Chapter 10
RYDER
Eden came home the next morning in the same jeans she had gone through the smoke in, a hospital sweatshirt hanging off her shoulders, Leah carrying the purse she hadn’t let anybody else touch.
The escort ran two vehicles and four bikes, from the county line.
Aris got out of the lead SUV first and went to Bear at the service gate.
I stood outside the clubhouse with Jess a few feet behind me and watched my wife refuse the wheelchair the hospital had sent along, because the distance from the vehicle to her porch belonged to her and not because she had anything left to walk it with.
Every step showed what the night had cost. No color in her face, both eyes swollen from smoke, and she stopped at the concrete barrier to cough into her sleeve.
Leah stopped with her and didn’t pull, steer, or ask her to prove anything.
Tessa came down off the porch and took the document bag after Eden held it out.
June had the house keys and waited to be asked before she opened a door that used to be mine.
I came off the clubhouse step. Eden saw me before I made the road and put her hand in the pocket where she keeps Aunt Beth’s knife. She had nearly died the previous afternoon and she looked prepared to spend the last of what she had on making sure I didn’t touch her. I stopped at the barrier.
“The house passed the air check,” I said. I gave her the information and kept the question. “Rear unit’s running off the clubhouse line. Aris had the filters changed.”
“Aris,” she said.
It came out flat. She looked at June, who already had the page open.
“County inspector, Aris, Leah, me, and a prospect who changed the filters while I watched,” June read. “Ryder stayed outside. The filter order came from Ryder.”
Eden turned back to me and waited, and made me stand in it. Her voice was scraped down to nothing and she still made me stand in it.
“Bear approved it,” I said.
“That isn’t what I asked, and it isn’t what you said.
” Another cough took the end of it. She held one hand up when Leah leaned in, asking for a second without letting anybody turn it into an emergency.
“You said Aris. You said Aris so I’d picture a doctor and not my husband inside my house with a screwdriver. ”
“The inspector recommended it. I had a prospect do the work with June standing there.”
“That’s the sentence, then. Say it.” She let her hand fall. “If you come across my porch I’ll assume the smoke damaged your judgment and correct it with whatever I can lift.”
The hospital band was still on her wrist. I wanted to cut it off her, put her in our bed, set water and medicine where she could reach both, and keep every person on this compound off the porch until her hands stopped shaking. Neither of those wants gave me the road. “I won’t come in.”
“I didn’t ask for a promise. I told you what happens.”
She made it a little farther and stopped, looking at the cut on my hairline. For one bad moment I thought it was concern. Her eyes went down to the smoke on my clothes and the jacket over my arm.
“Leah said you waited outside the hospital.”
“I stayed until Aris told me you were responding.” I left out the two orders I ignored and the radio Bear took off me.
“Why?” No hope anywhere in it. She wanted to know what a man collects by sitting outside the room of a wife he threw away.
“I needed to know you were alive.”
“You knew I was alive on Sunday, when you stood on that porch beside her and watched me get myself to the kitchen.” Her voice failed at the end.
She waited, took one careful breath, and refused every hand that came near her.
“You knew I was alive when you gave her your jacket. You don’t get to look frightened now, after three days of proving my body is something you can stand to watch. ”
“I didn’t want this to happen.”
“You wanted all of it except the part where I made you look at the bill.” She touched the hospital band and glanced past my shoulder at Jess. “Go ask whether your baby slept. I’m going home.”
Leah stayed on her left across the road, which put Leah’s body between us and took away the right-ear side she had stood on for five years without either of us naming it.
Eden reached the porch, put a hand on the rail, and waited while June worked the lock.
I built that rail the winter an attack left her dizzy on the steps.
She painted it black, put flower boxes under it, and made fun of me every spring for checking the screws.
I watched her use it from the far side of a property line she had drawn through the middle of our house.
Bear came over after the door shut. “You want to tell me why filters got changed on your order after I said Eden makes the call in that house?”
“Inspector recommended it. Prospect did the work with June watching.”
