Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hadley
I've been on this porch for an hour and I haven't written anything.
The notebook is open on my lap. The pencil is in my hand. The page is blank in the way pages get blank when your brain is in a different room than your body.
The heat is coming up through the porch boards in long slow waves. The cicadas are loud. Diesel is asleep at my boots with his belly against the cool plank where the shade falls. The dishtowel I brought outside with me is wadded in my left hand for no reason at all.
My right thumb keeps finding the chain at my throat. It happens four times before I catch myself. I make my hand drop into my lap. It comes back up to the chain before I count to twenty. I make it drop again.
I've been at Rogue's cabin now for three days.
Three days of feeling like I'm his woman, three days of every brother on this ranch carrying a piece of what Phantom used to carry alone, and every gate having a body on it, and Hartley's truck sitting somewhere south of Llano with my whole life in his crosshairs.
I'm grateful, and I'm losing my mind a little.
The pencil moves. I look down. I've written *Garrett would've hated this* on the page and I don't remember writing it.
Boots on the gravel pulls my attention from my notepad. I look up.
Bex is crossing the gravel from the direction of the barn, and there is no clean place left on her.
Her leather farrier's apron is hanging from one shoulder.
Her t-shirt is dark at the chest and under the arms. Her jeans are grey at the knees from the dust. There's a long smear of grease up the inside of her right forearm where she's been wiping it.
Her dark hair is back in a knot that's coming apart on one side.
She's got her water bottle hooked through two fingers and a rasp tucked into the back pocket of her jeans like she forgot to take it out.
She climbs the steps without slowing down and drops into the empty porch chair beside me. "Tell me you got somethin' cold to drink, Cross."
I laugh. The laugh comes up from somewhere deep. "Sweet tea. Be right back."
I get up, go inside, and come back with two glasses and hand her one. She drains half of it in three swallows. Sets the glass down on the porch boards between her boots. Wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist and moves the grease smear to a different part of her arm.
"Lord."
"Long day?"
"Spur's three barrel horses are gettin' twitchy with every brother on the gate. Tippin' their feet, dancin' on the cross-ties, gettin' froggy when I lean into the hoof. I worked an extra half hour on each one of 'em to settle their feet down. Took me till now."
"You been at it since when?"
"Since sunup."
"Bex."
"Don't Bex me. Banshee's on the gate till dark and he ain't allowed to leave. Somebody's gotta keep this ranch's feet under it. I'm the closest thing they got to a farrier who'll deal with finicky horses in forty-five miles."
She tips her head back against the chair and closes her eyes.
I look at her. The grease on her forearm. The sweat at her temples. The bandana she's tied around her wrist that I think is supposed to be a sweat rag. The smell coming off her of horse, a hot day, and a working woman who hasn't stopped since the sun came up.
I haven't taken off my own house slippers since this morning. "Bex."
She doesn't open her eyes. "Yeah?"
"Are you okay? With everything that's happenin'?"
She is quiet for a long moment with her face up to the porch ceiling. "I'm okay enough."
A small thing moves at the corner of her mouth.
"I been doin' this longer than you, Cross.
I been Banshee's woman through three Vegas trips and a Copperhead summer.
I been watchin' our men brace this ranch for ugly weather since I was a kid, I suppose.
The Shotgun Saints MC have always been part of my life, one way or another. They're royalty around these parts."
She opens her eyes and turns her head to look at me. Her eyes are dark and tired and very clear. "How you holdin' up, Cross? Give me the real answer, not some polite bullshit."
The pencil is still in my right hand. I press the lead of it slowly into the page of my notebook until the point breaks under the pressure.
"I keep thinkin' I should be more scared than I am. Or I should be more okay than I am. I don't know which one is the wrong feelin'."
Bex doesn't look at me right away. Her eyes are on the gate, on her husband's truck parked there in the heat. "Neither. Both. That's the deal."
I look down at the broken pencil in my hand. "Is it always like this?"
She nods once, slow. "When the firm or somebody's grandmother's cousin decides to come at us, yeah. It's like this. You get used to it, though. You don't get used to the not knowin' when it ends part."
Her glass is empty. She doesn't pick it up to fill it. Her thumb runs along the lip of it where it sits between her boots. "How long since the last time?"
