He Left Me For The Club's Girl (The Sins of an Outlaw #1)

PROLOGUE

Dax — September 6

The hallway in the Rochelle house is forty feet long and I count every one of them.

I know it is forty because I paced it out the first time I came here, back when I still thought a man could win an argument with Auguste Rochelle.

Twenty feet of oak from the stairs to the window.

Twenty more from the window to the last door on the left.

Somebody put a runner down the middle of it, red, worn thin in a straight line by sixty years of people walking toward something they should have turned around and walked away from.

I am going to be one of them. I know that too.

The house is quiet the way a house gets when it has been told to be quiet.

Downstairs there was music and there were men with drinks in their hands and there was Auguste at the head of the table talking about shrimp season like a man who has never once in his life cared about shrimp.

Up here there is nothing. A clock somewhere.

The hum of a window unit fighting the September heat and losing.

Nine hundred a week.

That is the first number. That is what the route puts in my hand every week the boats run clean, and that is only my end, only the Road Captain’s cut, and it is nothing next to what the club takes and nothing next to what the club could take if Rochelle stopped squeezing.

Nine hundred a week is what I make now. Eleven years riding.

Eleven years since I prospected under my own father, which was its own particular kind of hell, and nine hundred a week is where the arithmetic sits.

Sundown makes eighteen. Because he is VP and because he sits in a chair I have been circling since I was twenty-two.

Ten feet.

I am not drunk. I want to write that down somewhere so that later, when I am trying to explain this to myself, I cannot lie about it. Two beers in four hours. My hands are steady. I could put a bike through a two-foot gap right now and not scuff a boot.

Fifteen.

Camille Doucet weighed maybe one seventy.

He went into the water off the end of the Ardeen dock six weeks ago and he did not fight it, which is the part that stayed with me.

He asked me twice if he could talk to Deuce and I told him twice that he was talking to Deuce, and he understood what that meant and he stopped asking.

He said, tell my mother it was the boat.

That was all. Tell my mother it was the boat.

I told his mother it was the boat.

Then I rode to Sabine’s house with the river still on my hands and she took my jacket off me at the door like she always does, and she put her face in my neck and she did not ask.

She never asks. She fills the sink and she washes her hands and mine in the same water and she talks about a gearbox, about a man at the yard who does not know what he is doing, about her brother, about anything, and she lets me stand in her kitchen and be quiet until I am a person again.

She forgave that. She did not know she was forgiving it, but she forgave it, because a woman who does not ask has decided in advance what she is willing to carry.

That is the arithmetic too. That is the worst of it.

Twenty feet. The window. Outside there is nothing to see except the drive and the cars and one of Auguste’s men standing by the gate smoking, the coal of it going bright and dull, bright and dull, like something breathing.

I put my hand on the sill because I want to stop.

I want that on the record as well. I want somebody to know that I stood at that window with my palm flat on painted wood and I thought about the stairs behind me and the door in front of me and I understood, completely, with no fog on it at all, what each one cost.

The stairs cost me the gavel.

That is not dramatic. That is just true.

Auguste said it three weeks ago with a glass in his hand and his voice pleasant, and he did not say it as a threat because Auguste does not need threats.

He said a contract with a club is worth nothing.

He said a club votes, and a vote can be unvoted, and a president dies and the next one has ideas.

He said a contract with a family is worth everything, because family does not vote.

And he said, whatever else, it has to be the man who will hold the gavel. There is no point tying myself to a passenger.

So that is what is behind me. Twenty feet of oak, then stairs, then the drive, then the bike, then the road home, and at the end of that road my father saying the route is dead, and Sundown saying it out loud at the table with everybody listening,

and me at thirty-two years old still being the president’s son and never once the president.

I know exactly what my father is worth. Thibault Landry has held that gavel for nineteen years and there is not a man at that table who would meet his eye if he raised his voice, and he has raised it maybe four times in my life.

He did not have to. He built the water. Sixty miles of it, from the ship channel out past the shoals, and there is not a hull that moves through it without his say.

And at church he sat with his hands flat on the wood and he said, no man gets voted into a bed. He said it flat. He got up and he walked out and he left it in the room with the rest of us, and that is the part nobody is going to believe afterwards.

He did not order me here.

Nobody ordered me here. Not Deuce, not Sundown, not Bones.

There is no motion on any minute book. There was no vote and no hand raised and no brother who took me aside in the yard and told me what needed doing for the good of the club.

If there had been, I would have something.

I would have a thing to hold up later and say, look, look what they made me do, and men would nod because men understand orders.

I have nothing to hold up.