“And you gave her the doctor’s name first.” He shifted the post-attack report under his arm. “She told you to stay away from her room and her medicine. So you found a household job that let you get ready for her anyway.”
“Would you rather she walked into contaminated air while we asked whether a filter injures her independence?” It came too fast. I had done a useful thing and I hated that he could make it sound like a hand on the back of her neck.
“I’d rather you gave June the recommendation and let Eden approve it from a hospital bed. She might have said yes. You didn’t ask.” He looked toward the common-room door where Jess was standing. “And I want an answer about why your pregnant woman looks ready to run every time you open your mouth.”
“She watched Eden stop breathing.”
“It frightened you enough to leave an active perimeter and ignore your president.” He came in close enough that I had to give up the kitchen window. “Eden’s home. Are you going to keep being a husband when nobody’s looking and a stranger when she can see you?”
“The marriage is over,” I said. “Jess needs to stay calm until the gate opens.”
Bear looked at the house and swore at it. “Quit watching her windows like you expect forgiveness to come through the glass.”
The east row had been dark since Monday.
Ninety gallons in the pump tank still ran three buildings, and nothing had reached the houses since the fuel store went up, which meant no window units, no fans, and no way to cook.
So the civilian rotation fed everybody out of the common kitchen, three sittings, and the second one was noon.
Aris also wanted her inside the infirmary’s reach until he finished the discharge review.
There was no pretext involved. My wife had to be in that room because the compound had one working stove and she had come home to a dark house.
Leah came in first with the medication pouch.
June carried the discharge papers. Tessa held the door until every man near it worked out to move.
Eden walked to the table under her own power and set the purse down on the chair beside her, and left it there, and didn’t look at it again for the next hour.
Two days ago that bag went everywhere on her body — the burner, the drive, the knife, all of it against her hip in a room full of people she had known for five years.
Something in the house had a lock on it now.
Jax was at the bar. He caught my eye while Jess was still standing.
“Wherever you put her,” he said, “I’m watching you do it.”
I had time. I could have walked Jess into the infirmary corridor before the second sitting or taken myself out to the west line for an hour. Instead I put her in the chair on my right and laid the jacket over the back of it.
“Move the jacket,” Jess whispered. “She knows exactly what you’re doing.”
“That’s the point.”
“Who is it for?” She had her hands on the arms of the chair. “There’s no one in this building but us.”
She was right, and I knew she was right before she said it.
Silas had no eyes inside a locked compound.
The source’s watchers were on a highway a hundred and forty miles west. Every person in that common room was a brother, a brother’s wife, or a prospect who had held a fence all night, and not one of them was going to report the seating to Dez.
Bear’s clock had about a day left on it.
When the gate opened, Jax would drive Jess to an address on an envelope and come back without paper, and the only thing standing between her and a bus stop with Dez’s people at the other end was whether this club had spent three days watching me treat that woman as mine.
Housing follows belief. I needed the room, not the road.
So I told myself the watchers might have a man near the fence line, and left the jacket where it was.
“Stay close until Denver confirms,” I said. “That’s all.”
“You keep changing what all is.” Jess sat down. She kept the jacket behind her back and looked at her shoes.
Bear came in with the air-quality report and stopped when he saw the arrangement across from Eden.
He knew I had chosen it. Disgust went over his face and duty replaced it.
“Inspector cleared the house. Eden goes back when Aris signs. Common-room group moves to the basement during the north-wall repair. Jess stays near the infirmary. Ryder, west perimeter.”
“Jess comes with me to the center hall first,” I said. “The blast and the hospital put too much on her.”
Eden’s fingers closed around the purse strap on the chair. She watched my mouth rather than my face.
“Baby okay?” Jax asked from the bar. It wasn’t concern.
Jess looked at me. She had promised to answer questions about the baby and refused everything else, and she could have answered for herself.
I turned my body toward her instead and dropped my head until the whole room could see attention being paid.
“You had pain after the blast. Are you having it now?”
“No.” She barely moved her mouth.
“Any bleeding?”