Epilogue
Lennox
The morning heat came in through the open sides of my property cut and pressed itself against my skin like a warm palm.
I’d stopped closing it sometime in my sixth month when the belly made the zipper pointless, and now the leather hung open over the soft cotton tank that was stretched tight across the swell of me.
The fire pit bench was warm under my thighs.
I’d been sitting here for twenty minutes with a mug of coffee strong enough to strip paint, watching the compound wake up around me in the particular slow-motion way it did on days when the humidity sat on everything and nobody was in a particular hurry to move through it.
Brick passed by the main house with a toolbox in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other.
He didn’t break stride when he saw me, just lifted his chin and said, “Morning, trouble,” the way he’d been saying it since the day after the fundraiser when the first stories broke and the compound phone started ringing with calls from journalists I never returned. I lifted my mug in answer.
The compound breathed.
From the garage came the steady growl of an engine being tuned -- someone working the throttle, letting it idle, cutting it, then the metallic clank of a tool on concrete and a low curse that carried across the yard.
Beyond the fence line, the cicadas had reached that particular pitch where the sound wasn’t individual insects anymore but a single continuous wall of noise that you stopped noticing until it ended, and then the silence felt wrong.
Someone had fired up the grill near the clubhouse.
The smell of lighter fluid and charcoal caught the breeze and rolled across the yard, and underneath it was the greener smell of the trees that pressed against the perimeter fencing on three sides, the pine and the oak and whatever else grew in the Tennessee dirt that the Reckless Kings had decided was worth putting a fence around.
I took another sip of coffee.
Grant Stewart’s name hadn’t appeared in the news in months. It had been a fiasco of epic proportions, featured on the news almost daily. But the investigation had hit a snag, and I hadn’t heard anything more. Not that it mattered. Grant was out of my life, and that was good enough for me.
My hand was steady. No tremor, no half-grip, no careful placement of the mug that said I was afraid of spilling.
I set it on my knee and left it there, and my other hand came to rest on the curve of my belly where the baby was doing whatever babies did at nine in the morning -- kicking, probably, or turning, or just existing with the particular insistence of something that had decided it was coming out whether the world was ready or not.
I could feel the shape of a foot or an elbow pressing against the inside of my palm, a hard, little ridge of bone or joint that moved when I pressed back.
And so I pressed back and the ridge moved again.
I smiled into my coffee because nobody was watching and I didn’t have to explain the smile to anyone.
“Jesus Christ, that’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard.”
The voice came from behind me. I turned to see Jinx walking backward toward the clubhouse, his hands up in surrender while Brick stood at the garage door with a socket wrench in his fist and an expression that suggested the wrench might find a new home if the joke didn’t improve.
“Come on, man, it was solid.”
“It was dogshit.”
“I’m telling you, the delivery --”
“The delivery was you standing there with your dick in your hand waiting for a laugh that never came.”
I leaned forward on the bench. The movement pulled the cut open wider across my chest, and the morning air hit the sweat on my collarbone and cooled it, and I called out, “He’s right. It was terrible. I’ve heard better material from the morning news.”
Jinx turned. His face did something complicated that started as offense and ended as a grin. “You weren’t even listening.”
“I’ve got ears.”
“You’ve got opinions is what you’ve got.”
“Same thing,” I said, and took another drink.
He laughed. The sound was open and unguarded, the kind of laugh that came from the chest and didn’t worry about who heard it, and I laughed with him, my shoulders shaking, the coffee sloshing in the mug.
The laugh filled the yard for a second, and when it died down the cicadas picked up where they’d left off and the world kept turning.
One of the Prospects walked past on his way to the woodpile. He was carrying an armload of split logs, his face red from the heat. Another walked with him and gave me a quick smile. These people were my family now, and I’d never felt more welcome anywhere else.
Beast came out of the clubhouse with a beer in his hand, which at nine in the morning was either very early or very late depending on how you counted the hours.
