Epilogue 2
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— Austen —
Six months later
An hour to open, and for once there was nothing left to do.
The Wickham used to make industrial fans.
Good bones, hundred-year-old brick, a tin ceiling I’d had stripped back to bare metal, a row of factory windows I’d left exactly as I’d found them.
I walked the floor slow, the way I had every night that week, touching things that didn’t need touching.
Nudged a stool that was already square to the bar.
Ran a cloth down all eight feet of black walnut—cut from a single slab, near-black, more money than I’d strictly had, because I’d fallen in love with it.
The Edison bulbs were already lit and strung low.
The cocktail list I’d been writing in my head for eight years sat printed, stacked, and exactly right.
I checked the bottles, the garnishes, the glassware, the till—and then I checked all of it again, and a third time after that, not because anything was out of place but because tonight was the only opening night this room would ever get, and I wanted it to be perfect.
On the back shelf, between the good rye and the better gin, sat a row of battered paperback novels about manners—Tyler’s copies from when he sat at Velvet. I’d shelved them there as a private joke. I straightened those, too.
I’d named it The Wickham—part my surname, part the charming, faithless, ruinous villain of the only book my parents ever agreed was worth teaching. The kind of joke a family of literature professors raises you to make.
“Austen.”
I looked up when I heard Derek call my name. He’d come through the front of the bar fast—and Derek doesn’t go anywhere fast. Derek drifts, Derek glides; in all the years I’d known him I’d never once seen him hurry.
“You need to come to the door. Right now.” He pulled in a breath. “Your biker’s here. And he’s brought his friends.”
The place was ready. I was ready. I’d given myself this last hour on purpose—to walk it and breathe it and not have to manage a single thing—and I wasn’t eager to spend it on whatever had Derek running.
“Derek. We open in an hour. I don’t have time for whatever—”
“It’s not a-. It’s a—” He gave up on the sentence. “Just come. Trust me. You’re going to want to see this.”
I set down the cloth and went to the door.
I felt it before I heard it.
It came up through the floor first—through the soles of my feet and the old glass in the factory windows—before it ever reached my ears. A lot of engines, close and getting closer.
When I got to the door I looked left and there they were.
Dozens of bikes, coming up the street toward The Wickham.
Venom Riders MC, in formation—two by two, tight, no daylight between them—Dutch at the front, and Tyler, who’d been up my ladder forty minutes ago hanging a bulb and had slipped out the back swearing he was going for ice, riding at his right hand.
“Told you,” Derek said, beside me. “I have never in my life been so glad I happened to be facing a window.”
They didn’t stop in front of the bar. They rolled past it, slow, the whole long column, until Dutch and Tyler had drawn just beyond the bar.
“What are they doing?”
“I genuinely could not tell you,” Derek replied. “But it’s exciting.”
Dutch lifted one arm. Held his fist up in the air.
The bikes stopped. Engines down to a growl.
Then a small flick of that fist, upward—and every visor in the line went up at once. One motion.
“Oh,” Derek said softly. “Oh, that’s choreographed. That’s been rehearsed.”
Dutch turned his head toward me and dropped his fist.
“AUSTEN,” the bikers all shouted. Then again — “AUSTEN.” Then a third time, and on the third the engines came up underneath it, every throttle rolled at once.
“I’m going to need you to keep it together,” Derek murmured.
Dutch lifted two fingers off the grip. The visors came down—one motion, again—and he rolled his hand forward, and the whole column pulled off down the street and was gone.
“Holy shit,” Derek whispered.
Holy shit was right.
My pulse was going like I’d sprinted the block. Forty bikes had shut down my street, shouted my name.
And Tyler had organized it. Tyler. Dutch would have had to bless it—nothing like that rolls without Dutch—but the execution of it, that was Tyler. It was, hands down, the most exciting thing anyone had ever done for me. Wow didn’t cover it.
