Chapter 24
The gym smelled like rubber mats and body spray, which felt about right for a Friday night spent watching a man commit insurance fraud in real time in front of a paying crowd.
“Tell me again why we’re wearing sunglasses indoors,” Dani said, sliding hers down her nose to give me a look over the top of them.
“Disguise.”
“It’s eight p.m.”
“Disguise doesn’t clock out at sunset, Dani.
” I adjusted mine, which were doing absolutely nothing except making the ring lights blur into a smear of gold, and surveyed the folding chairs arranged in uneven rows around a wrestling ring that had definitely seen better decades.
“Also I look incredible and mysterious.”
“You look like someone’s aunt trying to sneak into a concert.”
We’d agreed, walking in, that we would blend.
Ordinary spectators, nothing more, two women out for a cheap, weird Friday night the way plenty of people in Greymonte apparently were, judging by the crowd filling in around us.
I’d worn my brightest yellow shirt on principle, which Dani had pointed out, with the flatness she reserved for my worst decisions, was possibly the opposite of blending in.
I’d told her blending in was overrated and I’d rather be memorable.
She’d said that tracked, and I let myself laugh it off even though some smaller, quieter part of me already knew memorable was a bad idea in a room full of Rover Court’s neighbors and their neighbors’ friends.
I found him within ninety seconds of scanning the room, because I’d gotten disturbingly good at finding Caleb Rourke in a crowd, the same way I could find the one prop out of place in a room I’d built myself.
He wasn’t near the ring. He was near the back, close to an exit, angled so he had a clean line to the ring apron without anyone needing to notice him noticing it.
Neutral shirt, a ball cap I’d never seen him wear, a phone held low and loose in one hand like he was texting instead of documenting a man’s entire disability claim collapsing in real time.
“Twelve o’clock, past the concession stand,” I told Dani under my breath.
She followed my gaze and made a small, appreciative sound. “He really does commit.”
“He’s a professional.”
“He’s something.” She bumped my shoulder. “You good?”
I was better than good, honestly, watching him work like that.
There was something about the stillness of him, the physical economy of it, the way his weight settled low and easy like he could stand there for six hours without needing to shift, that did things to me I probably shouldn’t examine too closely in a room full of strangers eating nachos.
The lights dropped, and a voice over a bad PA system announced the next match with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested he’d rehearsed it in his car, and then a man in a half mask and a cape stitched with lopsided, careful seams came through a curtain to a wave of recorded thunder sound effects.
“The Wrecker,” Dani said, reading the ring name off the paper program someone had handed us at the door.
Trent Holloway moved like a different person than the one who limped to his truck in a back brace.
He climbed onto the ropes, arms out, soaking in noise from maybe forty people like it was forty thousand, and every part of him, shoulders, spine, the easy way he dropped down and rolled his neck, directly contradicted the man in his claim file.
I pulled my phone out because everyone around me had theirs out, because it was the kind of moment you record without thinking about it, a masked man in a cape making an entrance in a rented gym, funny and a little sad and completely normal to want on video.
I held it up, caught maybe four seconds of him posing on the ropes, and lowered it again, laughing under my breath at the absurdity of the cape.
That was when his eyes swept the crowd and landed, for one full second, on me.
I felt it the way you feel a stranger’s gaze on the back of your neck before you turn around, except this time I was already looking straight at him.
His face didn’t change much behind the mask, but his posture did, a flicker of recognition, quick and specific, the kind you give someone you’ve passed in a mailroom a hundred times.
He knew me. Not from the ring, not from tonight. From Rover Court.
I lowered the phone the rest of the way and told myself it didn’t mean anything. Neighbors saw neighbors everywhere. It was a public event. I hadn’t filmed anything but a cape and some rope theatrics, the same clip half the room was capturing on their own phones right that second.
Still, I felt the small cold click of a fact settling into place that I couldn’t take back out of the room, and underneath the joke I’d made about being memorable, a quieter voice pointed out that memorable had just cost something.
The match itself was, if I was being honest, kind of great.
Trent hoisted his opponent overhead like he weighed nothing, held him there long enough for the crowd to count along, and then dropped him flat on his back with a slam that made the whole ring shudder and the front row gasp in a way that felt only about sixty percent theatrical.
He did it twice more before the match ended, plus a diving move off the top rope that required a spine capable of absorbing real impact, a spine that had no trouble at all with warehouse duty, whatever the paperwork claimed.
“That is not what a man who can’t lift a case of water looks like,” Dani muttered beside me, not quite able to keep the disbelief out of her voice even though we’d both known exactly what we were walking in to see.
“It’s definitely going in the appeal file.”
“Not our file,” she reminded me, gentle but firm, the way she always was when I got close to a line I wasn’t supposed to cross even by accident. “We’re just two women who paid fifteen dollars to watch a man in a cape.”
“We are exactly that. Extremely normal women.”
I glanced back toward the exit where Caleb had been standing and found him already gone from that spot, repositioned closer to the ring apron where the light was better, phone still low, still unhurried, catching what he needed without ever looking like he was catching anything.
What got me wasn’t just the focus itself, it was that he wouldn’t break it for me, wouldn’t so much as flick his eyes my way in a room full of people who could have followed the glance and asked questions.
That refusal, that discipline, felt more intimate than a look across a crowded gym would have been.
He never looked at me directly. Not once, not obviously, not in any way another person could have caught if they’d been watching him watch the crowd.
But when the second match started and I shifted my chair an inch to get a better view around a tall man’s shoulders, his weight shifted too, an inch the other way, correcting the angle he needed to keep me at the edge of his vision without ever turning his head.
It wasn’t imagination. I knew his stillness too well by now to mistake a real adjustment for a hopeful one.
By the time the show wound down, Dani was ready to leave before the final match even ended, citing the smell and her own limited tolerance for men in capes, and I didn’t argue.
We filed out with the rest of the crowd into the parking lot, warm night air a relief after the gym’s recycled sweat and rubber, and I made a point of not looking for the sedan or the plumbing van or whatever unmarked vehicle he’d used tonight.
Looking would have meant putting myself between him and his own evidence, turning a clean case into a complicated one, and that wasn’t something I was willing to hand him, not even out of curiosity.
We left separately. That part wasn’t even a discussion, just an understanding we’d built without saying it outright, the same way I understood not to wave at him from ten feet away or tell the guy next to me that the masked wrestler currently taking a bow was actually his neighbor from unit eight.
My phone buzzed in the car before I’d even pulled onto the main road, Dani following in her own car behind me, headlights steady in my mirror.
Home. Curtain closed. Front door unlocked for me.
I read it twice at a red light. Six words, no explanation, and I understood what tonight had put in his chest. This was not him letting himself in. He was asking, and the answer was mine.
I typed back three words before the light turned green. Door’s for you.
I drove home with the windows down and the radio off, turning his six words and my three over like puzzle pieces I already knew where to place, and when I pulled into Rover Court I didn’t hesitate at all before I went straight up the stairs, closed the curtain over my kitchen window, and turned the lock open on the front door, a clear, deliberate invitation left standing for the one person in Greymonte I trusted enough to walk through it.