Chapter 2
Cormac
I have imagined holding Josie again roughly four hundred thousand times over two years.
I want to be precise about that number because precision was the only thing I had left in that house — precision and imagination, the two things nobody could lock away from me — and I used both to build her, piece by piece, in my head, until I could have drawn her from memory better than any sketch artist alive.
Not one of the four hundred thousand times looked like this.
She was shaking against me so hard I could feel her teeth chattering, crying in the specific ugly, honest way people only cry when they've stopped performing for an audience, hitting my chest with closed fists that had absolutely no force behind them and every ounce of fury she had, and I stood there in the doorway of her shop and took every bit of it like communion.
"I have a lot of questions," she said into my shirt, muffled, furious.
"I know."
"A lot."
"I know, Josie."
She pulled back to look at me, mascara-streaked, flour-dusted, more beautiful than any of the four hundred thousand imagined versions, and said, with the particular deadly calm of a woman deciding not to fall apart twice in one evening, "Sit down.
Start from the beginning. And Cormac — if you leave anything out to protect me, I will bury you myself this time, and I will do it properly. "
She put the kettle on with hands that shook so badly I nearly reached out to do it for her, and stopped myself, because I understood, even then, exhausted and raw as I was, that she needed the task more than she needed my help with it.
I watched her instead — really watched, the way I hadn't let myself do yet, cataloging everything two years had changed.
Her hair was longer. There was a new, faint line at the corner of her mouth that hadn't been there before, the kind that comes from either laughing or crying more than a person used to, and I suspected, knowing her, it was both.
Her hands, when she finally set the mug in front of me, were rougher than I remembered, callused in new places from two years of kneading dough and hauling flour sacks and building a life out of raw material and stubbornness.
I wanted to memorize all of it. I wanted to catalog every single change so thoroughly that no future version of missing her could ever again outpace the reality of her, the way the last two years of missing her had outpaced everything, had built a version of Josie in my head so vivid it nearly hurt to sit across from the real one and notice the gaps between memory and truth.
"You're staring," she said, not unkindly, sitting down across from me with her own mug she wasn't drinking from either.
"I'm allowed to stare. I spent two years building you from memory. I'm allowed to check my work."
"That's a strange way to put it."
"It's the truest way I've got right now," I said. "I don't have gentler words left, Josie. I used them all up in my head, rehearsing this conversation four hundred thousand times. What's left is just true."
So I sat, in the little back kitchen of the bakery she'd built without me, surrounded by the smell of yesterday's bread, and I told her.
I told her about the job — as much as I could, the shape of it if not every classified edge — a deep operation that had been running long before I ever got pulled into it, infiltrating a supply chain that ran guns and worse through three states, work I'd taken on because the club had been asked to help and because I was, back then, the kind of fool who thought he could do dangerous things and come home from them clean.
I told her about the night it went wrong. The wrong kind of eyes recognizing the wrong kind of face at the wrong kind of moment. The three seconds where every plan I had collapsed into one bad option and one worse one.
I told her about the choice, because she deserved the whole shape of it, not a softened version.
Stay dead — vanish, let the world believe the cover story that had gone sideways into an actual death, let the club bury an empty box, let her grieve a lie — or refuse, and watch men who didn't bluff make good on the alternative, which wasn't my death. It was hers.
"They knew your name," I said. "Within a day of the operation collapsing, they knew your name, your route to the bakery, what time you close.
I didn't give it to them on purpose. I gave it to them delirious, bleeding out on a table, and by the time I understood what I'd done it was already a leash around both our necks.
Stay dead, stay silent, and you live untouched.
Make one move — one call, one letter, one word to anyone — and they don't come for me.
I was already dead to them. They come for you. "
Her face had gone very still. "So you chose."
"I chose," I said. "I'm not going to dress it up as anything except what it was.
I chose to let you bury me rather than risk them burying you for real.
I'd make the same choice again, Josie. I need you to know that, even if you hate me for it.
Given the same three seconds, the same two doors, I'd walk through the same one every time. "
"Two years," she said. Not a question. A number she was turning over, weighing, trying to find the shape of.
"Two years of not being able to send word.
Not a letter, not a message through a third party, nothing, because any thread back to you was a thread they could pull.
I lived in a house I never learned the name of, in a town I still can't place on a map, kept fed and unharmed and utterly caged, watched every hour of every day, until three days ago when whatever leverage they had on the people holding me came apart — I still don't have the full picture of how, I think it involves people I'll owe debts to for the rest of my life — and the door just wasn't locked one morning, and nobody stopped me from walking out of it. "
"And you came straight here."
"I came straight here." I looked at her, at the two years of grief written into every line of a face I'd once known better than my own hands.
"I want to tell you I agonized over it, that I had some plan, some careful way to break this to you gently.
I didn't. I had a bus ticket and your name and I walked until I was standing at the town line, and then I walked some more, because the alternative was turning around, and I'd already spent two years choosing to protect you by disappearing.
I wasn't going to make that choice again. "
Josie was quiet a long moment, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea she hadn't touched, and when she spoke, her voice had gone somewhere I didn't recognize — not the grief, not the fury, something underneath both of them.
"I don't know if I'm supposed to thank you," she said, "or never forgive you. I keep trying to hold both feelings at once and my whole chest hurts from it."
"You don't have to pick tonight," I said. "You don't have to pick for a long time. I'm not asking you to."
"What are you asking me for?"
I didn't have a good answer for that. I still don't, three months later, writing this down — I don't think there was a good answer, that first night. So I told her the truth instead of a good answer.
"Nothing," I said. "I'm not here to ask you for anything.
I came home because I couldn't not, and because you deserved the truth even if the truth doesn't undo a single day of what it cost you.
Whatever you do with me from here is yours to decide.
I gave up the right to expect anything the day I let you grieve a lie. "
She looked at me a long time after that, and I couldn't read her face, and I understood, sitting there, that this was the first of what would be a great many moments where I had absolutely no idea what came next, and would have to sit in that not-knowing without trying to control it.
"The club," she said finally. "Knox. Diesel. They think you're—"
"I have to tell them."
"Tonight?"
"Tonight." I stood, my body aching in the particular way it had ached for two years, a low, constant hum of old damage I'd stopped noticing. "I owe Knox that more than anyone."
Her face changed at his name — something complicated moving through it. "He blamed himself," she said quietly. "For the job. For sending you. I watched him carry that for two years, Cormac. It aged him ten."
"I know," I said, and my chest did something painful at the thought of it, of Knox — steady, unbreakable Knox — carrying that weight for two years on my behalf. "I have to go tell him he doesn't have to carry it anymore."
She walked with me to the clubhouse. I want to remember that detail specifically, because it mattered more than she probably realized — she didn't send me alone, didn't stay back to process this in private, safe distance from whatever came next.
She walked beside me through the dark streets of the town that buried me, close enough that our shoulders brushed, not touching otherwise, both of us too raw for more than that, and I understood it as its own kind of answer, even before either of us had any words for what came next.
The clubhouse lights were on, low murmur of voices inside, ordinary Tuesday-night sounds — someone's game on the TV, glasses on the bar, the specific comfortable noise of a family that didn't know it was about to be rearranged.
I stood in the doorway a moment before I went in. Josie's hand found mine, unexpected, warm, grounding.
"You don't have to do this alone either," she said.
I walked in.
I've been in a lot of rooms in my life. I've walked into rooms full of armed men who wanted me dead, and I've walked into rooms where the temperature dropped the second I entered, and I thought I knew what it felt like to command a room's total, silent attention.