He nodded at me, took a long pull from the bottle, and settled onto the bench across the fire pit with the particular heaviness of a man who had decided the day could start whenever he said it started.
“Your husband’s in the house losing his mind over a crib,” he said.
“I know.”
“He’s been at it since five.”
“I know that too.”
“He’s muttering. Loud. I could hear him through the wall.”
I set my mug down on the flat stone beside the bench. The baby shifted, a slow roll from one side to the other, and I adjusted my weight and felt the bench creak under me. “He’s building a crib, Beast. It’s not brain surgery.”
“It’s Ikea.”
“Same difference.”
Beast took another drink. The sun caught the gray in his beard and turned it silver, and for a second he looked older than he was, the lines around his eyes deeper in the morning light.
“Man’s been hovering over you like you’re made of glass.
You sneeze, he brings you tissues. You stand up, he’s got a hand under your elbow.
You want to tell him you’re pregnant, not dying? ”
The table behind us had filled up. Two of the brothers, a woman I didn’t know by name but recognized from the clubhouse kitchen, someone’s cousin visiting from Memphis.
They were playing cards, the soft slap of plastic on wood keeping time under the conversation, and when Beast finished his sentence the table went quiet for a beat and then someone snorted.
I rolled my eyes. The motion was so practiced by now it felt rehearsed, and maybe it was. “He’s excited.”
“He’s something.”
“He’s building a crib.”
“He’s building a fortress. I’ve seen less security around a bank vault.”
I picked up my coffee. Drank. Set it down.
The ring caught the light, the same one Rogue had slid onto my finger in a county courthouse that felt like it belonged to someone else’s life now.
“You want to tell him to back off, be my guest. I’ve tried.
He just brings me more water and asks if my feet hurt. ”
“Your feet hurt?”
“They’re the size of canoes.”
The table laughed. I felt it in my chest the way I felt all their laughter now -- not as something separate from me that I had to earn or deflect, but as another piece of the life I lived, no different than the cicadas, the motorcycles, or the smell of the grill drifting across the yard.
Beast raised his bottle in a toast that wasn’t really a toast. “To canoes, then.”
“To canoes,” I said, and raised my mug, and we drank, and the morning settled deeper into the compound around us, steady and mine in a way I was still learning to name.
* * *
The house was cooler than the yard, the air inside holding the particular stillness of a space that hadn’t been opened to the morning yet.
I left the screen door unlatched behind me and the song of the cicadas came in with the breeze, their sound thinning as it moved through the rooms, and I refilled my mug at the kitchen sink and stood for a minute with the water running over my wrists because the heat had found its way under my skin and I wanted it gone.
The second bedroom door was open.
I hadn’t closed it when I left that morning.
Rogue had been in there since before dawn, the sounds of cardboard tearing and plastic rustling carrying through the wall while I lay in bed with my eyes closed, listening to him move through the space with the particular focused rhythm of a man who had decided something needed doing and was going to do it whether the instructions made sense or not.
I stopped in the doorway.
The room looked like the aftermath of a very determined storm.
Flat-pack boxes torn open along their seams, the cardboard splayed across the floor in jagged crescents.
Wooden panels leaned against the wall in ascending size order -- he’d lined them up by height, the same way he lined up tools on a workbench, everything with its place even in chaos.
Hardware bags were spread across the rug, each one opened and its contents dumped into a careful row: screws here, bolts there, the little plastic connectors that came with warnings printed in four languages stacked in a tidy pile by the window.
In the center of it all, Rogue was crouched on his heels.
He had a dowel rod in one hand and the instruction sheet in the other, and the sheet was so crumpled from handling that the diagrams had started to fade along the fold lines.
His T-shirt was dark with sweat across the shoulders, the fabric clinging to the muscle underneath in a way that made me want to put my palm there and feel the heat of him through the cotton.
His jeans were dusty at the knees. One boot was untied.
His hair had fallen across his forehead, and he hadn’t bothered to push it back.
