Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Phantom
The screen door slams behind her and the sound ricochets through the house like a gunshot.
I keep walking.
Through the front hall, past the photographs on the wall that I stopped seeing years ago—my father on horseback, my grandparents on the porch, Shiver and Grace and Dakota as kids in matching Christmas pajamas that Jolene insisted on every year.
Past the kitchen where the coffee maker is still warm from this morning, when the biggest problem I had was unfamiliar bikes on County Road 112.
That was twelve hours ago, which feels like a lifetime ago.
I walk into the living room and stop at the bar cart, pour two fingers of Maker's Mark because if I'm going to have this conversation, I need something in my hands that isn't her throat.
Marlena is behind me.
I can hear her breathing—uneven, shallow, the breathing of a woman who drove three hundred miles on adrenaline and is crashing now that she's stopped moving.
She's standing just inside the doorway.
Not sitting. Not moving further into the room.
Hovering in the threshold like she's not sure she's allowed in, which is ironic, because she walked onto my ranch and into my life without permission twenty-one years ago and did the same thing today.
"Sit down."
"I'd rather—"
"I don't care what you'd rather do. Sit the fuck down."
She sits. The leather chair across from the couch, the one nobody uses because it faces the window and the afternoon sun makes it too hot.
She perches on the edge the same way Jolene perched on the porch chair yesterday—the posture of a woman bracing for whatever the hell is about to come her way.
I don't sit. I stand at the bar cart with my bourbon and look at her.
Twenty-one years.
She's not the girl I remember.
The girl was barely an adult, skinny, sharp-elbowed, with hair that fell past her shoulders and a way of looking at me like I was the most interesting thing she'd ever seen.
The girl smelled like the bar—beer and grease and the cheap vanilla lotion she kept in her apron pocket.
The girl had hands that shook when she cleaned my blood but never fumbled. Steady where it mattered.
The woman in my living room is thirty-nine.
The hair is the same color. That deep auburn that catches light like it's got fire trapped inside it —but it's different. Fuller. The face is different too.
The sharpness has softened into something more settled, more certain.
She's got lines around her eyes that weren't there before.
Freckles I remember scattered across a nose that's the same nose but on a different person.
She's beautiful.
That's the part I hate.
She's more beautiful now than she was at eighteen, and I resent the hell out of it because it would be easier to have this conversation if looking at her didn't make my chest crack open.
She's got curves she didn't have then. Hips. Weight that life put on her—pregnancy and age and grief and the kind of living that marks a body.
She's not the girl. She's what the girl became when the girl grew up without me and married someone else and built a life I wasn't part of.
I take a drink and set the glass down.
"Start talking."
She clasps her hands in her lap and her knuckles are white. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything. Start with the day you left and don't stop until I tell you to."
She flinches.
Not visibly. It’s a micro-movement, a tightening around the eyes that most people would miss.
I don't miss anything. I haven't missed anything in thirty years, except apparently the fact that I had a daughter growing up in another city with another man's name.
"You ended it," she says. "You sat me down on your tailgate and told me I was too young.
Too good. That you'd ruin me." Her voice is quiet.
Controlled. The voice of a woman who's rehearsed this, who knew this conversation was coming the second she turned her car toward Sharp. "You told me to go. So, I went."
"And you were pregnant."
"I didn't know that when I left."
"When did you know?"
"Two months later."
"Two months." I let the number sit in the air. "You found out you were carrying my child two months after you left, and your first thought was—what exactly? Don't tell him?"
"My first thought was terror." Her voice doesn't crack.
It steadies. Firms up. Like she's finding the steel underneath the shaking.
"I was eighteen years old, alone, in a city where I didn't know anyone, working a waitressing job for seven dollars an hour.
I had no money, no family, no support. And the last thing the president's wife said to me before I left Sharp was that the club handles problems and the problems disappear. "
That stops me.
"Jolene said that to you?"
"The night I left. She came to my mother's house.
Told me to disappear. Told me what would happen if I didn't." Marlena's eyes meet mine.
Dark hazel-ish brown, almost black in this light.
