Chapter 5 The Call
The call came on a Tuesday. Wren was restocking the mystery shelf when her phone buzzed with her aunt Lucille's number, and she almost let it ring through because Lucille usually called about coupon codes and church gossip. Some instinct told her to answer anyway.
"Wrenny." Lucille's voice was wrong, thick and unsteady in a way Wren had never heard from her before. "Honey, it's your daddy."
The floor of the shop seemed to tilt. "What happened."
"Heart attack. This morning, out at the garage. One of the boys found him on the floor. They got him to the hospital, but honey, you should come now if you're coming."
Wren didn't remember hanging up. She remembered Reyna's hands steering her toward a chair, and then not sitting in it, and then the highway toward Iron Falls, pulling over twice because her hands shook too hard to trust the wheel.
Her father's garage sat two streets from the Iron Reapers clubhouse.
Everyone in Iron Falls knew everyone, which was half of why she'd left, and going home now meant going back to the town where her marriage had died in a room with a cactus pillow on the bed, where every third face on the street would recognize her as the president's exwife before they recognized her as anyone's daughter.
She made it to the hospital forty minutes after driving faster than she ever had on that stretch of highway. Lucille met her in the waiting room with red-rimmed eyes, and the hug told Wren everything before anyone said the words out loud.
"He's gone, baby. He went about ten minutes before you got here. I'm so sorry."
Wren didn't cry right away. She sat in a plastic chair that smelled like antiseptic and bad coffee and felt the world go very quiet and very far away, the way it had felt for one specific moment eight months ago, standing in a doorway watching a stranger's hands on her husband's back.
Grief had a texture she recognized now. She hated that she recognized it.
She hated that her body had already learned the shape of catastrophic loss well enough to slide into it like an old coat.
Her father, Walter Calloway, had run the town's only full-service garage for thirty-one years.
He'd fixed cars for half of Iron Falls and both motorcycle clubs without prejudice, had walked her down the aisle at her wedding with tears in his eyes and a whispered warning to Cain that if he ever hurt his little girl, president's patch or not, Walter would find a way to make him regret it.
He'd never said a word against Cain after the divorce started, not once, though Wren knew he'd wanted to.
He'd just quietly started coming to see her in Hollow Creek instead of the other way around.
Now she'd have to bury him in the town that held both her happiest memories and the worst night of her life, surrounded by people who all knew her married name better than her maiden one, and she'd have to do it while half the Iron Reapers showed up out of respect for a man who'd kept their bikes running for three decades without ever once asking whose colors they wore.She sat on her father's porch that night, in his chair, wrapped in a flannel jacket that still smelled like motor oil and Old Spice, and let herself cry properly for the first time all day, grief and exhaustion and eight months of unresolved fury all tangled together until she couldn't tell anymore which loss she was actually crying for.
Forty minutes away, Cain heard the news the way everyone in Iron Falls heard everything, through the fast, informal network of people who'd lived their whole lives in a small town's orbit.
He sat very still for a long moment, feeling something complicated and guilty twist through his chest, grief for a good man who'd treated him fairly even after every reason to do otherwise, and underneath it, shamefully, a flicker of something that felt dangerously close to hope, the terrible thought that grief might crack open a door that eight months of his own effort hadn't managed to move an inch.
He hated himself a little for the thought. He had it anyway.
Manny called that same evening, his voice thick, once word had traveled through the small, tight network of people who'd known Walter Calloway for decades.
"Whatever you need, Wren. Whatever the shop needs.
We'll keep the doors open, keep the guys paid, keep everything running exactly the way your daddy would've wanted, for as long as it takes you to figure out what comes next.
Just wanted you to know that tonight, so it's one less thing sitting on your chest."
Wren thanked him through a throat too tight to manage much more, and sat with the phone in her lap long after the call ended, grateful, in the specific way grief makes a person grateful for small, steady kindnesses, for a crew of men who'd clearly loved her father as much as she had.
Wren sat with her father's employees the next morning, all three of them gathered in the small break room that smelled permanently of motor oil and burnt coffee, and found herself, through her own grief, having to steady three other people's uncertainty about their futures.
"Nobody's losing their job," she told them, with more conviction than she actually felt in that raw, exhausted moment.
"I don't know yet exactly what this looks like long term.
But nobody's losing their job because of this, not while I have any say in it.
" The relief on their faces reminded her, briefly and sharply, of exactly the kind of fair, steady leadership her father had modeled every day of his working life, and she found herself hoping, fiercely, that she had it in her to carry even a fraction of that forward.
Wren spent that first sleepless night in her father's house going through drawers she hadn't opened since childhood, looking for nothing in particular, simply needing the physical task of touching his things to feel closer to him for a few more hours before the practical business of funerals and paperwork swallowed the raw, private grief entirely.
She found, in the back of his desk, a stack of birthday cards he'd apparently written every year and never sent, one for each year she'd been gone from Iron Falls during the divorce, each one dated, each one simply reading some version of the same message: still proud of you, still here whenever you're ready.
She sat on the floor of his study and read every single one, and understood, freshly, exactly where she'd learned the particular quiet patience that had gotten her through the worst year of her life.Wren spent part of that long, sleepless first night calling the small list of people who needed to know before the wider Iron Falls grapevine beat her to the news, her father's sister in Tennessee, an old college friend of his who'd moved out west years earlier, each call its own small fresh wave of grief as she said the words out loud again and again until they started to feel almost mechanical, a script she was reciting rather than a truth she was still absorbing.
By the third call she'd learned to brace herself before dialing, understanding that each fresh reaction on the other end would reopen her own grief a little further, and doing it anyway, because somebody had to, and there was no one else left to do it.
Cain, upon hearing the news that same evening, sat with Diesel a long while trying to decide the right way to show up for a grief that wasn't technically his to claim anymore, unsure whether attending the funeral would read as respect or intrusion.
"Go," Diesel told him simply. "A man doesn't stop being grateful to somebody just because his marriage to that man's daughter fell apart.
Walter was good to you regardless of what happened with Wren.
Go pay your respects, keep your distance otherwise, and let her set whatever pace she needs to set from there. "
Cain took the advice to heart, and the careful restraint he showed at the funeral, watching from a respectful distance rather than pushing his way into her grief, would become, though neither of them fully recognized it at the time, one of the first real pieces of evidence in the long, slow case Wren would eventually build for trusting him again.