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We opened the doors at five. By six The Wickham was full—three deep at the bar, every table turned, the Edison bulbs throwing the whole room gold—and I stood in the middle of the thing I’d spent eight years building and ran the best service of my life.
Venom came out in force. They’d left the cuts at home—clean shirts—but you could still pick a Venom Rider out of any crowd by the way it parted to let him through. Dutch and Indira were at a table, Maya asleep against her mother’s shoulder the way only a clubhouse baby can sleep.
By eight there were people dancing between the tables who had absolutely no business dancing, and I let them, because it was my floor and my rules and tonight the rule was yes.
My parents had flown in from Vermont. My father has tenure, three degrees, and a lifelong policy against using the word proud in any sentence concerning his children.
He didn’t say much. He walked the whole eight feet of the bar, ran one hand down the walnut the entire length of it, and stopped at the sign.
“The Wickham,” he said. “Charming, faithless, ruins everything, and people line up to buy him a drink regardless.” He took in the roaring, packed room.
“I always said he’d make a marvelous bar.
” Then he spotted the shelf—the row of battered novels wedged between the rye and the gin—and his whole face opened. “Are those novels?”
“Decor.”
“Those are someone’s reading copies.” He leaned in, delighted, a man who could spot a loved book at forty paces. “Whose?”
“Long story.”
My mother, meanwhile, had Jamie backed against the stockroom door, interrogating him about our distributor with the focus of a woman taking a deposition.
The markup on the house gin. Who negotiated it?
Does she sleep? Jamie’s face begged me, over her shoulder, for rescue.
I let him drown a little. It builds character.
Emma facetimed from Chicago. I carried the phone around the room so my lawyer sister could see what I’d made of myself, and she went quiet. “Wait. Is that him? Behind your bar?”
“That’s him.”
“Huh,” she said, and left it there.
I’d staffed the night properly. I didn’t need anybody.
But Jamie hit the weeds around nine the way you do—the bar four deep, tickets stacking—and before I could even cross to help, Tyler was already through the gap in the bar with his sleeves shoved up, and Fewin was beside him, Fewin who’d come in on his own night off and planted himself behind my bar.
“Just here to help, boss,” Fewin said, already building two Old Fashioneds. “Place looks incredible, by the way. The ceiling. Did you do the ceiling?”
“She did all of it,” Tyler said, not looking up, stirring. “Don’t get her started on the ceiling, we’ll be here till close.”
And then I just watched him for a second, because I could.
He’s good. All those months of him at my bar learning my entire pour spec while I thought he was reading about manners.
He stirred, he didn’t shake. He let the number land last. He built a Manhattan I would put my own name on.
And his sleeves were up, and there it was, the thing I still hadn’t gotten used to and was in no hurry to.
My name. All over him.
Every one of those ridiculous pin-up girls I’d traced in the dark a lifetime ago carried it now—in a banner, along a hip, tucked in a corner. And under the shirt, plain, no banner, over his heart, where I get to put my hand on it. And on the back of the cut hanging in our house: Property of Austen.
I love it. I love that the man who spent his whole life making sure no woman could say she owned him now walks around with me written into every inch of his skin, where the whole club can read it.
“You arranged the bikes,” I said, when I finally got a second next to him behind the bar.
“Don’t know what you mean. I was getting ice.”
“Tyler.”
“Couldn’t say.” He passed two glasses across to Jamie without looking. “Dutch likes a parade. You’d have to ask him.”
“Forty men flipped their visors up on a hand signal. That’s not Dutch liking a parade. That’s formation practice in a parking lot.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.” He finally looked at me, and there it was, the boyish grin, the one that started all of this trouble at a wedding, back when I told him my name was Ruby. “I was getting ice, Austen. Ask anybody.”
“Hey.” He nudged a fresh Manhattan across the walnut to me, mine, made to my own spec in my own bar. “Drink your drink, boss. It’s a good night.”