Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Marlena
I wake up in a motel room on the highway outside Sharp and don't know where I am for three full seconds.
Ceiling fan. Popcorn ceiling. The smell of industrial cleaner and old carpet.
The kind of room where the bedspread has a pattern designed to hide stains and the Bible in the nightstand drawer has someone's phone number written inside the front cover.
Then I move, and the soreness reminds me.
Between my thighs. Along my hips where his fingers dug in hard enough to bruise. My throat— I don't even need a mirror to know what that looks like.
I can feel the tenderness when I swallow. His mouth on my neck. His teeth. The marks he left on purpose because Harlan has never done anything by accident in his life.
I lie still and stare at the ceiling fan going around and around and try to figure out what kind of woman drives three hundred miles to confront the man she lied to for twenty years and ends up fucked against his living room wall before the conversation is even finished.
The answer is: the same kind of woman who fell for him at eighteen.
Apparently I haven't learned a goddamn thing.
My phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up.
No texts from Presley, but I didn't expect any.
She hasn't initiated a text in weeks.
The communication between us has been reduced to the bare minimum that a daughter can get away with without technically being no-contact: one-word answers, read receipts with no reply, the occasional photo of a horse that might be an olive branch or might just be a photo of a horse.
I can't tell anymore.
There's nothing from Harlan either.
No call, no text, no summons.
Just silence.
Which is almost worse, because silence from that man doesn't mean he's done.
It means he's thinking, and him thinking is the most dangerous version of Harlan there is.
I get up, take of my pajamas, and head into the shower.
The hot water stings every mark on my body and I stand under it with my eyes closed and my forehead against the tile and let it.
I have a choice to make.
I can get in my car, drive three hundred miles back to my apartment, and wait.
Wait for Presley to finish her internship and come home.
Wait for the anger to fade. Hers and his. Wait for time to do what time does, which is sand down the sharp edges of everything until it's bearable.
That's the safe choice. The quiet choice.
The choice that the younger version of me would have made—the girl who ran, who chose distance over confrontation, who let silence do the work because silence was easier than truth.
Or I can stay.
Not for Harlan. I need to be clear about that, even if I'm only being clear with myself while standing naked in a motel shower with his bruises on my hips.
I'm not staying for a man.
I did that once. Followed a man's gravity into his orbit until I couldn't tell where he ended and I began, and it took me years to find my way back to my own center of gravity.
I'm staying for Presley.
My daughter is on that ranch.
She's working, she's learning, she's building a relationship with a father she just met.
She's doing the thing I should have let her do years ago, and I am not going to sit in an apartment three hundred miles away while she does it without me.
Not because she needs me. She's made it clear she doesn't think she does right now, but because a mother doesn't leave.
A mother stays close even when her daughter is furious, even when being close is painful, even when every instinct says run.
I ran once. I'm not doing it again.
Which means I need more than a motel room.
I need a life here.
A reason to be in Sharp that isn't Harlan and isn't dependent on whether my daughter decides to forgive me.
I need something that's mine.
I need a salon.
I dry off, pull on the cleanest clothes from my suitcase—jeans, a high-necked shirt that covers the bruises on my throat, boots I packed without thinking because boots are all I've ever owned.
I put on enough makeup to look like a woman with a plan instead of a woman who slept three hours in a highway motel after being fucked against a wall by the man she's been hiding from for two damn decades.
I check out of the motel, get in my car, and drive into town.
Sharp, Texas, in the morning light is exactly the way I left it and nothing like I remember.
The bones are the same.
The single main street, the feed store, the gas station, the water tower.
But there's a new grocery store where the old hardware shop used to be.
A coffee place that looks like it wandered in from Austin and got lost.
The diner across from Grace's vet clinic has a new sign but the same windows, and through them I can see the same red vinyl booths where I used to eat pancakes after my bar shifts, back when pancakes at midnight felt like the height of luxury.
I drive slowly. Not because I want to, because my body won't let me go faster.
Every block is a landmine.
There's the church—Jolene's church.
Front pew, every Sunday.
