Epilogue
JANIE
Three months is long enough for a thing to stop feeling like it could be taken away.
The legal aid office is on the fourth floor of a building downtown that smells like old coffee, determination, and the particular strain of fluorescent lighting that has been arguing with the afternoon sun through those windows since before anyone currently working here was born.
My desk is in the corner by the window with the view of the parking structure, which is not as depressing as it sounds, because on a good day you can see a strip of the river between the concrete levels, and on a very good day, there’s a pelican on the railing of the third deck who seems to be working through a personal crisis, and I find his presence oddly companionable.
The woman who sat across from me this morning wore long sleeves in July.
It’s the thing that stops your breath when you recognize it.
The deliberate choice of fabric. The angle of the chair.
The way she answered my questions precisely, carefully, giving me exactly what I needed while keeping the narrative as contained as possible, because you don’t learn to make yourself small in one place and then not carry the habit somewhere else.
You carry it everywhere. You carry it until someone helps you put it down.
I’m working on putting it down.
Three months in, and I’m still working on it, which is, as it turns out, completely correct.
The director told me that in my first week, when I asked how long it took.
She’d looked at me with the particular expression of a woman who has answered this question a hundred times and finds the honesty of it no less important for the repetition.
‘As long as it takes,’ she said. ‘And then a little longer.’
My phone buzzes at four thirty.
Devil: You’re not backing out.
The drive back to the compound takes eleven minutes.
Devil and Lucy are already in the kitchen when I walk through the door, two glasses on the counter and a third being poured without consultation.
Rose is in the yard with Roam, which I can hear but not see, her voice carrying the particular escalating cadence of a story she’s telling to someone who has made the mistake of showing mild interest. Gerald is visible through the window, strategically positioned in what Rose believes is playing with the dog, and Gerald believes is lying down.
“Where is it?” Devil asks by way of a hello.
“Hanging in the closet.”
“Go put it on.”
“I’m still thinking about—”
“You’re not thinking,” Lucy says, handing me the glass. “You’re rehearsing a speech to yourself about why you shouldn’t. There’s a difference.”
The thing about these women is they’re not wrong. They are almost constitutionally incapable of being wrong about this particular category of thing, which is both their greatest quality and occasionally inconvenient.
“Go put it on,” Devil says.
“I will… later. When it’s closer to—”
“Janie.” The way she says my name is not unkind.
It’s the same tone she used in the fitting room three weeks ago when I reached for the shapeless option out of pure reflex, and she handed me something else without a word.
It’s the tone of a woman who has watched me come a long way and has no patience left for watching me stall at the last ten feet.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go put it on.”
“We’ll come up,” Lucy says.
“You absolutely don’t need to—”
They’re already moving.
The dress is where I left it this morning, hanging on the closet door where I’d put it last night so I could see it first thing and get used to the idea. The getting-used-to-it hasn’t progressed as far as I’d hoped.
It’s red. The kind of red that doesn’t ask permission.
Bought three weeks ago on a lunch break, tried on in a fitting room smaller than a confessional, stood very still in front of the mirror while something in my chest did something complicated.
It fits every curve. Craig’s word for that was ‘exposed.’ His other word was ‘inappropriate.’ His other words were worse, and I’m not giving them space here.
Not tonight, not in this room with the sound of my daughter’s voice carrying in from the yard.
The dress doesn’t know what Craig called it. The dress is just red.
Devil lifts it off the hanger without ceremony and holds it out.
Argument rises in my throat. I consider it. Then I consider the last four months, the compound and the legal aid office, the paperwork on the kitchen table, and the laugh that lives close to the surface now, and I take the dress.
Devil zips it up. Steps back, and doesn’t say anything for a moment, which from Devil is its own form of communication.
“Yeah,” Lucy says quietly.
My reflection in the closet mirror looks back at me. The curves are there. The softness of my belly, the fullness of my hips, the weight of me in the fabric. Everything Craig cataloged and handed back to me as evidence.
The dress doesn’t agree with him.
