Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Saylor
Telling someone the truth doesn't make you lighter. It makes you hollow.
The morning after I told Rookie everything, I wake up in my apartment feeling scraped clean.
Like someone took a spatula to the inside of my ribcage and removed whatever was keeping me upright.
He didn't flinch. He didn't look at me differently.
He held me on a freezing porch while I cried, and then he followed me home and sat outside until my lights went off.
He texted at midnight:
Doors locked?
I texted back:
Yeah.
Ten seconds might have gone by before he texted me again:
I'll handle this.
I don't know what "handle this" means in his world.
Part of me doesn't want to know. The rest of me is so tired of being afraid that someone else's willingness to carry the weight feels like oxygen.
* * *
By Thursday night, everything feels different. Not the temperature. The way people look at me.
I’m at Backroads, and a woman I've served a dozen times takes her chardonnay from my grip without making eye contact and moves to the far end of the counter.
Two guys at a high-top go silent when I bring their beers. One mutters something after I turn away. His buddy shushes him.
Not out of respect. Out of awareness that I'm close enough to hear.
A woman in the bathroom stares at me while I wash my hands and says to her friend, loud enough for the words to carry through the stall door: "That's her. The Halstead girl."
I dry my palms on my jeans, walk out, head behind the bar, and pour the next drink.
The mask is on. It's been on for years.
But the hits keep coming.
A man at the counter asks if I'm related to "that Halstead guy" while I'm pouring his beer. He doesn't lower his voice, and I doubt he cares who hears.
I set the beer in front of him, and my expression doesn't move. "Can I get you anything else?"
He picks up the glass. "My wife went to school with Christine Pelletier."
Christine's name in a stranger's mouth. Aimed at me across the bar like he was making small talk and not gutting me with it.
I don't respond. My fingers wrap around the rag on the counter and squeeze.
Ellie appears from the kitchen.
I don't know how she heard. The woman has ears that could pick up a whisper through a concrete wall and the timing of a sniper.
She walks to the bar, stands directly across from the man, and folds her arms.
"You got something you want to say to my bartender, you say it to me first." Her voice is low and level and carries more authority per syllable than most people manage in a paragraph.
The man blinks. "I was making conversation."
Ellie leans forward, both palms flat on the bar. "No. You were making a point. And the point's been made."
She straightens. "Now finish your beer and get the fuck out of my bar."
He opens his mouth.
"That wasn't a suggestion." Ellie doesn't raise her voice. The room has gone silent around her, and every person within earshot has stopped breathing.
He finishes his beer in two long pulls, drops a five on the counter, and walks out.
Ellie watches him go. Then she turns to me, leaning one hip against the bar. "You okay?" Low, for me alone.
I swallow around the knot in my throat. "Yeah."
She nods once. Picks up the five, folds it, and tucks it into my tip jar.
"He doesn't get to come back." She says it to me, but loud enough for the room. "Anyone else got opinions about who works behind my bar, the door's right there."
Nobody moves.
Ellie squeezes my shoulder once, firmly, and goes back to the kitchen.
I pour the next drink and pretend my eyes aren't stinging.
The rest of the shift is a gauntlet. Not every customer is cruel. Most of them don't know, don't care, are here for cheap beer and a good time.
But the ones who know make sure I feel it.
A woman at a booth asks Tildie if "that Halstead girl" is really working here now.
Tildie looks at her, picks up her half-finished margarita, and says "That Halstead girl made your drink, so if you've got a problem with her, you've got a problem with the salt on your rim." The woman doesn't order another round.
A college kid I've never seen before takes a photo of me behind the bar when he thinks I'm not looking. I see the phone angle, and the flash he forgot to turn off.
Beats, who's been nursing a Coke at his table all night, stands up and walks over to the kid. I can't hear what he says, but the kid deletes the photo, leaves cash on the table, and is gone in under a minute.
Tildie appears at my elbow after the college kid leaves. She doesn't say anything about what happened. She doesn't need to.
She picks up a rag and starts wiping the bar beside me, close enough that our arms brush.
"Ellie threw a man out of this bar for calling Vanna a junkie last year," Tildie says it to the counter, not to me. "Picked up his beer and poured it in the trash in front of him."
I glance at her.
"She doesn't protect people because she likes them." Tildie rinses the rag, wringing it with both fists. "She protects people because she knows what it costs when nobody does."
