Chapter Twenty-Eight
I HAD EXACTLY one good day, and I want to remember it right, because I think it might be the last one of its kind I get for a while.
I woke up in his bed alone with the sun already high and a note on the pillow beside me in that blocky, careful handwriting of his: garden — coffee’s hot — didn’t want to wake you.
I read it about nine times, which was embarrassing even with nobody there to catch me doing it, then read it once more before I got up because apparently this was who I was now.
A woman who got stupid over those words and a dash from a biker who grew medicinal herbs and made coffee strong enough to strip paint.
I drank it anyway. Put on his shirt too, because mine was on the floor and his was right there and I wanted to, which was still a new enough reason for doing something that I noticed it.
Then I stood barefoot in his doorway with both hands around the mug and watched him work the beds in the morning sun, sleeves shoved up, head bent, dirt already on his hands, and for once there wasn’t anything else in my head.
No hallway. No wondering what we were. No replaying what he’d done or what I’d done or what any of it meant.
I just stood there wearing his shirt and drinking his awful coffee while the man I loved worked in his garden, and I was happy.
I almost didn’t know what to do with it.
Sawyer had texted back under my thumbs-up. THAT’S MY GIRL. No details. I mean it. I have an imagination and I don’t need it weaponized against me. Eat something, drink water, and please know I am taking full credit for this.
Brenda caught me crossing the yard later that morning, and I knew from the first look at her face that she knew. Of course she knew. This was a motorcycle club compound, not witness protection, and I’d apparently walked out of Rune’s cabin wearing the emotional equivalent of a billboard.
I stiffened anyway. I waited for the worry, for are you sure, baby, for some gentle version of every warning she’d been trying not to give me since the day she realized where my eyes kept going, but Brenda only stood there looking at me until her eyes went shiny and her mouth did that tight thing it does when she’s trying to boss an emotion back where it belongs.
Then she reached up and tucked a piece of my ridiculous hair behind my ear. “Lord knows I tried to keep you clear of these fools,” she said, shaking her head.
I smiled. “You really did.”
“Did a damn fine job of it too, apparently.”
I laughed, and that nearly got her. Her mouth wobbled before she caught it, and when she looked at me again there wasn’t any warning in her face at all.
“There’s my girl.”
She patted my cheek once, brisk and firm, like that was about as much emotion as she was willing to tolerate from herself at one time, then kept walking before I could answer.
Everybody kept calling me their girl that day. I kept letting them. I felt like somebody’s girl for once and not somebody’s problem.
I had that.
And then it got dark, and Rune came down the path with his face wrong, and I lost it all in about four sentences.
* * *
I knew before he opened his mouth. I always know.
I read faces the way other people read weather, it’s the first thing I ever learned to do, back when reading a face right was the difference between a bad night and a worse one, and I took one look at him coming through the pines and every good thing I’d been carrying all day went cold and heavy in my chest.
“What happened,” I said. Not hello. We were past hello.
“Sit down with me.”
“I don’t want to sit down. Tell me what happened.”
He didn’t argue, and that was how I knew it was bad.
Rune didn’t tell me I was getting ahead of myself or ask me to calm down or give me one of those careful little lies people use when they’ve already decided you’re not strong enough for the truth.
He stood in the doorway of his cabin, looked straight at me, and gave it to me.
“There’s a man,” he said. “He’s been watching you.
Not just the once, in the garage. For weeks.
At the school. On the street. He’s the reason your car quit, Amy, it wasn’t the radiator going, somebody put a hole in it.
It was him.” He watched my face while he said it, not flinching from any of it.
“He’s dangerous. He’s done time, hard time, and he’s fixed on you, the club’s known enough to be worried for a while now and today we learned enough to be more than worried. ”
The garage.
The face in the garage.
I put my hand out and found the doorframe, because the floor did the thing it does.
All those weeks. All those weeks of the feeling on the back of my neck, the shadow at the edge of the parking lot, the man standing too still.
All those weeks of me talking myself down, it’s nothing, it’s the damage, it’s just the thing he left in you that goes off at shadows, all that careful work I did convincing myself my own alarm was broken.
It wasn’t broken. It was right. It was right and I called it a liar every single day.
“It’s him,” I said. It wasn’t a question. My voice came out flat and far away. “The man. It’s my father.”
Rune went still.
“I knew in the garage,” I said, and my voice sounded far away even to me.
“I saw him and I knew, and then I spent weeks telling myself I didn’t because I’ve seen him in a hundred men who weren’t him.
A shoulder. A walk. Somebody standing at the wrong angle.
I’ve been wrong so many times I thought I had to be wrong again.
” I swallowed, but my throat wouldn’t open all the way. “Guess eventually you get lucky.”
“Amy.”
