3. Lola
THREE
LOLA
Six weeks later, I threw up in the salon bathroom for the third morning in a row.
The first time I'd blamed the coffee. The second time I'd blamed a stomach bug. The third time I stood over the toilet with my hand braced against the wall and I couldn't blame anything anymore.
I knew. Before the test. Before the pharmacy run where I drove twenty five minutes to a town where nobody would recognize my face, before the two pink lines that appeared on the pregnancy test from behind a locked bathroom door.
My body had been telling me for days. The nausea that arrived every morning like clockwork.
The bone-deep exhaustion that hit me in the afternoon.
The tenderness I'd been explaining away because the alternative was a truth I wasn't ready to hold.
I sat on the bathroom floor with the test in my hand. Two lines. Clear, unmistakable, final.
Fuck.
One night. One corridor. And one man I couldn't have.
I was carrying Ghost's baby.
I sat there for a long time in my quiet apartment. I sat on the cold tile with my arms around my knees and I let the tears arrive.
And they did. For my father. For his face when he found out.
The cold, the shutdown, the door closing behind his eyes that I knew was coming.
I'd seen men on the other side of that door.
Men who'd betrayed the club, who'd broken faith.
He didn't hit them. The cold was worse than hitting.
The absolute removal of everything he'd been to them, delivered in silence, was the most devastating thing I'd ever witnessed.
The loyal good daughter. The one who never broke a single rule. Pregnant with the enemy club VP's child.
I got up and threw water over my face. The mirror showed the same person. That felt wrong. This should show on the outside, should rearrange my face, should be visible to anyone who looked. But the woman staring back at me was the same. Dark blonde hair, steady jaw, a gaze that didn't waver.
I went to work.
Mrs. Callahan was in my chair at ten. She'd been coming in every two weeks for four years, same cut, same color, same stories about her daughter's divorce.
I sectioned her hair, mixed the color, applied it with steady hands while she talked.
The rhythm was a mercy. Foil, brush, fold.
The chemical smell of developer, the warmth of the dryers, the low conversation of the other stylists and their clients.
Ordinary things. A world where I was just Lola, the girl who did good work and always smiled, and nobody needed to look any deeper.
"You seem quiet today," Mrs. Callahan said, watching me in the mirror.
"Just tired." I met her eyes in the reflection and smiled. "Long week."
She launched into a story about her son-in-law and I let the words wash over me while my hands worked.
Section, foil, fold. The mechanical rhythm of it was the only thing keeping me upright some mornings, the muscle memory of a job I'd been doing since I was nineteen.
The nausea hit. The room tilted. The secret pressed against the inside of my skull so hard I was amazed it didn't show on my face.
I finished Mrs. Callahan's color. Shampooed, conditioned, blew out. She tipped me twenty dollars and told me I should take a vacation.
After she left I stood in the back room, hands on the supply shelf, forehead against the cool wood. I breathed until the dizziness passed. The other girls were out front with their clients, the buzz of dryers and conversation muffling the quiet space around me. Nobody came looking. Nobody noticed.
I straightened up and went back to my chair. Next client, next smile, next performance.
She accepted it the way people always accepted it, because I was Stone's daughter and I'd learned to wear a face the way my father wore authority. Completely, automatically, so thoroughly that the effort of it disappeared.
On Thursday, it was dinner at my father's house.
I sat across from him at the kitchen table, the window open even though it was cold, his coffee black, same mug he'd used my entire life.
He was fifty-three, broad across the shoulders, thick hands wrapped around the ceramic.
He drank his coffee the way he did everything.
Deliberately. With the weight of a man who'd built his world from scratch and maintained it through force and calculation and a love that held you so tightly it sometimes felt like a fist.
I loved him. That was the part that made everything impossible.
He'd taught me to change a tire before I was twelve. Taught me to throw a punch, to read a room, to meet a man's eyes and never be the first to look away. When my mother left, I was nine. He'd sat on the edge of my bed while I cried and he'd said, "You and me, kid. We're enough." And we had been.
But his love had walls around it. Rules built into the foundation that I'd never needed to question because I'd never broken one.
I lived in his world, followed his rules, and in return I got his protection, his pride, his fierce devotion.
That devotion had been safety when I was a child.
It was a perimeter now that I was a woman.
He loved me completely. He also owned me completely.
And I didn't think he knew the difference.
"You look tired," he said.
"Long week at the salon."
He studied me for a beat. I held steady the way he'd taught me. Eye contact, no flinch. I met his gaze with everything I had and I waited for the follow-up question that would end our relationship.
"You work too hard," he said. And went back to his coffee.
The relief nearly killed me. I excused myself to the bathroom, locked the door, pressed my hands against the counter, and breathed until the shaking stopped.
The nausea was worse in the mornings but it didn't respect a schedule.
Tuesday afternoon I was mid-cut, scissors in my hand, when the room tilted.
I set the scissors down, excused myself with a smile, and made it to the bathroom with four seconds to spare.
When I came back my client was checking her phone, unbothered.
"Stomach thing going around," I said. She nodded.
I picked up the scissors and my hands were perfectly steady and the lie was becoming easier than the truth.
I stopped drinking coffee because the smell made me gag.
