Chapter 2 #3
But here's what I catch, in the half-second before the shutter comes all the way down: her eyes go to the sketchbook in her own hands one more time, fast, like she can't help it, like she's checking that the drawings are still real.
People don't look twice at a thing that means nothing to them.
You glance at nothing once and forget it.
You glance back at the thing you're trying to talk yourself out of.
I've spent my whole life reading the small involuntary tells people don't know they're giving — it's the one skill the streets handed me that I'm not ashamed of — and that double-glance at a book full of drawings of herself is the loudest thing she's said all afternoon.
She wants to keep looking. She's making herself stop.
And the cold she pulls down over her face isn't the truth; it's the lid she's putting on the truth, and a lid is only ever proof there's something underneath worth covering.
I file it the way she taught me to file everything. I leave the right things out. I don't say a word about the double-glance. I just take the dismissal, and the thing inside the dismissal, and I carry both of them out into the afternoon.
"Thursday," I say.
I drive back to the compound. I scrub the bays.
I run an errand for Dominic that takes three hours and a tank of gas.
I take a turn on watch that night and I stand in the cold by the gate with my breath fogging and the sketchbook a warm weight against my ribs, and I think about the way she held it to her chest before she gave it back.
Rhett finds me out there around midnight.
He's got two coffees and he hands me one without asking, which is the most words Rhett ever says.
He's older, scarred, the kind of quiet that comes from a life that earned it.
He went through something once that the club only references sideways — a woman he wasn't supposed to want, a long time ago, before my time.
"You're not sleeping," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You're working yourself to the bone in the day and standing watch you don't have to take at night and you've got that sketchbook welded to your side." He sips his coffee. "I've seen this before. Hell, I've been this before."
I don't say anything. The denial isn't worth the breath.
"Here's the only thing I know," Rhett says, watching the dark road.
"If it's real, it won't go away. Doesn't matter how hard you work or how far you ride.
It'll be there in the morning, every morning, waiting.
" He drains the cup. "And if it's not real, prospect duty'll kill it inside a month.
So you've got your answer either way. You just have to be honest about which one it is. "
I should leave it there. Rhett's not a man who invites follow-up questions. But the cold and the dark and the sketchbook against my ribs make me reckless. "The one you wanted," I say. "The one you weren't supposed to. What happened?"
Rhett's quiet so long I think I've overstepped, that I'm about to learn exactly how much it costs to ask Rhett a question.
Then he says, to the road, not to me: "I did the math.
Same math you're doing — I can see you doing it, kid, you do it with your whole face.
I ran the numbers and the numbers said walk away, so I walked away.
Did the smart thing. Protected the patch, protected the club, protected everybody.
" He turns the empty cup in his scarred hands.
"That was nineteen years ago. The numbers were right.
It cost me nothing. The patch, the club, all of it — intact.
Never lost a thing." A long breath fogs out into the dark.
"Except I think about her every single day.
Nineteen years. The one time the math was right and I listened to it, and it's the only thing in my whole life I'd take back. "
He doesn't say anything else. He doesn't have to.
It's the most words I've ever heard out of Rhett and probably the most I ever will, and he didn't say them to teach me a lesson, exactly — Rhett doesn't do lessons.
He said them because I asked, and because some debts you pay forward to whoever's standing watch in the cold doing the same math you got wrong.
He claps me on the shoulder and goes back inside.
I stand watch till dawn. I think about whether it's real, and I think about a man who did the smart thing nineteen years ago and has regretted it every morning since, and I think about the difference between a math that keeps you alive and a math that just keeps you safe, and how those aren't the same thing, and how I spent seven years confusing them.
It's real. It was real the day she put her hand on my hand and told me to draw from the shoulder. It was real before that, probably, but that's the day I stopped being able to pretend.
The sun comes up over the breakwater the way it comes up in my drawings, low and gold across the water, and I watch it the way she taught me — not the light, the things the light touches — and I think: I'm in so much trouble.
And then I think about Thursday, and her hand on my stiff hand, and the green bottle that wished someone would pick it up.
And God help me, I can't make myself wish it would go away.