lift. I haven’t said it to her before, though she saw my truck arrive and knew. “Yes. You did.”
“I won’t use this to get around what you said.” I set the phone faceup on the table so she can see the entry and nothing else. “If you send me one sentence, I’ll respond only to what you asked. If you send nothing, I leave it empty.”
She doesn’t thank me, and I’m glad. She has no reason to thank me for a promise after I spent six months breaking them.
I have rehearsed the question since the day she left, cutting it into pieces so I won’t sound like a man asking for his property back. The words come apart anyway. “Have you seen a doctor? Is the baby—can you tell me if everything is okay?”
Avery’s shoulders rise beneath her cream blouse, and for one second I expect her to refuse. “The pregnancy is healthy. I’m nine weeks, six days.”
I count automatically. Our baby has grown through every night I slept alone in the marital house, through the clubhouse search, the missing shipment, and the hours I spent telling myself not to drive every street until I found her. “Did you have an ultrasound?”
“Last week.” She opens the folder and removes a page, but the printout remains beneath it, one grey corner visible before she covers it with her hand. “I heard the heartbeat.”
My attorney stops moving. Across the table, Avery’s attorney lowers her pen.
Neither of them pretends not to hear what Avery said.
I heard the heartbeat. Not we. Avery and somebody else stood in a room while our child made the first sound either of us would ever hear, and I wasn’t there.
She would have been afraid. Her hand goes for my arm in medical offices when she is scared, nails digging in, and she apologizes after as if pain shared between us ever needed one.
I look at the part of the printout beneath her hand. “Who went with you?”
“June.”
Jealousy arrives before shame, ugly and useless.
June held the hand that used to find mine.
June heard my child’s heart. June knows where Avery lives, carries her emergency authorization, and gets the calls I forfeited.
I force the anger away from the only two women who had any right to be in that room.
“Were you scared?” I ask.
Her mouth tightens. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry you had to do it without me.”
“I didn’t have to. You made it that way.”
I don’t argue. I look at the grey corner again. “Can I have a copy?”
Avery closes the folder. “No.”
Every excuse rises at once. I want to say I’m the father.
I want to tell her that I missed the room and should still get the image, that she is punishing me with a child who had nothing to do with the affair.
I know the argument is wrong before I say it.
She was alone beneath that screen because I made her afraid of me.
“All right.” My voice nearly fails on the word, and she hears it. If I let her hear how badly I want the photograph, that becomes another kind of pressure. I pick up the next form. “Keep that one.”
She watches me as if waiting for the demand behind it. When none comes, she unlocks the folder again but doesn’t show me the printout.
“I need the truth about the affair,” she says. “Not the answer you gave Cruz about the club breach. Not a speech about why you love me. Facts.”
“I’ll give you anything you ask.”
“You said that at the safehouse after I had to catch you to get an honest answer.” She removes a stapled packet and places it in front of me, keeping her hand over the top until I stop myself from reaching.
“These are the questions I need answered. Dates. Places. Money. Protection. What Sasha knew about me. Whether you came home after her. Whether you touched me after touching her. What you promised, what you gave her, and what she saw.”
The print is clean, large, and spaced in a way Avery chose for me. Even now, even here, she has formatted the questions so I can read them more easily. This isn’t kindness or forgiveness. She wants no excuse left when I answer.
“Do you want me to write them?” I ask.
“No. I want you to answer aloud with both attorneys present. Your lawyer can prepare a typed timeline first. I want to hear what you say when I’m in the room.”
“I can do it now.”
“You spent six months saying whatever kept me from finding out the rest. You get three days to make sure you don’t hide behind forgetting.
” She removes her hand, leaving the packet between us.
“The answers don’t buy you another meeting.
They don’t change the petition. They don’t earn you the photograph. ”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that after I teach it to you.”
I take the packet. “Then I’ll answer every one.”
She doesn’t react. She gathers the signed orders while the attorneys arrange the next meeting. I reach for my wallet to put away the business card with the new time, and the yellow sock slips from the fold, falls past my knee, and lands on the grey carpet between us.
Avery’s hand stops on the zipper of her folder.
She looks at the tiny sock, then at the place my cut would cover if Cruz had not taken it.
Her face empties in the same frightening way it did when Sasha wore my hoodie.
I bend, pick up the sock, and close it inside my fist before the moment becomes one more thing she has to endure in front of strangers.
“I found it under the bed,” I say, because I can’t let her think I left it out. “I didn’t leave it there.”
She puts on her coat. “You left everything else.”
I have no answer that wouldn’t ask her to count one recovered sock against half a year of choices, so I move my chair back and clear the path to the door before she stands.
Avery passes without touching me. Her new clothes disappear beneath the coat, the folder stays against her body, and the address on every copy remains covered in black ink.
In the truck, I open the packet across the steering wheel.
The first question asks for the date of the first sexual contact.
I know the answer: late April, after Sasha read the manifest. The second asks where it happened.
The third asks whether I used a condom. By the fourth, the lines begin to double.
I press my finger beneath the words the way Avery taught me, but my place slips when a truck passes and light moves across the page.
For years, I told myself I needed Avery for the papers and loved her for everything else. Then I let Sasha take the papers so I could pretend Avery’s help was replaceable. Now the questions Avery needs answered sit in my hands, and she isn’t beside me to turn the page.
I take out my phone, search for the text-to-speech app Hutch sent me after the club meeting, and photograph the first page.
A flat voice reads Avery’s questions through the truck speakers while I write each answer in the notes app, starting with the first night, the first condom, and the first time I went home to my wife afterward.