Chapter Two
The Weight of It
Marcus Steele had the kind of body that made men straighten their spines when he walked into a room and made women forget what they had been saying mid sentence.
Six foot something of it, built the way a man gets built from actual work and not a gym membership, shoulders that filled a doorway, a chest and stomach cut into hard lines under whatever he wore, which was never a suit.
He had worn one exactly twice in his life, both times for funerals, and both times he had looked like a wolf someone had tried to dress as a house pet.
He lived in leather and denim instead. A cut worn soft at the seams, sleeves that strained over forearms inked shoulder to wrist in ink that told the story of every year he had survived to become club president.
A silver ring through one nostril, a line of small hoops climbing one ear, dark hair kept just long enough to look like he did not care, because he did not.
Nothing about him was groomed for anyone’s comfort.
He looked like exactly what he was, a dangerous man who had made peace with being dangerous a long time ago, and had no intention of apologizing for it to a room that had not asked.
This morning the room was the clubhouse garage, and the thing demanding his attention was a spreadsheet he did not fully understand, open on a laptop that felt too small under his hands.
Vance sat across from him, feet up on a crate of oil filters, running numbers on the Sacramento expansion like it was nothing, like the difference between Ironbound owning four legitimate businesses and six was a conversation you could have before coffee.
“You are not listening,” Vance said.
“I am listening.” Marcus was not listening. He was thinking about a name on his phone screen, one he had not saved, one he had told himself for three weeks running he would delete the second he got a spare five minutes, and never did.
“The vote is in six weeks,” Vance said. “You want the gavel, you show the table you can hold this club together without Callie standing behind you translating everything into numbers old men can understand.”
“Callie built this club’s money.”
“I know that. You know that. Half the table does not, and the other half would rather not think about it too hard, because it is easier to vote for a man than a marriage.” Vance closed the laptop. “So hold it together. Whatever it is.”
Marcus did not ask what Vance meant by that.
He had a feeling Vance already knew, in the way men who had ridden together for fifteen years always seemed to know things before anyone said them out loud, and he was grateful, in a small ugly corner of himself, that Vance had the decency not to say it plainly.
Vance had patched in the same year Marcus had, back when Ironbound was still mostly a garage with a drug problem hiding under it and a charter president who ran the place like a fiefdom instead of a family.
They had buried that president’s mistakes together, more than once, and buried some of their own along the way, and there was a shorthand between them now that did not require full sentences.
Marcus valued that shorthand more than almost anything else the club had given him.
It was, some days, the only place he felt entirely known and entirely safe at the same time.
He did not feel that this morning. This morning the shorthand felt like a spotlight.
“You remember the Delgado situation,” Vance said, apropos of nothing, the way he did when he was circling toward a real point.
“I remember.”
“You remember what happened when Delgado let something fester instead of naming it out loud. Three months of everybody pretending, and then it blew up in the middle of church, and half the table nearly voted no confidence in a president who’d done nothing wrong except let a problem sit too long before he named it. ”
“I am not Delgado.”
“No,” Vance agreed. “You are worse, because you actually know what the right move is, and you are choosing not to make it anyway.”
Marcus did not answer that, because there was no answer that would not be a confession, and he was not ready to hand Vance a confession before he had figured out how to hand one to the only person who actually deserved to hear it first.
He thought about Callie the way he always did when the guilt got loud, which was to picture her exactly as she had looked that morning, heels already on before seven, hair still damp, moving through the kitchen like she owned the floor under her feet, because she did, because she had built the floor.
Nine years of her. Nine years of a woman who had taken one look at a struggling garage with a drug problem hiding under it and turned it into something that could survive an audit, a raid, a recession, anything but this.
He remembered the first time he had seen her, actually seen her, not just noticed her the way every man in a hundred mile radius noticed her.
She had been twenty six, sitting across a folding table from three patched members twice her age, explaining in a voice that never once rose above conversational why their current bookkeeping setup would land somebody in federal prison within eighteen months if nobody fixed it.
She had not been afraid of the room. She had been irritated by it, the way a good mechanic is irritated by an engine somebody has clearly never changed the oil on, and Marcus had watched her dismantle three grown men’s excuses one at a time with the patience of someone who already knew she was going to win and simply wanted them to arrive at the same conclusion in their own time.
He had married her eleven months later. He had never once, in nine years, regretted it, not for a single day, not even now, especially not now, because the thing eating him alive was not doubt about her.
It was the specific, ugly knowledge that he had taken something perfect and put a crack in it anyway, for reasons that made less and less sense to him the longer he sat with them.
He had done a lot of things in service of this club that he was not proud of.
He had broken bones that needed breaking and buried things that needed burying, and he had never once lost sleep over any of it, because all of it had a reason he could stand behind.
Protect the club. Protect the family. Protect the woman upstairs with the ledgers and the four inch heels who had built something worth protecting in the first place.
This did not have a reason he could stand behind. That was the part that sat in his chest like a stone he could not put down.
His phone buzzed against the workbench. He did not need to look to know whose name would be sitting on the screen, and he looked anyway, because apparently three weeks of telling himself he was stronger than this had taught him nothing.
You never used to be a coward.
He stared at it long enough that Vance cleared his throat.
“You gonna answer that,” Vance said, “or you gonna sit there looking like it already answered you.”
“It is nothing.”
“Nine years I’ve known you. You’ve got exactly one face for nothing, and that is not it.
” Vance stood, brushing metal shavings off his jeans, and for a moment Marcus thought he was going to push further, the way he sometimes did when he thought Marcus was being stubborn about something that mattered.
Instead he just said, quiet, “Whatever it is, brother, the longer you sit on it, the more it costs when it finally comes out. I have watched that happen to better men than either of us.”
Marcus turned the phone face down and stood, because standing felt like doing something, even when it was not.
“I need to check on Callie,” he said, and it was not a lie, it was just not the whole truth either, and lately that was the only kind of honest he seemed able to manage.
He crossed the yard toward the stairs that led up to the office, past three prospects arguing about a carburetor, past the flag that had hung over the garage door since before he patched in, past Ruiz waxing his bike with the kind of devotion most men reserved for church, and he thought, the way he had thought every day for three weeks, that he would end it today.
That he would go up those stairs, and instead of grabbing his wallet and coming back down, he would tell her everything, and let whatever came next come.
The stairs were old wood, worn soft in the middle from twenty years of boots, and they creaked the same way they always creaked, a sound he had heard so many times it had stopped registering as sound at all and started registering as home instead.
He found her exactly where he expected to find her, bent over a stack of invoices with a pen behind one ear and a second one in her hand, hair falling forward, that familiar crease between her eyebrows that meant a number was not behaving the way she needed it to.
She did not look up when he came in. She never did, not right away, not until whatever she was working on reached a natural stopping point, because she had told him once, early on, that half finished thoughts were how mistakes got made, and she did not make mistakes if she could help it.
He stood in the doorway a moment longer than he needed to, just looking at her, the way he sometimes still did after nine years, like he could not quite believe his own luck, which made everything else so much worse.
“You are staring,” she said, without looking up.
“I am allowed to stare at my own wife.”
“You are allowed to stare at your own wife while also handing her the Fillmore permits, which I asked you for Tuesday, and which I am still waiting on.”
“They are in my saddlebag. I will bring them up tonight.”
“Marcus.”
“I know. Tonight.”