Chapter 22 Sisters #2
I thought about the bloodstained concrete, Hank limping through his watch shifts, and the morning I’d spent cleaning the service lane while Conrad’s son swept broken plastic one-handed.
Gordon hadn’t been there for any of it. He’d been at Iron River, talking on the phone, managing the situation from a distance.
Through leverage. Believing that the right amount of leaning would bring his dutiful elder daughter back in line.
“If Conrad tells Dad to deliver me,” I said, “what does that look like?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe Dad calls and asks you to come home for a conversation. Maybe he shows up here the way Conrad’s wolves did. I don’t know how far he’d go. I’m telling you because you deserve to know it’s happening.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“If it turns from talk to action, I’ll warn you. That’s a promise. Whatever Dad plans, whatever Conrad pushes him toward, I will call you before it happens.”
“Why?”
“Because I owe you that. And because—” She stopped herself and drew a breath that shook in her chest. “I’m sorry, Nora.
For the ceremony. For standing there and letting you find out in front of everyone.
For helping them plan it that way instead of coming to you months before and telling you the truth.
I should have walked into that garage and said it myself instead of letting Dad and Conrad arrange it like a transaction. ”
She meant it. I could hear it in her voice and see it in the way she stood, stripped of the polished composure she’d worn across the lane.
“I’m not forgiving you,” I said. “Not today. I might not ever. You helped them arrange the worst night of my life, and you came to my garage afterward in your ceremony dress and told me I should have understood. I can’t just put that down because you drove up here and told the truth three weeks late. ”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do. But I believe you mean the apology.”
Delia nodded. She looked past me at the bay door, at the harbor beyond, at the pack house up the hill where smoke curled from the kitchen chimney. She was trying to see the life I’d built. I didn’t know what she thought of it.
“You look strong,” she said. “Stronger than at Iron River.”
“I’m the same person I was.”
“No.” She shook her head, and something flickered across her face that might have been envy or might have been grief. “You’re not.”
She walked back to her truck. I watched her cross the lane, her coat pulled tight against the wind, her steps careful around the oil stains and gravel patches.
At the driver’s door she paused and looked toward the far end of the yard where Rafe stood beside the hull he’d been scraping.
He’d stopped working. The borrowed flannel hung from his gaunt frame, and his right arm rested at his side with the scraper still in his fist. He watched Delia with an expression I couldn’t read from where I stood.
Neither of them moved toward the other. After a long moment, Delia got in and pulled the door shut. The engine started, and she backed out of the lane and drove toward the shore road without looking at me again.
Rafe stood there a few seconds longer. Then he turned back to the hull and lifted the scraper.
? ? ?
I went up to the pack house because I didn’t trust myself to stay in the yard.
The kitchen was empty. Jules’s lunch sat covered on the back burner, and the table had been wiped down, and the house held the quiet of a place where everyone had gone elsewhere on purpose.
Jules and Wade had seen Delia arrive and given me room, and the rest had followed.
I washed my hands at the kitchen sink until the grease faded to gray ghosts in my knuckles. The water was cold. I left it cold.
My sister still loved me. I kept coming back to that, and it hurt more than the anger, the warning, or the admission about Rafe’s bed.
She had been selfish and envious and complicit in the worst thing anyone had ever done to me, and she was still my sister, and she was hurting, and I had not held her.
I turned off the water and gripped the edge of the sink.
Through the bond, Rafe’s thin thread carried a dull ache. He had just watched Delia drive away from the life I’d built without him. I left him to it.
A low, patient fury settled in me, directed south toward a house in iron country where my father sat at his desk and listened to Conrad Sutherland explain why his eldest daughter’s answer belonged to someone other than her.
Gordon had let me walk into that ceremony blind.
He had arranged a substitution behind my back.
He had warned me that leaving meant losing his protection, and now he was negotiating with the man who’d sent armed wolves into this yard to grab me.
And he still believed, after all of it, that the right phone call or the right appeal to duty would bring me home to say four words and make his treaty whole.
I dried my hands on the kitchen towel and hung it on the hook. The house creaked around me. Outside, the October wind drove whitecaps across the harbor and bent the birches along the ridge. Somewhere in the yard, metal scraped against fiberglass in that slow, relentless rhythm.
I sat at the scarred kitchen table and put my hands flat on the pine. The wood was cool and solid and smelled faintly of lemon and soap. It belonged to a house that had taken me in without asking me to be anyone other than who I was.
Gordon and Conrad still believed my answer was theirs to schedule. Like the treaty and the ceremony and the public humiliation and the armed men in the yard had all been reasonable steps in a process, and the only remaining problem was that one stubborn woman hadn’t yet agreed to make it tidy.
They could wait.