The eyes I used to lose myself in when I was thirty-one and stupid enough to think I could have a girl like her without consequences.
"I believed her, Harlan. I was eighteen and I'd watched you nearly die in a bar fight and then heard you killed the man who did it. And your wife, or ex wife, I don’t even know anymore, was standing on my porch telling me the club would make me disappear if I came back. "
"So, you ran."
"You told me to leave. Your wife threatened to kill me. So yeah, I ran. What was the alternative?"
The question hangs in the air and I don't answer it because I don't have one.
Not one that doesn't make me the villain in her version of this story.
So, I set the glass down harder than I mean to.
The sound is sharp in the quiet room. "You still took my daughter and ran for twenty years.
You let another man raise her. You let her call someone else Dad.
You let me sit on this ranch for two decades not knowing I had a child out there with my blood and my face.
You had twenty-one years to pick up a phone, Marlena. Twenty-one fucking years!"
"It started as surviving," She's not backing down.
I can see it—the girl I knew is gone but the spine is the same.
Maybe stronger. "I was scared. Of the club.
Of Jolene. Of what would happen to me and my baby if I came back.
And then a year passed. And then five. And then ten.
And every year it got harder to tell the truth because the truth meant admitting I'd been lying, and the longer the lie went on, the heavier it got, until I couldn't lift it anymore. "
"You could have called."
"And said what? 'Hi, Harlan, it's the teenager you dumped. By the way, you have a daughter'?"
"Yes. That's exactly what you should have said."
"And then what?" She stands up. The perching is over—she's on her feet, arms crossed, color rising in her cheeks the way it always did when she was angry. The flush starting at her throat and climbing.
I used to kiss that flush. Used to trace it with my mouth while she arched against me and said my name like a prayer.
"You would have—what? Left Jolene? You went back to Jolene, Harlan. You chose her. You chose your family. What was I supposed to do, show up with a baby and blow that apart?"
"That wasn't your decision to make."
"Everything was my decision to make! I was alone. No one was making decisions for me. Not you, not my mother, not anyone. I was eighteen with a baby and I made the best choice I could with what I had."
"The best choice." The words taste like ash. "You call hiding my daughter from me for twenty years the best choice?"
"I call it the only choice that kept her safe!"
The room goes quiet.
Her chest is heaving. Mine is tight.
The bourbon is sitting in my stomach like acid and the sun is coming through the window behind her, backlighting her hair so it looks like it's on fire, and I hate her.
I hate her and I want her so badly my hands are shaking with it.
Twenty-one years. Twenty-one years since I've been in the same room with this woman and my body doesn't care about the betrayal.
My body remembers her. The smell of her, the sound of her voice, the way the air changes when she's close.
Somehow, it’s like I’m back and my body is thirty-one years old and back in this house with a girl who smelled like vanilla and tasted like recklessness, and my brain can scream all it wants about the twenty years she stole but my blood isn't listening.
She sees it. Whatever's on my face. She sees it, and something shifts behind her eyes.
Not fear. Recognition. The same recognition that's burning through me right now, the understanding that the thing between us didn't die when she left.
It didn't even have the decency to go dormant. It's been sitting in both of us for twenty-one years like an ember in dry grass, waiting for oxygen.
"Don't," she whispers.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're deciding whether to hate me or—" She stops. Swallows. Her throat moves and my eyes follow the line of it the way a predator tracks movement—involuntary, instinctive, dangerous. "Harlan. We can't."
"You don't get to tell me what we can't do." I close the distance between us in two steps.
Not fast—deliberate.
The way I do everything. Giving her time to move, to step back, to leave if she wants to leave.
She doesn't move.
Her feet stay planted and her chin comes up and she looks at me with those dark eyes that are older and more dangerous and I am so goddamn furious at this woman I can barely see straight.
"You kept my daughter from me."
"I know."
"Twenty years, Marlena."
"I know."
"Every birthday. Every first day of school. Every—" My voice breaks and I hate it. I close my jaw. Reset. "Every moment. You took every moment from me when I could have been forging a relationship with my daughter."