Chapter 5
Freya
I go to talk to Theo before Friday, because I've decided that if I'm going to jump off a cliff I'd at least like to know how far down the water is.
I don't tell him about Kieran. I'm not stupid, and I'm not ready, and there isn't anything yet to tell — one held hand, one almost, one Friday on the calendar that hasn't happened.
What I want from Theo isn't permission. It's information.
I want to know exactly what I'm standing on before I step off it.
I find him at the compound on a Sunday, in the bay, half under a bike with only his boots showing.
The whole place smells like the world I grew up in — oil and metal and old leather and the particular sweetness of two-stroke smoke — and it does what it always does to me, which is make me both achingly homesick and absolutely certain I was right to leave.
That contradiction has been the whole story of my life with this place.
I love it and I can't live in it. I miss it and it suffocates me.
Every time I drive through the gate some animal part of me relaxes — home, safe, mine — and then about ninety seconds later the walls start coming in, the unspoken rules, the careful way the men go quiet around the women, the sense of being precious and powerless at the same time, a thing they'd all die to protect and none of them would think to ask.
I spent my twenties learning that you can be homesick for a cage.
That the missing is real and the leaving was still right.
That both of those can be true and you just have to carry them, one in each hand, for the rest of your life.
I'm carrying them now, walking across the bay toward my brother's boots, about to ask him a question that's really about whether I'm allowed to want something the cage was built to keep me from.
"Got a minute?" I say.
The boots go still. He rolls out from under the bike on the creeper, wiping his hands on a rag, and looks up at me with our father's eyes, which are also my eyes, which is the whole problem with this family. "For you? Always."
The word lands wrong. I just heard it from someone else, with a different weight, and hearing it in Theo's mouth makes me flinch in a way he catches, because he catches everything.
"What," he says, sitting up.
"I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually hear it before you do the thing where your face turns to a wall."
"My face doesn't —"
"Theo." I sit down on the bench across from him.
"I'm thirty years old. I run my own business.
I own a building. I have not asked you for help with anything since I was twenty-two, and I'd like to keep that record intact.
So I'm going to say something and I need you to hear it as a fact, not a fight. "
He sets the rag down. The wall's already coming up; I can see it building behind his eyes, brick by brick. "Okay."
"My romantic life is mine. Completely. Whoever I choose, whenever I choose them, however close they are to your world — that's my decision, and I need you to respect it. Not approve it. Respect it. There's a difference."
The silence goes on a beat too long.
"Who," Theo says.
"That's not the question. The question is whether you can respect —"
"Who, Freya."
"No one." I hold his stare. I've held it since I was six; I'm not about to lose now. "Yet. I'm asking you in principle. Hypothetically."
Theo Katsaros has interrogated men who do this for a living.
He has sat across from people who lie professionally and made them weep the truth.
He looks at me now with that exact stillness, the enforcer stillness, the one that makes grown men confess to things they didn't even do, and I hold it, because I'm the one person on this earth it's never worked on, because I learned the trick of it in the same crib he did.
"It's the prospect," he says.
It's not a question. I don't answer it. My silence is its own answer and we both know it and I refuse to give him the satisfaction of the word.
"Kieran." He says the name flat, and then something happens to his face that's worse than anger. It's hurt. Quick, and buried fast, but I saw it. "I pulled him out of a hole. I put my name on him. In front of Dominic, in front of the table. My name. And you're telling me —"
"I'm telling you nothing. I'm telling you in principle."
"In principle." He stands up. He's bigger than me, he's always been bigger than me, and he's never once used it and he doesn't now, but he uses the only weapon he's ever allowed himself, which is the wall.
"Here's my principle. If it's Kieran — if it's him — he loses his patch.
Day one. He's done as a prospect, done at the table, done in this town. That's my principle."
And there it is. The bottom of the cliff. I came for information and I got it, cold and clear.
"That's not your call," I say. My voice is very steady. I'm proud of how steady it is. "Prospect status is the president's. That's Dominic's call. Not yours."
"I'll make it my call." He says it quietly, which is how I know he means it.
"I'll go to Dominic and I'll tell him my prospect can't keep a single boundary I set, that I told him on day one and he stepped over it anyway, and Dominic will agree with me, because a man who'll cross his sponsor will cross anyone.
That's not a grudge, Freya. That's the actual logic of the patch.
You earn it by proving you can be trusted with the things you're told. And he was told."
I stand up too. We're a foot apart, the same blood, the same stubborn jaw, the same impossible love that's been a cage my whole life.
"He didn't step over anything," I say. "Whatever's happening, I'm the one who let him in.
I offered the lessons. I closed the distance.
If you want to punish someone for crossing a line, punish me, except you can't, because I don't have a patch for you to take, because I built a life where you have nothing to hold over me. Funny how that works."
"Freya —"
"And if you force this —" My voice cracks and I let it, because I want him to hear it crack, I want him to know the cost. "If you take his patch over me, if you make him choose between the only family he's ever had and the woman he —" I stop.
I won't finish that sentence; it's not mine to finish yet.
"If you do that, Theo, you don't lose him.
You lose me. I'll respect your right to run your club.
You respect my right to run my life. And if you can't, then I'm done visiting the tower.
I mean it. I'll love you from a distance and I'll never set foot in this compound again. "
The wall holds. But behind it, something gives. I've known this man my whole life, and I see the exact moment the hurt and the principle and the love all collide in him and produce nothing he can say.
"You'd really choose him over family," he says. It's almost a whisper.
"I'm not choosing him over family. I'm choosing me over the cage.
He's just the first thing I've wanted badly enough to fight you for.
" I pick up my bag. "There's a difference.
There's always a difference. You taught me that, actually.
You're the one who said the patch isn't about obedience, it's about earning trust. Well, I'm thirty years old. When do I get to be trusted?"
He doesn't answer.
"You know what the worst part is?" I'm at the doorway now, and it comes out of me before I can stop it, the thing I've been carrying since I was a girl.
"You're doing exactly what Dad did. He loved me so hard he never once asked me what I wanted — he just decided, and built a wall, and called the wall protection.
And you watched him do it. You watched it make me leave.
You were there, Theo, you held me the night I packed the car, you said you understood why I had to go.
And now you're standing in this bay doing the identical thing to the one kid who ever just asked me what I wanted instead of deciding it for me.
You're about to take his whole life away to keep me on a shelf.
Dad would be so proud. He'd think you finally got it right. "
That lands somewhere the rest of it didn't. I see it go in. It's cruel and it's true and I'm not sorry, because I've spent twelve years being gentle with this family's feelings and look where it got me — back in the tower, fighting for one inch of my own life.
"That's not fair," Theo says, low.
"No," I agree. "It's not. Neither is taking his patch because your sister has a pulse.
" I sling the bag over my shoulder. "I came here for information, not a fight.
I got the information. He loses everything if it's him.
Message received." My voice is shaking now, full-on shaking, and I don't try to hide it.
"I just need you to understand that you don't get to make this decision and keep me too.
You can have the principle or you can have your sister.
You can't have both. And I think — God help me, I think you're stubborn enough to pick the principle, because you're his son all the way down, and that's going to be the great tragedy of your life, Theo, that you were too much like him to do the one thing he never could. "
He doesn't answer.
I leave him standing in the bay with the half-built bike and our father's eyes and a silence I've never heard from him before, and I walk out into the cold compound yard, and I'm shaking — not the way my hand shook after the tourist, a different shaking, the shaking of a person who just jumped and hasn't hit the water yet.
And somewhere in the falling, mid-air, I get my clarity.