Brittany
The first thing I notice about Oaks being gone is the quiet.
It ain’t peaceful, and it sure as hell ain’t relief.
It’s the kind of quiet that hums under your skin like a live wire you can’t see, but you know better than to touch.
The Lockup still rattles on Friday nights.
Slice of Paradise still fills with gossip and grease and judgment.
Hell still breathes the same humid, watchful air.
But something has shifted, and I feel it every time I step outside and realize I’m not listening for the sound of a Harley like it’s a warning siren.
He left without saying goodbye. That should make it easier. Instead it feels like something unfinished got ripped out by the root and left a hole that keeps catching on everything.
Elijah fills the space like he’s been waiting for it.
He picks me up for dinner in his truck with the cracked dashboard and a pine-tree air freshener swinging from the mirror.
He opens doors. He texts good morning. He asks about my classes and actually listens to the answer like it matters.
When he touches me, it’s careful and deliberate, like he understands hands can bruise even when they don’t mean to.
I should feel lucky. Most days, I convince myself I do.
One evening we sit on the tailgate near the river, his shoulder warm against mine, the sunset bleeding pink into the water.
The air smells like mud and honeysuckle and whatever the town dumps upstream and pretends not to.
I let myself lean into the normalcy of it.
No engines rumbling in the distance. No club girls whispering in corners.
No wives watching with knives behind their smiles.
Just us and the chirp of crickets like the world’s still capable of being ordinary.
“You look happy,” Elijah says quietly.
“I feel happy,” I answer, and it ain’t entirely a lie.
When he kisses me, it’s soft and earnest and unhurried. Nothing like the tension that used to hum between me and a man who never even touched me properly. There’s no danger in Elijah’s mouth. No claim. No heat that threatens to consume something it can’t keep.
Safe.
Safe feels good. Safe also feels like a dress I’m trying on in a mirror, turning side to side, wondering if I’m fooling myself.
Daddy still doesn’t come home.
At first I tell myself it’s normal. Truckers run long hauls. Weather delays things. Paperwork gets held up. I leave the porch light on anyway, because habits don’t die easy and neither does hope, no matter how stupid it makes you.
Then the call comes.
Missouri. That’s where he is. There’s a woman in the background when he talks, laughing at something he says that ain’t meant for me. Her laugh is bright and easy, like she belongs there. Like she’s been there long enough to get comfortable.
“I met someone,” he tells me, voice too careful. “Didn’t plan on it, but… well. Things happen.”
Things happen.
I grip the kitchen counter so hard my fingers go numb, staring at the cheap laminate like I can press my anger straight through it.
I think about all the times I made excuses for him.
All the times I told myself he was doing his best, that he loved me in the only way he knew how.
That he’d come home and it would be the same.
“I sold the house,” he continues, like he’s discussing the weather. “Paperwork’s done. You’ll have thirty days.”
Thirty days.
“You didn’t even ask me,” I whisper.
“You’re grown, Brittany,” he says, as if that absolves him. “You’ll land on your feet.”
Land. Like I jumped.
When the line goes dead, I stand there a long time staring at the wall where Mama’s old clock used to hang before Daddy pawned it during a bad year. The space is still lighter than the rest of the paint, like the house remembers what got taken.
I don’t cry. I just go hollow.
The house doesn’t feel like mine anymore. The couch. The kitchen table. The dent in the hallway where I ran into it when I was six. The squeak on the third step that always gave me away when I tried sneaking past bedtime. All of it already belongs to somebody else, and I’m the last one to know.
I pack nothing. I tell no one. Pride is a mean thing in a small town.
Instead I spend more time at the pawn shop.
Lottie doesn’t ask why I’m lingering. She just hands me Mason and lets me carry him around while he babbles about trucks and crackers and the important things in a two-year-old’s world.
There’s something grounding about his weight on my hip, the way he trusts I’ll hold him without question.
He doesn’t care about rumors. He doesn’t care about clubs or cults or who’s watching.
He just wants his snack and his toy and somebody safe.
Becki watches me the way she watches storms rolling in, chin tipped like she’s reading the clouds.
“You look like somebody kicked your dog,” she says one afternoon. Her voice is rough, but it ain’t unkind.
“I’m fine,” I reply, because I’ve been practicing that word for weeks now like it’s a prayer I can say enough times to make true.
Elijah notices something’s wrong too, but he mistakes it for missing Oaks. That would be simpler. It ain’t Oaks that makes my chest ache at night.
It’s the house.
It’s the realization my father chose a stranger over the daughter who waited with the porch light on.
It’s the sound of a new woman laughing in the background while he told me I’d “land” like I was a cat and not his kid.
One evening, after Mason falls asleep in the playpen in the pawn shop’s back office, Lottie finally closes the door and looks at me like she’s done pretending.
“You know why he married her?” she asks.
I don’t pretend not to understand.
“Oaks,” she clarifies anyway.
I move my head back and forth.
She exhales slowly, glancing toward the front of the shop where the hum of fluorescent lights fills the silence like a held breath. “It wasn’t love,” she says. “It was leverage.”
That word lands heavier than anything else I’ve heard lately, because it explains too much and none of it is pretty.
“Bethany’s daddy runs freight,” Lottie continues. “Quiet freight. Routes that matter to more than one charter. When Legendary Mike went down and things got shaky, the club needed protection. Political protection. National-level protection.”
I lean back against the desk, arms folded tight, like holding myself together takes effort now. “So he married her,” I say, the words tasting like rust.
“He married the deal,” Lottie corrects gently. “Her father had dirt. On members. On runs. On things that would’ve split this club clean down the middle. A marriage shut it up. Secured access to land we needed. Kept a few young idiots out of prison.”
I swallow hard. My throat feels raw, like I swallowed smoke. “So he sacrificed himself.”
Lottie gives me a look that’s almost pity. “No,” she says. “He chose the club.”
That’s different. That’s worse, in its own way. It means he did it on purpose. It means he’d do it again.
“He don’t love her,” Lottie adds quietly. “But he ain’t free either.”
The realization slides into place with a sickening kind of clarity. I’d painted Bethany as a jealous wife, a villain with perfect lipstick and sharp teeth. But maybe she’s just another person trapped in a bargain she didn’t fully choose.
The difference is, she wears her trap like armor.
And Oaks wears his like silence.
That night I lie awake in a house that ain’t mine anymore and try to stitch together the version of him that makes sense.
The man who warned me. The man who ignored me in public.
The man who married for the club. The man who left for Anarchy, California, to sit at the feet of a national president who controls more than any one like me could imagine.
Elijah texts goodnight. I text back because I’m trying. I tell myself I’m moving forward.
But when I close my eyes, I don’t see Elijah’s safe hands or his careful smile. I see a man who married for power, and I understand, for the first time, that in Hell, Kentucky, love is rarely the thing that decides anything.
And I have twenty some days before I’m homeless.
I don’t tell Lottie. Not yet. I’m not ready to watch her face change. I’m not ready to hear the solutions, the pity, the panic.
And Hell doesn’t leave girls alone once they have no where to go.