4. Cara #2
“No,” I answer immediately.
She pauses with the cookie halfway to her mouth. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask.”
“I know you,” I tell her.
“I guess that’s fair.” Frankie bites the cookie in half, chews slowly, then looks directly at me. “How did it feel, talking to Falcon?”
I close my eyes and wish for patience.
Across the table, Sarah sits up straighter. Maya stops chewing, and Emily smiles for the first time since the alert came through.
I open my eyes and glare at all of them. “Every one of you needs a hobby.”
"We have hobbies," Maya says. "This is one of them."
The humor drains out of me faster than I expect it to, because there's too much sitting behind the question. His searching. The note. The fact that he'd hated me for leaving him when he was the one who'd never come.
"He told me he looked for me," I say finally.
The room goes still. Nobody jokes.
Frankie sets the cookie down. "I believe that."
"What?" I look at her; did she just say that?
"I never knew him then, but from what the brothers say, he nearly tore himself apart looking." Frankie picks up the cookie again.
Something in my chest twists. "He thought I chose to go."
"They made him think that?"
I nod. "I left a note. I didn't write it."
Sarah's brow furrows. "Someone else wrote it?"
"They did." Nobody asks who they are. Nobody in this house needs it clarified.
"It said I was sorry. That was all. He thought I'd left him." I can feel the tears welling, they are both tears of sorrow and anger that he believed that small note
Emily's face twists. "That's evil."
"Yes." I close my eyes, to stop the tears.
Maya reaches across the table, not quite touching my hand, just close enough that it's an offer. I turn my hand over and let her take it.
"He said he hated me."
Sarah sucks in a breath.
Frankie watches my face without flinching from it. "How did that make you feel?"
"Like I deserved it." The answer's out before I can stop it.
"No," Frankie says.
"I know logically I didn't."
"Logic isn't the point."
"I hated him too," I admit. "I used to lie there and think he'd come for me. Every noise outside, every door that opened, I thought this is it, Falcon found me." My voice wobbles and I stop to breathe through it. "He didn't."
"That wasn't his fault," Sarah says quietly.
"I know. It didn't stop me blaming him though. I hated him for living while I was there, for not finding me, and for all the days I told myself believing he'd stopped looking hurt less than believing he was still looking and couldn't reach me."
The room is silent for a while. I wipe at my cheek and realize I've been crying without noticing.
Maya passes me a tissue. "Hospital-grade. Knox bought a whole box."
I laugh through the tears, and it sounds ridiculous, which is exactly what I need it to sound like.
"Do you still hate him?" Sarah asks.
I think about Falcon on the porch. I remember his face when I told him I’d blamed him, and the way he moved toward me before stopping the second my body tensed. He could have touched me, but he chose not to.
“No,” I answer firmly.
Maya studies my face. “That sounded definite.”
“It is,” I confirm.
She leans forward, resting her arms on the table. “What do you feel, then?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “You’ve really embraced this interrogation thing.”
“I’m curious,” Maya says, completely unapologetic.
“You’re nosy,” I correct her.
“Also true.” She reaches for another handful of popcorn.
I look away, because the honest answer is complicated enough that I don't fully trust it yet. Love, fear, hope, maybe grief for two people who existed five years ago and never got the chance to finish becoming whoever they might have been.
"He's familiar," I say finally.
Frankie's expression shifts. "That's not the same as safe."
"I know." She’s right.
"And safe isn't the same as never frightening you.
" She folds her arms on the table. "You've been through something most people never will.
There might be things he does that trigger you even if he never means to hurt you.
His bike might scare you. His voice, a slammed door, something you can't predict.
That doesn't automatically make him unsafe. "
"Then how do I know the difference?" I look at Frankie, I really need her to help me.
"Watch what he does when you tell him." That lands harder than anything else said tonight.
I think about the porch. Don't order me around. Fine, I'm asking. It might not seem like much to someone who hasn’t been through trauma, but to me it’s a really big thing.
"Safe doesn't mean he never makes a mistake," Frankie sets the remains of her cookie down and meets my gaze. “It means that when you tell him something hurts, he doesn’t punish you for saying it. He listens, and he adjusts. He doesn’t decide that his need to protect you matters more than your right to choose.”
I stare at her, unsure what to say.
Frankie gives me a small, understanding smile. “You don’t have to decide anything today. You don’t owe him forgiveness, and you don’t owe him a relationship just because he suffered too.”
“He does love me,” I say quietly.
“I know,” Frankie replies without hesitation.
I study her face. “How do you know that?”
Her smile turns almost fond. “Cara, that man looks at you like somebody handed him his heart back, and he’s terrified he’s going to drop it. Love was never going to be the test. You already know he loves you.”
I swallow against the tightness in my throat. “Then what is the test?”
Frankie’s expression turns serious. “Whether he can love you without destroying himself in the process.”
That's exactly what scares me, because Falcon believes protection means taking the bullet, walking into the fight, drawing the danger toward himself and away from everyone else.
What happens when that means leaving people behind.
What happens when the person he's trying to protect has to spend her life waiting to find out if he's coming home.
The phone buzzes again. Thank God. I'm not sure how much more of this I can stand tonight.
Security Phone:
ALL CLEAR FOR INTERNAL MOVEMENT. External patrol remains elevated. SUV lost eastbound. No confirmed threat to compound. Security channel remains active.
Underneath it, there’s another line, from Condor this time.
Condor:
Need feedback on system later. Falcon says keep updates going even after all-clear.
I stare at the last line longer than it deserves.
Frankie reads it over my shoulder. "What?"
"Nothing." I turn the phone away and she raises an eyebrow, unconvinced, but doesn't push.
It shouldn't matter this much. He didn't do anything dramatic. He listened to something I said, carried it into Church, and made it part of how the club runs now. That's all. It's also everything, and I hate how much matters.
The tension in the house eases with the lockdown lifted.
Sarah goes to tell the women upstairs. Maya takes the cookies into the living room because apparently surviving a potential threat requires two kinds of snacks minimum.
That leaves Frankie and me alone at the table.
I pull the notebook closer and turn to a clean page.
“We need the lockdown zones written up properly,” I say as I uncap my pen. “We should also make a list of what kind of space each person prefers.”
“Definitely.” Frankie leans over the table to look at the page.
I jot down the first few ideas. “Maybe we should prepare a bag for each person too. Medications, copies of important documents, emergency contacts.”
Frankie’s mouth curves into a teasing smile. “Now you sound like Vulture.”
I point my pen at her. “Take that back.”
She laughs and lifts her hands in surrender. “Sorry.”
“You should be,” I reply, returning to my list.
We spend the next half hour turning tonight's scare into something useful, and by the time we finish the list's grown again, and I find I don't mind.
For years everything that happened to me was something I endured.
This is different. Something happened tonight and I can use it, we can all learn from it, and that feels like a kind of power I haven't had in a long time.
Outside, engines start somewhere near the clubhouse, several at once. The brothers moving out on patrol. The sound still hits my nervous system, though not as hard as it did this morning. I listen for one bike in particular and don't let myself find it.
I turn my attention back to the women instead. This is where I am tonight. This is what I can control.