"A while now." Her thumb stops moving on the glass. "And it was bad."
She looks at the front gate from where we sit. Banshee's truck is the only thing she can see from here. Her face shifts for a split second. "It can be really bad, sometimes, Cross. You should know that, but you should also know that the club will do anything to protect its women and children."
I let the silence sit.
Her eyes don't leave the gate. "Cross. Can I say one more thing."
"Yeah."
"That man's been waitin' on you since before you knew his name."
The pencil moves a quarter inch in my hand.
"Two months I been watchin' him watch the porch of your cabin. Banshee saw it before I did. Came home one night about six weeks ago and said Rogue went over the cliff and didn't even know it yet."
She keeps staring at Banshee's truck. "Rogue's been waitin' on a woman for a decade.
He'd put himself in the ground for your boy by the end of next week.
You don't get to keep parts of yourself protected from a man like that.
Either give it all to him or give him nothin'.
He'll handle whatever you give him, but he can't handle half. "
Bex turns her head and looks at me. "You hearin' me, Cross?"
"Loud and clear."
"Good."
She stretches her arms over her head until her back cracks, reaches down and picks her water bottle off the porch boards and stands up.
My phone buzzes against the porch boards next to my notebook. I pick it up and see it's a text from Thunder:
*Mama's askin if Nash can come over tonight for a movie night with Raine. Popcorn on the couch, the whole production. Diesel welcome too. I'll come grab the boy in about an hour if y'all are good with it.*
I type back without having to think about it.
*Yes, please. Tell Mama Lou I owe her one.*
I set the phone down. Bex doesn't ask what it was. She waits for me to say something. "Mama Lou wants Nash and Diesel tonight. Movie night with Raine."
Bex's mouth pulls into the slow knowing smile. "Mama Lou is a saint. That woman has been collectin' kids since she had Thunder. She'll have Nash thinkin' he's at Disneyland by the time the credits roll."
"That's what I'm countin' on."
Bex's eyebrow goes up a quarter inch. "That right?"
I laugh and Bex heads down the porch. "There's one more thing I've noticed about you."
"Yeah?"
She doesn't turn around. She's looking out at the gravel with her water bottle in her hand and her back to me. "That chain at your throat. The one your fingers keep findin'."
My hand drops away from it.
"You don't have to be ready before you're ready.
But when you're ready—when it's time—you'll know.
And it won't feel like losin' him. It'll feel like settin' him down somewhere safe.
I went through all of this with Banshee.
I don't know if you know it, but his dead wife was my best friend.
Grief is complicated, and no one will try to push it on ya. Take your time."
She lifts a hand without looking back and walks across the gravel toward her own cabin.
I sit on the porch with the broken pencil in my hand and Diesel breathing slow against my boot. I don't move for a long time.
Thunder comes for Nash around supper.
Nash runs across the gravel with his backpack and his Switch and Stitch under one arm and Diesel keeping pace at his hip.
Thunder lifts him into the cab one-handed and Diesel jumps up beside him without being told.
Thunder buckles Nash in, tips his hat at me from the driver's side, and the truck pulls down the drive.
Nash waves at me from the back window until they turn the bend.
The dust settles on the gravel. The ranch goes quiet.
I cross the gravel to my own cabin. The screen door makes the same sound it always makes. The boards under my feet feel the same. The smell is the same—the same lavender soap, the same coffee, the same six-year-old socks balled up under the kitchen table from a morning I can't remember now.
Nothing has changed in this cabin. I'm the one who's changed.
I walk down the short hall to my bedroom and stand at the dresser. I look at myself in the small mirror above it. My hair is up off my neck from the heat. My face is the same face it's been for thirty years. The chain is around my throat where it has been since the day Garrett died.
I lift both hands to the back of my neck. The clasp is small and warm from my skin. I work it open with my fingers. The chain slides forward over my collarbone and into my palm. The weight of Garrett's ring lands in the gold.
I sit down on the edge of my bed because my knees go and hold the chain in both hands. The ring is warm and the chain is warm. My palms are cold.
I look at the ring for a long time.
*Garrett.*
The word doesn't come out of my mouth. It moves through my chest the way a hand moves through water.
My thumb works the ring up off the chain. It comes loose with a small clean motion that takes longer than it should and shorter than I expected.