Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Saylor
Something has changed in the clubhouse and nobody will tell me what.
The brothers move differently. Doors close when I walk down hallways. Conversations stop mid-sentence when I step into the kitchen. Ruger's office light has been on for two days straight.
Rookie says it's club business. His jaw tightens when he says it, which means it's bad club business, but I've learned the boundaries of what I'm allowed to ask and this sits on the other side.
I don't push. He didn't push me when I was hiding Creedy. Returning the courtesy costs me some sleep, but I return it.
Creedy’s gone, though. The parking lot at Backroads has been empty after every shift the last few days.
My mother hasn't seen the truck on her street in days now either. The gas station, the Kroger, the dental office—all clear.
Rookie came home that night smelling like cold air and soap.
His knuckles were clean, but his expression was different.
I didn't ask what happened and he didn't tell me.
Some doors stay closed for a reason. I've lived behind enough of them to know when one is doing its job.
The Backroads crowd is thin tonight. It’s cold and that doesn't bring people out during the middle of the week.
The temperature dropped below twenty after sundown.
Sarah is at the bar.
This is the fourth time in eight days. She used to come with Porter, sit in a booth, order wine, leave by ten. Now she comes alone, sits at the counter, orders whiskey, and stays until Tildie or I cut her off.
Tonight she's on her third double by eight o'clock.
I pour the fourth when she slides her glass toward me because cutting her off will make her leave, and right now she looks like a woman who shouldn't be driving, or walking.
Her makeup is smudged under her left eye. Not from crying tonight. From crying earlier today and reapplying without a mirror.
She's wearing Porter's flannel. The one he leaves draped over the back of their booth when they come in together.
She's swimming in it, the sleeves rolled four times, the collar smelling like a man who isn't here.
"You eating tonight?" I set a napkin beside her glass.
She shakes her head without looking up. Her thumb traces the rim, around and around, a loop with no exit.
I don't push. I stay close.
Tildie catches my eye from the other end of the bar and raises an eyebrow. I give a small shake of my head. Not yet. Let her sit.
The bar is warm, the music is low, and Sarah Boyd is dissolving in front of me one whiskey at a time.
I can't help her because I don't know what's killing her.
Except I have pieces.
I found something out. It's going to ruin everything.
The absent husband. The empty booth.
Something is breaking inside Sarah's marriage, and whatever it is, she's drowning it in Jameson because the alternative is feeling it sober.
I've watched a woman drown before. My mother.
After the divorce, before the trial, during the years when Dennis Halstead's name was still fresh enough to draw blood in casual conversation. She didn't drink—my mother's coping was cleaner than that, all locked doors, lemon cleaner, and control.
But the drowning looked the same. The hollow stare. The mechanical movements. The body operating on autopilot while the mind goes somewhere nobody can follow.
Sarah lifts her glass, sets it down without drinking and lifts it again.
"He won't even talk about it." She says it to the whiskey, not to me.
I lean my hip against the bar. "Talk about what?"
Her lips press together. For a long time she doesn't answer, and I think she's going to shut down the way she shut down last time—pick up her drink, drain it, walk out.
She doesn't walk out.
"A baby." The word lands on the counter between us like a stone dropped from a height. "I've been asking for two years. He keeps saying it's not the right time. Club's too hot. Things need to settle."
She picks at the edge of the napkin I set beside her glass, tearing it into strips.
"Things are never going to settle, Saylor. This is a motorcycle club. There's always something. There's always a reason to wait." Her voice cracks. "And I'm running out of years to wait."
I don't speak. I stand there and let her talk because Tildie taught me that an open door is better than a knocked-down wall, and Sarah needs a door right now, not advice.
"I almost died for this club." She looks up at me and her mascara is running fresh. "I took a bullet. I lay in a hospital bed for two weeks and my husband came when he could, between Church and club business and whatever else was more important than his wife with a hole in her."
She swipes under her eye with the heel of her palm, smearing the mascara wider.
"I love him. I love Porter. Donnie." She uses his real name and the tenderness in it makes my ribs ache. "But he loves the table more. And I can't compete with a piece of wood and a room full of men who've known him longer than I have."
The front door opens.
Cold air. Boots on hardwood.
The sound of a man who isn't walking—he's arriving. The way Ruger arrives. The way men in this world enter a room when the room needs to know they're in it.