The dress is on my side, apparently. Red, fitted, and unambiguous.
Craig’s voice runs its usual commentary.
Quieter than it used to be. Considerably quieter than it was in July, when it was loud enough some mornings to fill the whole room.
It’s still there. I don’t expect it to vanish entirely, but I’ve stopped expecting that.
The director was right about how long it takes, but tonight it’s background noise behind something else.
Something that sounds like my own voice telling me I’m walking out of this room in this dress, and that’s the whole of it.
“Okay,” I say.
Devil smiles. Not the wide one, the small one. The one that means she knew.
“Go show him,” she says.
***
The ceremony is at dusk.
The whole chapter is there. The yard is lit with strings of lights Scout spent three hours hanging and complained about for two, the tables are pushed back, the bikes lined up at the far end because these men will not stop being who they are for an occasion, they simply include the occasion in who they are.
Reaper is in his usual corner with his arms crossed in a way that communicates festivity through pure contrast. Scout has already located the drinks.
Memphis, Rock’s man from the Durango chapter, flew in yesterday and has the easy, watchful bearing of a man taking in everything about a new chapter without appearing to.
He’s good at it, but I’ve gotten better at spotting it.
Rock is on his tablet propped against a speaker.
Durango is visible through the screen behind him, the mountain dark that means something different from Florida dark.
He raises a glass when the connection comes through and says something to Creed that makes Creed do the thing that is almost a smile.
Rose is wearing her yellow dress. She decided this without consultation and defended it on multiple grounds, the primary one being that Mr. Rabbit prefers yellow events. The case was airtight.
Roam is across the yard talking to Reaper when I walk out, and he stops mid-sentence.
Reaper’s eyes move to me briefly, then back to Roam, and something shifts in his expression, the dark humor he keeps mostly internal finding a rare public moment. He lifts his drink and moves away with a deliberateness that is its own form of comment.
Roam doesn’t move.
He looks at me the way he looked at me three months ago, standing in the doorway of that room before I knew he was there.
He looked then like a man who didn’t understand what I was seeing in the mirror.
He looks now like a man who sees me, specifically and completely, and finds the view in exact opposition to Craig’s accounting of it.
The yard is full of people. He crosses it without looking at any of them, then he stops in front of me. One hand comes up, the back of his fingers near my jaw—the almost-touch of a man who knows the difference between taking and asking.
“Red,” he says.
One word. His entire opinion of the dress. Of me in it. Of the three months it took me to get here. Delivered flat and certain, the way he means everything.
“Red,” I agree.
The corner of his mouth moves.
***
Creed stands at the head of the yard. This is what claiming looks like in the Royal Bastards, not performance or theater, it is a declaration inside the family, in front of the people who will be asked to honor it.
A man standing up in front of his chapter and saying this one, without qualification.
Roam has a card.
This detail almost undid me when I found out.
It’s Winchester’s doing. He printed it out and handed it over, explaining that some men need the words in front of them so they don’t have to construct them in real time.
Roam had looked at the card for a long moment, said nothing, and put it in his pocket.
He doesn’t read from it now, doesn’t need to, because he looks at me the whole time, the declaration traditional, the language smoothed by decades of use the way all club language is, each word landing with the particular weight of something that is simply true and is being stated because truth deserves to be stated plainly.
“I claim this woman, Janie. Under my protection, under club law, under the Royal Bastards’ code. What’s mine is hers. What threatens her answers to me. She rides under my colors and stands under my name for as long as she’ll have me, which I intend to make a very long time.”
The yard is quiet in the way yards go quiet when something real has just been said in them.
When he finishes, Creed speaks, “This woman is under your protection?”
Roam’s eyes don’t leave my face. “Mine,” he says. “Both of them.”
The yard shifts.
Not loud, not the way I’d expected it. It’s quiet, the shift, the quality of attention changing.
Men who have watched this man spend years living as if leaving were easier.
Men who watched him go still when Rose speaks and have seen what happens to his face in an unguarded moment when he thinks nobody is looking.
They’ve been watching.