I used to walk past it on my way to work and wonder what it felt like to be that certain about anything—about God, about your place in the world, about the man sitting next to you and whether he'd still be there when you opened your eyes.
There's the school. Sharp Elementary.
Small, brick, a mural on the side that's been repainted at least twice since I was a kid.
I went there. My mother went there.
Everyone in this town went there, and everyone in this town remembers who went there with them, which means everyone in this town remembers Marlena Philips.
The girl from the bad house on the east side.
The girl whose father left and whose mother worked doubles and who got a job at a biker bar at eighteen because nobody was watching closely enough to stop her.
The girl who caught the MC president's eye and then disappeared.
They'll remember. Small towns don't forget.
They just file things away and wait for the right moment to bring them back out, and my return to Sharp is going to be that moment for a lot of people.
I park on Main Street in front of an empty storefront between the coffee shop and a place that sells Western wear. T
he storefront has a FOR LEASE sign in the window and dust on the sill and the bones of something that used to be a boutique.
I can see the display shelves through the glass, the track lighting on the ceiling, the back room that could be a wash station.
I cup my hands against the glass and look in.
It's not perfect. It's small—two, maybe three chairs max.
The plumbing would need updating.
The floors are scarred and the paint is peeling and the whole place has the abandoned smell of a space that's been empty too long.
But it's on Main Street. It has foot traffic.
It has natural light from the front windows. And most importantly, it has nothing to do with Sharp Shooter Ranch or the Shotgun Saints MC or Harlan.
I take a photo of the FOR LEASE sign and save the number.
The rest of the morning passes in the strange, suspended way that mornings pass when your entire life has been upended and you're pretending it hasn't.
I buy coffee.
I drive the streets I used to know and catalog what's different.
I sit in a parking lot and stare at my phone for twenty minutes trying to figure out what to say to my daughter.
I text Presley at noon:
I'm in Sharp. I know you're at the ranch. Can we talk?
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
I'm working.
It takes me half a second to shoot a response off to her:
After work?
A long pause.
Long enough that I set the phone on the motel bed and go back to the list I'm making—things I need if I'm going to set up a salon, things I need if I'm going to live in Sharp, things I need if I'm going to survive being in the same zip code as Harlan Lyle without losing myself in him again.
The phone buzzes.
Fine. Diner at 6.
Not the ranch.
She's not inviting me onto Lyle property.
She wants neutral ground. I would too, if I were her.
The afternoon stretches.
I call the number on the FOR LEASE sign and leave a message.
I drive to the grocery store and buy the basics. Toothbrush, deodorant, a change of clothes that doesn't look like I packed in seven minutes during a panic attack, which I did.
I find a rental listing for a small house on the south side of town—two bedrooms, month-to-month lease, available immediately.
I call and take it, sight unseen, because I need a mailing address and a kitchen and a door that locks and a space where I can fall apart in private when I need to.
I do not drive past my mother's house, The Dusty Spur, or anywhere near the ranch.
At five-thirty I park at the diner and sit in my car for ten minutes, trying to figure out what to say to a daughter who is angry enough to apply for a summer internship on her biological father's ranch without telling her mother, but not angry enough to refuse dinner.
Presley walks in at six on the dot.
She's dusty. Work boots, jeans, a Sharp Shooter Ranch t-shirt that she's wearing like armor.
Or, almost like she wants me to see it, wants me to know where she's been and who she belongs to now.
Her red hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her face is sunburned across the nose.
She looks more like her father than I've ever noticed, and I wonder how I missed it for twenty years, or if I just didn't let myself see it.
She slides into the booth across from me. Doesn't hug me. Doesn't smile.
"You drove here," she says. Not a question.
"I checked your location. Saw where you were."
"And panicked."
"Wouldn't you?"
She thinks about it, picks up the menu even though we both know she's not going to order anything complicated.
Presley eats the way Mitch used to eat—decisively, without fuss, food as fuel rather than experience.
"I told him," she says to the menu.
"I know. He told me."
Her eyes come up.
Sharp. Assessing.
So much like Harlan it makes my chest ache. "You went to the ranch?"
"Yesterday. As soon as I saw your location."
"And?"