Switched to peppermint tea and told my father it was a health kick.
He looked at me the way he looked at everything, with that thorough attention that missed nothing.
I held my face still. Waited. He shrugged.
Went back to his paper. Each time I survived one of these moments, the relief lasted shorter. The dread lasted longer.
My jeans stopped fitting in the fifth week. Not visibly, not to anyone looking, but the button sat differently and the waistband pressed where it hadn't pressed before. I bought new ones a size up from a store in Kalispell where nobody knew my face.
Sunday afternoon and it was a barbecue at the Jackals clubhouse.
Jackals everywhere, kids running through the lot, old ladies laughing on the porch.
One of the brothers' wives was six months pregnant, her belly round under a sundress.
The brothers clapped her husband on the back.
My father raised his beer from across the yard.
More family. More blood. More Jackals being built.
I stood on the porch with a plate I hadn't touched and watched the pregnant woman across the yard.
She was laughing, one hand resting on her belly, her husband's arm around her shoulders while the brothers talked bikes, routes, the comfortable business of men who knew exactly where they belonged.
Her pregnancy was public, celebrated, uncomplicated.
She'd told her husband in their kitchen.
He'd picked her up. Spun her. The club had thrown them this barbecue. That's what family did.
I pressed my thumb against the edge of the paper plate until it dented. Her pregnancy was sunlight. Mine was a bomb. They were celebrating. I was concealing.
Nita came and stood beside me. She was my father's sergeant-at-arms' wife, a woman built from practical warmth and an instinct for reading people that rivaled my father's. She handed me a bottle of water without being asked.
"You're not eating," she said.
"Not hungry."
She looked at me. Looked at the water she'd just put in my hand instead of a beer. The assessment was happening. Maternal radar picking up signals I couldn't control. My stomach dropped.
"Heat getting to you?" she asked.
"Yeah." I took a sip. "Think I'll head out early."
She watched me walk to my car. I could feel her eyes on my back the whole way and I didn't breathe until I'd turned the corner.
They were celebrating. More legacy. More loyalty. The next generation, growing inside a woman who belonged in this world completely, who'd chosen it freely, whose child would be born into it without complication.
The secret inside me burned so hot I was amazed nobody could feel it.
I left the barbecue early. Drove back to my apartment and sat in the dark kitchen with a glass of water I didn't drink.
The silence in the apartment was different from the silence at my father's house.
My father's silence was warm, inhabited, the warmth of a man who filled a room even when he wasn't speaking.
This was just absence. The emptiness of a woman sitting alone with a truth she couldn't share.
I started talking to the baby. Not out loud, not at first. In my head, at night, lying in the dark with my hand on my stomach.
I told it about its father. The quiet VP in the bar with the pale eyes, a man who had fought for our country and then chosen a different life.
I told it about its grandfather, about the Iron Jackals, about Forsaken and the mountains and the highway that connected everything.
I told it that I was scared. That I didn't know what was going to happen.
That I loved it already, fiercely, with a protectiveness that felt like a door slamming shut around us both.
I thought about Ghost every night.
His hands on my body, his mouth on mine in that corridor.
The sound he'd made when he came, rough, unguarded, the most honest sound I'd ever heard from a man who lived behind walls.
The way he'd tried to hide his face against my neck and I'd grabbed his jaw and turned it back.
The way he'd let me. The way that yielding had told me more about him than conversation ever could.
I didn't know him, not really. A handful of hours, one night, and now his child was growing inside me. I didn't know his real name, his history, what he looked like when he slept. Whether he'd want this. Whether he'd want me.
He might walk away and he had every reason to. The enemy president's daughter, pregnant. It wasn't a complication. It was a detonation.
Or he might look at me the way he had in that corridor. Like I was the first real thing he'd seen in years.
Three weeks after the test, I sat at my kitchen table at midnight. A glass of water in front of me, a silence around me that only existed when you'd run out of ways to avoid the truth.
I could hide it. Loose shirts, careful angles, a few months of grace before my body made the announcement my mouth couldn't. I could leave town. Disappear. Start somewhere nobody knew my name.
But my father would tear the state apart looking for me. Ghost would never know he had a child. And I'd spend the rest of my life carrying a secret heavier than any truth.
I didn't run from things. I was my father's daughter, and whatever else that meant, it meant I looked people in the eye and said what needed saying, even when it cost everything.
Ghost had a right to know.
The decision came slowly, over two days, the way water settles into ground. No flash of courage. Just the steady stubbornness of a woman who'd examined every option and rejected the ones that required her to be less than she was.
On Saturday morning after doing some jobs around the clubhouse. I told my father I was running some errands. Another half-truth to add to the growing pile.
The drive took forty minutes. I'd made the drive to the Forsaken Angels place twice before. The first time with Sarah, oblivious, bringing me to the edge of a cliff she didn't know was there. The second time alone, with my keys in my hand, and choosing to jump.
This time I was carrying Ghost’s child and the weight of two clubs on my shoulders. I wasn't jumping. I was walking to the edge with my eyes open because standing there looking over the edge forever was no longer a life I could accept.
I pulled into the lot at Angel's Rest. Turned off the engine and sat with my hands on the wheel.
Then I got out and walked inside.