13. Weston
Weston
My phone goes off.
It's in my jacket pocket on the chair behind us, the vibration of it audible in the quiet kitchen.
Monique pulls back first, just slightly, her hands still at my collar, her forehead almost against mine. We both look at the jacket.
It stops.
Her eyes come back to mine.
It goes off again.
She steps back, gets the phone, and looks at it. Her whole face changes. She turns it toward me.
Iris.
I take my phone. "Hey."
"Hey." Iris's voice is too level. Too careful. She uses this tone when she's working to sound fine, but isn't. "I need you."
"Yes. What's wrong?"
A sound in the background, something sharp, indistinct. "Can you come get me?" A beat. "Please. I'm outside a club, The Mooring, on Thames — "
The call cuts. Or she ends it. I can't tell which.
I'm already reaching for my keys.
The drive is forty minutes back toward the city, and we do it in thirty-five. Monique sits in the passenger seat, her eyes on the road, and neither of us mentions the kitchen or the table or the quiet of the house behind us.
The coast road is dark, and I take the turns faster than I should.
"Weston, she's okay," Monique says.
"I hope so," I say back.
Neither of us fully believes it, and we drive.
The club is on a side street with a narrow entrance, a dwindling late-night line, bass through the walls.
Iris is on the sidewalk outside, jaw set, her arms rigid at her sides. She's past crying now, hardened into something colder and quieter.
Beckett stands just a few feet from her, his hand still grabbing her arm, his voice low and urgent. The moment I see it, tension snakes up the back of my neck.
I get out of the car.
Iris sees me first and lifts her chin.
Beckett turns and releases her arm. He's composed, already arranging his expression into something measured. When he speaks, his voice is calibrated to land as reasonable.
"Weston."
"Get away from her." I hold his eyes and walk toward them.
I stop when I see Monique in my peripheral vision.
She's flinched.
Not startled, just caught off guard. This is different.
Her right shoulder has pulled in and up, her chin dropped a quarter inch, her weight shifted back onto her left foot before she's caught herself and gone still. It happens in under a second.
Beckett steps back three feet from Iris with his palms out.
Monique's body didn't wait to find out if he was going to. She's looking at Iris, jaw level, expression flat.
I walk over, drape my jacket across her shoulders, and say, “Let’s go.”
Beckett says, "We were just talking — "
"I don’t need your opinion." I look at him, keeping my voice calm.
There's no point raising your voice when dismissing him works better; my father taught me that, and his father before him, and it's one of the few things I've actually kept. "Good night."
I put my arm around Iris's shoulders and steer her toward the car without looking back.
She doesn't speak on the drive. She sits in the back seat with her head against the window and her eyes on the dark outside it.
I drive, and Monique sits in the passenger seat.
We get back at an hour that barely feels like night anymore. The site office light is still on.
Iris gets out of the car and looks at the main house and then at me. Her eyes are dry, but the tension is still there, gathered in her jaw.
"Can I just…" She stops.
"Bed's made up in the site office," I say. "I'll be right here."
She nods once and goes.
Standing in the gravel for a moment, I watch the site office door close and listen to the coast, the low sound of it in the dark, and then I go inside.
Monique is in the kitchen. She's put the kettle on, and she's standing at the counter with her arms loose at her sides and her back to me. I can see the set of her shoulders.
She turns when she hears me come in.
"She'll be all right," she says.
"I know." I lean against the doorframe. "That wasn't the first time."
Monique is quiet.
"With Beckett," I say. "That wasn't the first time something like that has happened. She was helpless when we got there…she already knew what he was doing to her.”
She looks at the kettle.
"Monique, I saw you flinch."
Her hands come up and wrap around each other on the counter.
Pulling out a chair, I sit down. I want her to be able to look at me without having to look up.
"Has anyone ever hit you?" I ask.
The kettle begins its low hum. She looks at it for a moment, then looks at me.
Her eyes go somewhere just past the surface — somewhere I can't follow, somewhere behind her own face. She stays there for a beat, and then two, and then she comes back.
"My father," she says.
That's all. Two words, flat and simple, set on the table between us like something she's been carrying in a pocket for a long time.
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say that wouldn’t be less than what she just gave me, and I know better than to reach for less. I sit in the chair, look at her, keep my hands flat on the table, and breathe.