The words settle into my chest and stay there.
Rookie calls me on my break. I step into the back hallway and press the phone against my ear.
"The club identified the guy from the parking lot." His voice is controlled, stripped down to facts. "His name is Dale Creedy."
Dale.
The name hits like a brick through a window.
My legs stop working. I lean against the wall and press my free palm flat against the concrete.
Dale. A mentor named Dale who's been helping him process his anger.
My father's letter. The second paragraph. The progress report, the therapy, the clarity.
He wrote about Dale like the man was a gift. A guide. A sign of change.
Dale Creedy was his cellmate.
Rookie runs down Dale’s charges with me.
My father's mentor is a man who beats women.
The clarity he found in prison came from a man who understood his violence because he shared it. Two predators in a cell, sharpening each other, and my father called it growth.
He called it healing.
He wrote about it in a letter he sent to the daughter he lost, and he expected me to be proud of him for it.
"Saylor?" Rookie's voice sharpens. "You there?"
I slide down the wall until I'm sitting on the floor. "Dale. My father wrote about him in the letter."
My voice cracks. "He called him a mentor. Said Dale was helping him work through his anger."
Silence on his end. I can hear him breathing. I can hear the exact moment the information hits him.
"I thought it was a counselor. A therapist." I press the heel of my palm against my forehead. "It was his cellmate the whole damn time. The man my father said was helping him get better is the same man who showed up at my mother's door."
I pull my knees to my chest on the break room floor. The fluorescent light hums above me.
I press my cheek against my kneecap. "My father sent him to us and called it love."
When Rookie speaks again, his voice is different. The warmth is gone. What's left is metal. "Don't go anywhere alone tonight. I'll be at Backroads before your shift ends."
The line goes dead.
I sit on the hallway floor and think about my father writing "clarity" in blue ballpoint while the man who taught him that clarity sat in the next cell planning how to find his daughter.
* * *
Rookie is at Backroads by ten.
The club is watching me so I should feel safe.
I don't. Because safety is a feeling I've never been able to hold for more than a few hours, and the last man who promised me safety was my father.
My shift ends at midnight. I grab my jacket, pull my keys, and Rookie is waiting by my car.
He reaches for my hand.
The voice comes from behind me.
Not shouted. Calm, steady, coming from the shadow between the dumpster and the building's east wall where the lot light doesn't reach.
Creedy steps out, his boot scuffing gravel. "Saylor."
Same cap, same broad frame. Same practiced smile that doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes.
"I told you he wouldn't stop." He says it like he's delivering good news. "Your daddy's a persistent man."
Rookie moves. Two strides. His body slots between mine and Creedy's, his shoulders squaring, his chin dropping.
"You need to leave." Rookie's voice drops low enough to vibrate in my sternum. Flat. Final.
Creedy lifts his palms, spreading his fingers wide. "Easy, kid. I'm not here for trouble."
Rookie takes another step forward. "I'm not a kid, and you’ve got ten seconds to get the fuck back in your truck and leave."
Creedy's smile cracks. What's underneath isn't friendly.
He's sizing Rookie up the way my father used to size up anyone who stood between him and what he wanted.
His attention shifts past Rookie, finding me.
The practiced smile is gone now, replaced by something thinner and harder.
A look I recognize from my father's sentencing hearing.
He tilts his head to see around Rookie's shoulder. "Saylor, honey, your father loves?—"
"She told you to stay away." Rookie's voice cuts across Creedy's without raising a single decibel. "Her mother told you. Now I'm telling you."
Creedy's jaw tightens. He takes half a step to the right, angling to see around Rookie, and Rookie mirrors the movement without hesitation. Blocking. Keeping his body between mine and Creedy's sightline.
The calmness drains away, and what replaces it is interest.
The attention of a predator who's been challenged.
He looks at Rookie's cut. At the prospect patch.
"You're a prospect." He says it like a diagnosis. "You're nobody."
Rookie doesn't move. Doesn't blink. His breathing hasn't changed since the confrontation started, and the stillness of his body is more threatening than any fist I've ever seen raised.
"Walk away." Two words. No volume. A statement delivered with the certainty of gravity.
Creedy holds for a long count.
His gaze slides past Rookie one more time, finding me over his shoulder. The I-see-you look. The I'm-not-done look. The look that says this conversation isn't ending, it's pausing.
Then he turns.