46 - NO GREATER SORROW
Lacey
It had been over a week. She'd texted four times.
Lunch, then coffee, then dinner if that's easier, then just the word talk, with nothing after it, which from Janice was close to begging.
I'd left all of them unanswered. For years, I'd handed her my life in pieces as it happened, both the good and reckless, narrated it to her the way you narrate to the person who's going to help you understand what it meant.
What I couldn't do was sit across a table from her.
Not yet. Not where she knew what I was feeling before I'd felt it.
That was the trouble with Janice, the thing I'd loved and didn't trust anymore.
So when I finally answered, I told her no to lunch and to bring her bike to the trailhead off Reed.
A bike ride kept your eyes on the road. You talked to the air in front of you and the other person caught it sideways, and nobody had to watch anybody's face.
She was already there when I pulled in, leaning against the rack with her helmet on, and she came off it the second she saw my car. She crossed the lot before I'd gotten the bike down off the hitch.
"Lacey." She stopped a few feet from me, hands working at nothing. "Look. I've been thinking. About the plane. About all of it, and there are things I want to say to you, things I should have said before I—"
"Don't." I kept my eyes on the strap, working it loose. "Janice. Don't."
She closed her mouth.
"I'm not here for that," I said. "I'm here to ride my bike and tell you what's been happening, because there's a lot of it, and you're the person I tell things to. That's it. No big talks. Not the cruise, none of it. If you can do that, we'll have a nice afternoon."
I looked up then. She was nodding before I'd finished, fast, like she'd take any terms I set.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah. Whatever you want. I'm just glad you called."
And she meant it. The new Janice kept knocking me off balance, like a stair that isn't there will. Part of me wanted to hand her the reins back just to make the strangeness stop. Most of me had spent years getting moved around by people who were sure they knew better, and I didn't want them back.
I got my bike down. We rolled out onto the trail without settling a single thing, which was exactly what I'd come for.
The first half mile we didn't talk at all.
The trail ran flat and pale ahead of us, two lanes with a seam down the middle, and we rode side by side.
The trees closed over and the light came down green and moving.
We'd ridden like this a hundred times, before any of our drama, and I knew the rhythm in my legs even while the rest of me stayed braced.
"Okay," I finally said to the trail. "So. Derek's house."
"Mm." Careful.
I told her about the dinner. The house being too big and too quiet.
The kitchen where he cooked for us himself, which I hadn't expected.
The burned heel of his palm he ran under the tap without comment, like pain was a thing you handled and moved past. Jessica's drawing on the wall in a frame worth more than most of what was in my house.
Janice rode and listened. The old Janice would have been three questions deep by now.
"He's not what I pictured," she commented, when I paused. "From how you've always talked about him."
"No. He's not what I pictured either."
Then the harder part, and I gave it to the road instead of to her.
"At one point he held my wrists," I said. "Both of them. In one hand. And I felt that sensation, that craving, you know. What you showed me. On the cruise." I made my voice even, didn’t let the anger creep in. "And this time I knew what it was while it was happening."
A long beat. When she spoke, she'd set the words down with care.
"Derek Harrington." A pause. "Huh." And then, lower, almost to herself, "Yeah. That makes sense."
It did make sense, I told myself. Big man. Strong hands. Of course I'd go somewhere under that.
We came to a rise and I dropped a gear and stood on the pedals, and she stood on hers, and for a few breaths we were both just working, the talk suspended in the effort. At the top, the trees fell back and the valley came up gold on the left through a gap in the green. We coasted.
"There's more," I said, while we were moving.
"There's always more with you." A flick of the old dryness, there and gone, and she winced. "Sorry. Go on."
"Jessica went into a crisis. Derek's daughter.
She coded in front of me. And my hands knew what to do, they just did it, while the rest of me stood there watching them.
" I let it sit. "For a few minutes I thought I was going to lose her.
And I have no business loving a patient that much, it's unprofessional. "
I'd slowed without deciding to. Janice slowed with me, matched me without a word, and for a stretch we just rolled, the trail unspooling under us.
"God, Lacey. A week and a half. You've held all of this in a week and a half."
"Yeah."
"And you didn't call me." Her hand twitched on the bar like it wanted to cross the gap between our bikes and couldn't.
"I'm calling you now," I said.
I pushed back up into the pace. Used the burn in my legs to get the last of it out.
"After, when Jessica was stable and I could breathe again, Derek joined me in the cafeteria.
And he saw the bracelet. And I figured here it comes, the judgment, the look he gives when scrutinizing a budget.
I had my back up before he opened his mouth.
I snapped at him. Told him it was mine to wear and none of his business. "
The trees broke and the light came down hard and white and I squinted into it.
"And he didn't say any of the things I'd expected. He looked at it, and he said, Glad it's working." The words sat as strange in my mouth as they had in his. "Glad it's working. And then nothing. Like that was a complete sentence I was supposed to already understand."
I shook my head at the road.
"I've turned it over a hundred times. I have no idea what he was talking about."
For a while neither of us said anything. The trail bent and the trees thinned and somewhere off to the right a dog was barking at something.
Then Janice said, "What do you mean, you don't know what he was talking about?"
"Because it's Derek," I said. "Because he's a tight-ass and he says some cryptic controlling thing and expects you to do the work of figuring it out. That's what I mean."
Her tires went quiet. Then the soft drag of her brakes, and she came down off the pace until she was rolling slower than we'd gone all day, beside me.
"Wait." She wasn't watching the road anymore. "Lacey. We're talking about Derek Harrington. The one who chairs your board. That Derek Harrington?"
"Yeah, Janice." Sharper than the old me would have managed. "You know exactly who I'm talking about."
She heard it.
"Well, of course he'd say that. I mean, just because he hasn't been around the last while, that doesn't mean he wouldn't—"
"Been around where, Janice?"
She didn't answer right away. She frowned.
"Janice. Why are you being cryptic? You're as bad as he is."
"I'm not being cryptic." Real confusion in it now, the two of us each certain the other had skipped a stair. "Lacey, why on earth wouldn't Derek know about the club? He founded it."
I kept pedaling on muscle memory while my mind held the syllable and turned it and couldn't get it to mean anything.
"He and his wife. Years back, seven, eight." Offhand. The way you remind someone of a thing they already know. "Of course he knows the Second Circle, Lacey. It's his. The whole place is his."
My front wheel wandered off the line, drifted toward the grass at the edge, and the bike tipped after it before I caught the lurch and hauled the wheel back under me. It fought and shuddered and I almost went down. I got both feet flat on the asphalt and stood over it, breathing.
Ahead of me Janice rode on a few yards before the quiet behind her registered. Her head came up. She braked, circled back.
She stopped a few feet off and put a foot down. She didn't ask what was wrong.
"You didn't know." Her hand had come partway up toward her chest and stopped in the air. "Oh. Lacey. You didn't know."
I couldn't make my mouth work. The dog had stopped barking. Somewhere a long way off a car went by on the road that ran parallel to the trail, and then it was quiet again.
Derek Harrington founded the Second Circle.
Derek Harrington, tight, controlling and judgmental, the man who'd looked at my bracelet in a hospital cafeteria like it was an unbalanced budget.
Derek Harrington built a sex club.