Iris at thirteen, hands flat at her sides in the funeral home corridor.
Not the same. Not even close. But it reminds me of what it feels like to fail someone you’re supposed to protect, even when there was never anything you could’ve done. I’ve been carrying that since we lost our parents.
The kettle clicks off.
Monique pours two mugs without asking. She sets one in front of me and keeps the other in her hands.
She sits down across from me, close.
"Was that…" I pause and touch the back of my neck. "The night we met. Were you running from him?"
She looks at her mug. Her thumb moves once on the ceramic. "Yes." She sighs. “I’ve had a very sad life growing up, Wes.”
The house creaks once, the low sound of a structure settling.
The night I saw her sitting on that bench, her bag strapped tight across her chest, was probably the night she ran from her father. At the time, I’d thought that was just how she wore it. Now I understand why someone wears a bag that way.
Something in my chest has gone very quiet. Not the good kind of quiet.
I stand up.
Her hands are still wrapped around the mug. I go around the table and crouch in front of her so my eyes are below hers, resting my hands on her forearms.
Looking into her eyes, I hold her hands. "Listen, I don’t want to see you like this. I don’t want you to be afraid."
She looks at me, tears gathering along her lower lashes.
"If he comes near you again," I say. "Or anyone like him. I want you to know how to break a grip."
Her chin comes up. "Weston…”
"I'm not doing this because I think you can't handle yourself." I keep my voice level. "I'm doing it because I want you to have it. That's different."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she stands.
After I roll up my sleeves, I take her wrist gently in my hand. I show her the weak point in any grip — the thumb. Fingers can hold through pressure, but the thumb gives way to rotation. Toward the thumb, not away from it.
I demonstrate once on my own wrist so she can see how it works.
"Try it," I say, taking her wrist again.
She tries. Her first attempt goes in the wrong direction, and I redirect her without letting go. Her second attempt is correct, and my grip breaks.
She steps back, slightly surprised.
"Again," I say.
She gets it on the third try, then the fourth and fifth, faster each time. The movement stops being something she’s thinking through and starts becoming a reflex her body knows.
Good. That’s what it needs to be.
I show her the punch next. Not from the arm but from the floor, through the hip, up through the shoulder.
Standing behind her, I put my hand briefly at her hip to adjust the angle of her stance. She doesn't pull away; she just adjusts her weight the way I'm asking her to.
I step back.
"Try it," I say.
She throws the punch. It's better than the first one. She throws it again without being asked, and it's better still. The weight comes up from the floor through her whole body, and I watch her do it.
The mugs have gone cold. I pick mine up and drink it.
Monique stands at the counter and looks at her own hands for a moment like she's checking that they're the same hands they were an hour ago.
Crossing to her, I put my hand to the side of her face, my thumb along her cheekbone, and she goes still. I press my lips to her forehead and hold them there for a moment.
Then I take my hand back and step away. "Get some sleep," I say. "I'll take the couch."
I'm two steps toward the door when she says, "Stay."
I stop.
The kitchen is quiet for a beat. The one word is still in the room.
I turn around.
She's standing at the counter with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes on me. Her face is open, and she says it again, quieter, "Stay."
I cross back to her without hesitating.
There’s a room at the back of the house with a bed and two windows facing the water.
I pull the blanket back, and she sits on the edge of the mattress for a second before easing her legs up and pulling the blanket over herself, still in her clothes.
Sitting on the bed, I wait while she shifts onto her side. When she finally turns toward me, I lie down too.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. Then I slide an arm around her, and she moves a little closer, fitting herself into the space as if she’d already decided it was hers.
Her head rests against my chest.
I lie there in the dark and listen to the coast. Her breathing slows.
Outside the windows, the water is dark, and the gravel of the site is pale in the moonlight. I’m lying in the back room of an unfinished house with a woman I’ve been waiting for.
Her breathing has gone even and slow, and she's asleep.
I don't sleep for a long time.
I lie there and think about the flinch outside the club — the shoulder pulling in, the weight going back, the body that didn't wait to find out if the threat was real.
I've spent years being the person who handles things, and I'm lying here in the dark unable to separate that curve of her shoulder from the fear that drove it.
She's asleep against my arm, and it is the most right I have felt in a decade.