I am standing in a hallway in Auguste Rochelle’s house on my own two legs because I did the arithmetic myself and the arithmetic came out one way and I did not like the other answer.

Thirty feet.

There is a hall table with a bowl on it and no keys in the bowl.

There is a photograph on the wall of a girl about nine years old holding a redfish nearly as long as she is, and she is not smiling, she is looking at the camera like she is being asked to prove something.

Odette. Somebody taught that girl young that being looked at is a transaction.

She read me in under a minute the first time I met her.

She poured my drink and she told me the club was going to lose the route because it had nothing her father wanted except promises, and then she told me Veracruz had started calling.

She was not flirting. She was briefing me, the way you brief a man you have already decided is going to be useful, and I rode home unsettled and could not work out whether it was her or what she had said.

It was what she had said. I know that now. It is not the worst thing about tonight but it is close, because it means I cannot even claim I wanted her.

Thirty-five.

Four years in July. Sabine came out from under the Marie Delphine with grease to her elbows and a bolt in her teeth and she looked at me and took the bolt out and said, you are standing in my light, and that was it. That was the whole thing. Four years.

She has never worn my name on her back. She told me why once, in her own kitchen, no heat in it at all.

She said her father did not raise her to be anybody’s paperwork.

She said, I will stand next to you and I will not be a document.

And I said I did not need my name on her back to know what she was, and I meant it.

I still mean it, right now, forty feet down a hallway from a door I am about to knock on.

She will forgive this.

There it is. That is the number I have been circling since I came up the stairs.

Because she has forgiven everything else.

Because I have come to her with the river on my hands and she has washed them without a word.

Because she knew what I was when she picked me up out of my own light on a shrimp boat, and she chose it, and a woman who chooses that has already agreed to a certain amount of arithmetic.

It will be bad for a while. She will be quiet in the way that is worse than shouting.

Then she will come around, because she always comes around, because I am the thing she has decided to carry.

I will tell her it was for the route.

I will tell her Auguste squeezed, and the boats were stopping, and Fry and Bones and Theo and every man on that table has kids and notes and trucks, and that if the water dies, Port Ardeen dies, and I will say it standing in her kitchen with my hands open, and it will not be a lie exactly.

It will be a shape that is not true.

And she will listen to me with her arms folded and her hip against the counter and she will let me finish, and then she will forgive me, because she is tired, and because she loves me, and because I have never once in four years given her a reason to think I would count her against anything.

That is the arithmetic. That is all of it, laid out on the table.

Nine hundred a week against eighteen. My father’s gavel against a chair at the low end. A dead route against a live one. A woman who will forgive me against a man who will not.

I stand there and I run it again to see if it comes out different.

It does not.

Thirty-eight feet.

There is light under the door. A thin line of it, warm, and the shadow of somebody moving inside, unhurried, not waiting up but not asleep either. She knows. Of course she knows. Auguste will have told her the way he tells her everything, which is not as a request.

Two women in this arithmetic and neither one of them was asked.

I think about that for exactly as long as it takes to breathe out.

Later there is going to be a version of tonight where I did not have a choice.

I can already see the shape of it, sitting there ready for me, and I know I am going to reach for it.

In a week I will say the club needed it.

In a month I will say Rochelle forced my hand.

In a year I will say it so smoothly that I will hear my own voice and believe it.

But I am here now, on this side of the door, and nobody is watching, and there is nothing between me and the truth of it.

I want the gavel.

I want to walk into that chapel and have the room go quiet because I came in.

I want my father to look at me one time and see something other than a boy he had to make room for.

I want the eleven years to have bought something.

I want to stop being Deuce Landry’s son and start being the man who saved the water, and I have found a way to buy all of it in one night, and the price is a woman who will forgive me.

That is what I am. Right here, in this hallway, before anything has happened. I have already done it. The door is a formality.

Forty feet.

The door is white and the paint on the frame has been touched up badly, and there is a mark at hand height where somebody has pushed it open a thousand times with the same hand in the same place.

Downstairs somebody laughs, and it carries up the stairwell and gets thin, and then it is gone.

I lift my hand.

I want to say something happened in that half second.

I want to say I heard her voice, or I saw Sabine’s face, or my hand stopped on its own and something in me stood up and refused.

That is how it goes in the stories, and there is going to be a long time later when I try to put it there, because a man can live with a moment he almost took back.

Nothing happened.

My hand went up and it stayed up and there was no weight in it at all.

I knock.

The light under the door changes. Footsteps, unhurried. The handle turns and the shadow moves and the line of warm light widens across the worn red runner and reaches the toe of my boot.

And that is the last minute of my life where I am a man who still has her.