Porter is standing in the doorway.
He's in his cut, his face carved from something harder than stone.
Red rimmed, jaw locked, the veins in his neck visible from twenty feet away.
He looks like a man who's been handed a grenade and told it's been ticking for months.
His attention sweeps the room until he finds Sarah.
She sees him.
Her spine goes rigid on the barstool. The glass in her grip stops moving.
The air in the bar changes.
The two regulars at the high-top go silent.
Tildie's expression shifts from alert to locked down, her body already angling toward the situation.
Porter crosses the room in six strides. He doesn't sit.
He stands beside Sarah's stool, towering over her, close enough to touch, not touching.
"Ruger told me." His voice is low, controlled. The controlled you hear when screaming would be easier. "About the house in Clarksburg. About Cody."
Sarah's face drains. Every drop of color, gone. Her skin goes the shade of the napkin she's been shredding.
"Donnie—" She reaches for his arm.
He steps back. One step. Enough space between himself and a detonation.
"You gave him my passwords." Porter's voice hasn't risen. The flatness of it is worse than the volume. "You let a man I've never met into our network. Into our financials. Into the one thing I've spent my entire adult life building."
Sarah's hand hovers in the air where his arm was. She pulls it back slowly.
"I didn't mean for it to go this far." Her voice is barely audible. "I didn't know he would?—"
"What did you think he would do, Sarah?" Porter's jaw flexes. "You handed a stranger our keys. What did you think was going to happen?"
"He's not a stranger." She says it and immediately closes her eyes, and the admission hangs in the bar like gunpowder waiting for a spark.
He's not a stranger.
Porter goes very still.
The silence that follows is the loudest sound I've ever heard in this bar. Louder than Ellie throwing out the man who called Vanna a junkie. Louder than the reopening crowd. Louder than anything.
"How long?" Porter's voice drops so low I feel it in the floorboards.
Sarah opens her eyes. The tears are falling now, unchecked, running down her jaw and dripping onto Porter's flannel.
"Since the hospital." She whispers it. "He reached out when I was recovering. You were at the club. You were always at the damn club. And he called and he asked how I was, Donnie, and he waited for the answer. He didn’t rush me off, or tell me he had someplace to be."
Porter's chin drops. His hands are at his sides, fists opening and closing, the tendons in his forearms standing out like cable.
"I wanted you to fight for me." Sarah's voice breaks open. "I wanted you to notice. I wanted you to choose me over the table, over Church, over every goddamn brother in that building, for once."
She presses her palms flat on the counter. The same gesture I use. The same gesture my mother uses. The universal pose of a woman holding herself together because the counter is the only thing that won't move.
"I wanted a baby, Donnie. I wanted a family. And every time I asked, you told me it wasn't the right time."
Porter makes a sound. Not a word.
A sound from the center of his chest, punched out of him like air from a gut shot.
He turns and walks out. Doesn't slam the door. Doesn't speak. The door closes behind him with a soft click that carries more finality than any slam.
The motorcycle fires outside. The engine roars, revs, and then fades down the road until there's nothing left to hear.
The fact he’s riding his bike on a night as cold as this is terrifying. He could easily hit ice and get himself killed.
Sarah puts her head on the bar and cries.
I walk around the counter, sit on the stool beside her, and put my hand on her shaking shoulder.
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say.
She's a woman whose marriage detonated in a bar while she was wearing her husband's flannel, and the only comfort I can offer is the weight of my hand and the knowledge that I won't leave until she's ready to stand.
Tildie appears with a glass of water and a box of tissues. She sets them down without a word and goes back behind the bar.
The regulars left during the confrontation.
The bar is empty except for the three of us—two women on stools and one behind the counter, holding the wreckage together the way club women do.
In silence. With presence. Without flinching. Without needing to be asked.
Rookie finds me in the parking lot after we close.
He's leaning against his truck, breath visible in the air, his cut collar turned up against the cold.
He straightens when he sees my face.
"I heard." His voice is low. "Tildie called Ruger."
I nod. My throat is tight from two hours of holding Sarah's weight without letting my own shake loose.
He opens his arms and I walk straight into them.
His chin rests on top of my head. His warmth wraps around me, blocking the wind, and I press my face into his chest and breathe.