“It was always going to be him.” I heard the little laugh come out of me and hated the sound of it. “That’s the joke, isn’t it? You don’t get away from somebody like that. You just get a couple years where he lets you think you did.”
Rune didn’t tell me that wasn’t true. He didn’t tell me my father couldn’t hurt me or that everything was going to be fine, and God help me, I loved him for that, because Rune has never once made a terrible thing smaller just so he could feel better standing next to it.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s him.”
“How long have you known?”
“Some of it a while. All of it, today.” That closing thing passed behind his eyes again, quick, the thing I’ve never been able to read. “There’s pieces the club’s still running down. But it’s him. You’re not imagining one bit of it, and you never were.”
He took a breath, and I pulled everything in tight, because I could see there was more and I could see it was the part he’d come down here to say.
“Here’s the hard part, and I’m not going to pretty it up for you.
” His voice stayed even. “You’re safe on this property.
He can’t get to you here, not with what we’ve put up.
But you can’t leave it. No more school. No more crossing the river.
Not till this is finished. You don’t go past that gate, you’re not in a room without one of us, and at night you’re here, with me. ”
And just like that, he took my life out of my hands.
I know that isn’t fair. Rune didn’t do it.
My father did. Rune was only the man standing in front of me saying the words, but all I could see was my eight o’clock biology class and Sawyer shoving half a muffin at me because I’d forgotten breakfast, my car on the bridge with the radio down and those ten minutes when the water went pink-gold and nobody on earth knew where I’d come from.
I saw the nursing program I’d barely gotten my foot inside, the girl I was trying so hard to become, the one in scrubs with steady hands who walked into somebody else’s worst day and knew what to do.
All of it stopped because Cal Rickard had walked out of prison and remembered he had a daughter.
“Amy — ”
“I built all of it.” My voice came out very small.
“You know that? Everything he took just now with one sentence. I built it. Brick by brick. The school, the drive, all of it, I built it so I wouldn’t be the girl anymore, and I was doing it, Rune, I was almost there — ” I pressed the heel of my hand to my mouth.
“And he doesn’t even have to touch me. He just has to stand across a parking lot and I lose all of it. ”
Rune crossed the room, I let him put his arms around me and I stood there stiff inside them, not because I didn’t want them but because if I let go into them I was going to come apart, and I was so tired of coming apart.
“I know,” he said, into my hair. “I know what it costs you. I’d give anything for it to be different.
But I need you behind this fence more than I need you to have your good life right now, because your good life doesn’t matter one damn bit if he gets his hands on you, and I am not — ” his arms tightened, and something in his voice went to a place I’d never heard it go — “I am not going to let that happen. Do you hear me? Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs. He doesn’t get you. ”
I stood there in his arms, and let myself have that, at least, because it was true, I could feel how true it was, it came off him like heat.
But underneath it, sat something else. And it took me a while, standing there with my face in his chest, to work out what it even was, because it wasn’t anything he’d said.
It was what he hadn’t asked.
A man who loves you finds out your father is the one hunting you.
A father. The word alone should raise a hundred questions in anybody who doesn’t already know the answers.
What did he do to you. Why’d you run. How bad was it.
What am I dealing with here. Rune hadn’t asked me one.
Not one. He’d stood there and taken it’s my father like a man being handed a fact he already had, and he’d handled me, careful around the exact places I’m broken, never once near the wrong one, like somebody working from information he’d already been given.
He knew.
He knew what was done to me, the extent of it, the awful details, the things I have never said out loud for two years because saying them makes them real again. He knew, and I never told him, and there is exactly one person on this earth who could have.
Brenda.
The only one who has it. The only one I ever handed it to, on the worst night of my life, when she swore — she swore — that I would never have to say it again to anybody as long as I lived.
I felt it go up on the shelf, cold and enormous, next to all the others. And this one didn’t just not-fit. This one moved the shelf.
Because two nights ago this man stood in this cabin and told me every inch of everything had to be mine, mine to know, mine to choose, mine to give.
And he was standing here right now with the worst thing that ever happened to me already in his hands, handed to him behind my back, and he wasn’t saying so.
I didn’t ask him about it. I don’t know why.
Maybe because I’d only just gotten to be happy and I wasn’t ready to know how much it was already going to cost me.
Maybe because I was afraid of the answer.
Maybe because some part of me understood I wasn’t the only one in this room holding a thing too heavy to set down yet.
So I put my face in his chest, let him hold me and said nothing.
But I knew. And he didn’t know I knew. And we stood there in his cabin, the two of us, each holding a piece of the same terrible thing back from the other, and calling it love, and maybe it even was.
I fell asleep in his arms that night, safe as houses, locked behind a fence with a man who loved me and a man who wanted me both closing in at once from opposite directions.
And for the first time since I started coming down that path — I didn’t sleep all the way through.