He was muttering.
Low, under his breath, the particular stream of commentary that happened when he was working on something that was fighting him.
Not loud enough for me to catch the words from the doorway, just the cadence of it, the rise and fall of a man having a one-sided conversation with an inanimate object that he fully expected to answer.
I leaned against the doorframe. My shoulder found the wood and settled there, and I cradled the coffee mug in both hands and watched him.
He picked up two panels. They were curved, meant for the headboard, and he fitted them together at the joint and held them there with one hand while he reached for a bolt with the other.
He held the position for three seconds. Then his brow furrowed, and he turned the panels in his hands, and I watched the realization cross his face -- backward.
He’d put them together backward. He let out a low curse, the kind that wasn’t performance, just the honest sound of a man who had been at this for four hours and was running out of patience with whoever had designed the thing.
He flipped them. Reached for the bolt again. Glanced at the instructions, which were now folded into a shape that resembled a paper airplane more than a set of directions, and said to the room at large, “Whoever drew this has never actually built a damn thing in their life.”
The room did not argue.
He picked up the bolt, fitted it into the hole, and started turning it with his fingers.
His knuckles were white. The muscle in his forearm shifted under the skin with each rotation, and I watched the movement and thought about the first time I’d seen those hands -- on a motorcycle at a gas station, reaching for me in the dark, and then later on my body in a bedroom where the light had stayed on.
He stopped turning. His hand stopped on the bolt. He didn’t look up. Didn’t turn his head. He merely paused, alert in an instant, and I knew he’d felt me. Not heard me. The cicadas were too loud for that, and I hadn’t made a sound. He’d just known, the way he knew most things about me now.
He turned. His eyes found me in the doorway, and whatever had been on his face -- the frustration, the concentration, the tight line of his mouth -- softened.
Not all at once. In increments, the way light changes when a cloud passes, and what was left was something quiet and open that he didn’t try to hide.
He set the instructions down on the floor.
Pushed up off his heels in one motion, his knees cracking audibly in the quiet room, and crossed to me in three strides.
His hand found my waist -- careful, always careful, his palm warm through the cotton of the tank top -- and he pulled me toward him and then down, settling himself on the edge of the low dresser box behind him and drawing me into his lap in the same motion.
I went. My weight settled against him, the swell of my belly pressing between us, and I felt his chest expand with a breath that was half-sigh, half-relief.
One of his arms locked around my lower back, holding me there.
He shifted us so we could place our hands over the swell of my stomach.
His palm was rough and warm, and his fingers laced through mine, and I could feel the baby move under our joined hands -- a slow shift, a roll.
He kissed me. His kiss was slow and assured, and he tasted like coffee and the particular salt of a man who’d been working in a closed room all morning.
He brought his hand up to cup my jaw and brushed the corner of my mouth with his thumb.
The kiss lasted long enough that the rest of the world blurred at the edges, becoming nothing more than distant distractions.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.
His breath was even. His hand stayed on my jaw, his thumb making small, unconscious strokes along the line of my cheekbone.
I closed my eyes and let the weight of his arm around me be what it was -- not protection, not possession, just the fact of him, solid and present and mine in a way that had stopped being a question months ago.
The room smelled like fresh wood and motor oil.
The instruction sheet lay crumpled by Rogue’s boot where he’d dropped it.
Through the window, the compound was alive -- someone laughing by the fire pit, the distant growl of the engine from the garage, the cicadas going in the trees beyond the fence -- and inside the half-built room, with Rogue’s hand on my belly and my weight settled against his chest, I opened my eyes and looked at his face and felt nothing in my body but the particular, settled quiet of a woman who was exactly where she meant to be.
No fear.
No plan.
No exit strategy ticking in the back of my mind, counting doors, measuring distances.
Just this.
He brushed his thumb across my cheekbone once more, and I turned my face into his palm and breathed him in, and the baby turned under our hands, and the room held us, and the world outside kept its distance the way it had learned to do.