"She wanted a baby." I say it into his shirt. "She wanted a family and he kept saying not yet. I could see how it was slowly killing her, Rookie. It was… so sad. Now she blew up her life… for what? I’m sure they could have worked something out. But, from what I can tell, she cheated and betrayed the club. There’s no excuse for that. "
His arms tighten. "I know."
We stand there. The parking lot is empty. The Backroads sign glows behind us, and the mountains are black shapes against a blacker sky.
"Saylor." He says my name into my hair. "I need you to know something."
I pull back enough to look at him. His expression is open in a way I haven't seen before. Not guarded, not controlled. Bare.
"You're mine." He says it without flinching. "And I'm yours. And I'm not saying that because of what happened with Sarah and Porter or because I'm scared of losing you. I'm saying it because I should've fucking said it ages ago. Not only that, but I’m in love with you, Saylor."
My eyes sting. The cold air bites at the moisture and I blink it away.
"I don't know your real name." I say it with a laugh caught somewhere in my throat. "And you're telling me I'm yours, and that you love me."
The corner of his mouth lifts. "You'll get my name. I promise. But I need you to know what you are to me first."
His thumbs brush across my cheekbones. My cold skin burns under his touch.
"You're not a secret. You're not a situation I'm handling. You're the woman I want beside me, and I'll say that in front of Ruger and Bloodhound and every brother at the table if you need me to."
I grip the front of his jacket with both fists. "I don't need you to say it in front of them."
He raises an eyebrow.
"I needed you to say it to me." I press my forehead against his chin. "And you did, and in case it isn’t obvious, I love you too, Rookie."
He kisses me. Cold lips, warm breath. Deliberate and certain.
My fingers slide up his chest and curl into the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him closer.
His mouth opens against mine and the cold parking lot disappears.
He groans into my mouth, low enough to vibrate through my ribs, and his arms wrap around my waist, lifting me until my boots leave the ground.
I grip the collar of his cut with both fists and kiss him like I've been holding my breath for months and his mouth is the only air I need.
When we pull apart, I'm shaking, and it’s not from the cold.
"Come on." He opens the passenger door of his truck. "I'll drive you to your mom's."
Backroads closes earlier during the weeknights, so by the time I’m in Mom's kitchen, it’s around eleven-thirty.
She's in her robe, a mug of tea in her grip, the TV playing a Hallmark movie she's already seen twice.
She doesn't ask why I'm here this late. She makes me a mug and sits beside me on the couch and waits.
The Hallmark movie plays. A woman in a small town falls for a man who builds things. The conflict is mild. The resolution is guaranteed.
The snow is fake but the warmth is real.
I curl my feet beneath me on the couch. "I'm happy, Mom."
She sets her tea down and looks at me.
Really looks, the way she looked at me the morning I told her about the letter.
Except this time she's searching for something different. Not damage. Evidence.
"His name is Rookie." I tuck my feet under me on the couch. "Well, it's not his real name. It's his road name. He's in a motorcycle club."
Her eyebrows lift. Not alarm. Processing.
"He's the one who got me the job at Backroads. He sits next to me in statistics and he's terrible at math and he borrows ridiculous pens to make me laugh."
The corner of her mouth twitches.
"He knows about Dad." I swallow. "He knows about Halstead. About the name change. About all of it."
She goes still. The Hallmark movie fills the silence with orchestral strings and dialogue about Christmas decorations.
"And?" Her voice is careful.
"He didn't flinch." My voice cracks on the word. "He looked at me and said my father's crime isn't mine, and he meant it, Mom. He's the first person who ever meant it."
Her eyes fill. She sets her tea on the coffee table and pulls me into a hug so tight my ribs compress.
"Good." She says it into my hair, her voice thick. "Good."
We stay like that for a long time. The Hallmark movie reaches its resolution. The woman gets the man. The snow falls. The credits roll.
My mother pulls back and holds my face between her palms. Her eyes are wet but her expression is fierce.
"You deserve someone who doesn't flinch." She brushes my hair behind my ear. "You've always deserved it. And I've been waiting a long time to see you find it."
I sleep in the guest bed. She sets a glass of water on the nightstand, like she did when I was a little girl.
Things feel different now, like I’m not weighed down by stress.
And honestly, it’s about damn time.