Chapter 10 #2
I had written that same question into the burner history in June, after reading enough forums to make an invented pregnancy sound like a real one.
Eden had read it. She knew the thread where Jess reported spotting and I promised to meet her at a motel outside Brazil at eleven at night.
Saying it out loud in a common room welded the woman in the chair to every month I had manufactured.
“I’m fine.”
“You tell me if that changes.” I took the jacket off the chair back and laid it around her shoulders before she could refuse it without showing the room what refusing meant.
My hands touched leather and nothing else.
That distinction existed for me and for nobody watching.
“I’ll keep you and the baby out of the smoke. ”
Eden stopped pulling air for a fraction of a second. Aris caught it and turned toward her; she lifted one finger and he waited. She wasn’t having an attack. She was making herself breathe while I put a jacket around another woman twenty hours after smoke nearly finished her.
“Ryder,” Jess said. Shame, not intimacy.
“Keep her calm,” I told Bear, using rank and a child to hold the scene together. “I’ll clear the west route.”
“Nobody in this room needs you to explain what pregnant means.” Tessa spoke from behind Eden without raising her voice, which made it worse. “Leave, before I show you what stress looks like.”
Eden reached for the water. Her hand shook enough to move the cup on the table and she pulled it back before anyone could steady it.
Leah pushed the bottle within reach and didn’t look at me.
June folded the discharge pages into the purse.
Every hand around my wife either returned a choice or removed the need to ask for one.
I waited for her to look at me. She always had.
On the porch she looked after every lie as though my face might take it back.
In the kitchen she asked when I stopped loving her and watched me build the answer.
In the infirmary, with Aris holding oxygen near her face, she found me past Leah and decided how close I could come.
Now she looked at the jacket, then at Jess’s bowed head, then at the door behind me.
She took a drink, answered Aris about dizziness, and never once checked whether I could hear it.
From where I stood it looked like the end of something — like the part of her that had been waiting for me to choose her had finally closed, and I would have sworn I saw the moment it happened.
I wanted to pull the leather off Jess’s shoulders and tell the room there was no baby.
Then the photograph came up the way it always does, and the sentence I use to put it down came with it: if Silas turned back before Denver, Eden could die outside a Kroger, or in our kitchen, or on the road to a bakery she hasn’t bought yet.
The sentence broke in my hands while I was still holding it. If she can die in our kitchen, then a highway west was never safety. It was distance. I had spent nine days building distance and writing it onto route sheets.
I gave myself the answer I had ready: distance is measurable, and the only thing I know how to do is move people away from a line of fire. Then I let Jess keep the jacket.
Eden stood when Aris cleared her. Tessa took the purse only after Eden handed it over.
Leah held the door and June went ahead to check that the path had stayed clear.
Eden passed close enough to reach the chair, and I have crossed worse ground than that under fire.
She didn’t threaten me, ask me anything, or use my name.
Indifference costs more than the knife did.
Anger had at least kept me inside the room with her.
Jess pulled the jacket off the second the women were out and dropped it. “You asked me about bleeding in front of her.”
“Jax asked about the baby.” I picked the jacket up off the floor.
“I could have answered him.” Color had come into her face for the first time since the fire. “You made it sound like you know my body. You made her listen to you ask me a question you used to ask her.”
“Eden’s never been pregnant.”
Jess stared at me. “Then you found a new way to do it.”
She locked herself in the infirmary room. Jax intercepted me in the corridor before I reached the west door.
“That sounded practiced.”
“We’ve talked about symptoms before.”
“She answered like she was remembering a line. You asked like you wrote it.” He put an arm across the door.
“Prepared car. Hidden phone. Dez hearing your wife ran west before that woman cleared our gate. Now you’re performing in front of Eden while Jess looks ready to throw up on your boots. Give me the part I’m missing.”
“You’re seeing an affair neither one of them wants in public.”
“I’m seeing you put two women in chairs and call it Silas.” He dropped his arm and followed me into the table hall anyway.
Bear was there with the house report. “Jax says the money, the burner and the car look planned. I say your conduct since the hospital looks planned too. Church when the west line holds. If there’s a fact about Jess that touches club security, you bring it before we have to take it out of her.”
“Dez holds paper on her and he was going to sell access to her to clear it. Keeping her next to me makes his people slow down.” All of that was true, and I gave it to them the way you give a man the receipt and keep the invoice.
“And why wasn’t it said at this table before she came through our gate?”
I had the answer for that too, and it was the photograph, and it stayed where it was.
Friday, I thought. Locked room, Bear and Jax and Mia, the image on the table with the range written on the back.
He would be angry for a week and grateful for a year, and he would understand why a man doesn’t hand a threat like that to a table with a hole in it. “I didn’t know Silas would hit.”
“That answers nothing.” Bear pointed at the perimeter. “West line. When the gate opens you sit at my table until I understand what you brought in here.”
The afternoon went into fire damage, the men who had held the north wall, and a fence I walked twice.
At four the secured phone asked for one more day before the Denver handoff and I sent back the confirmation, and told myself a day is cheap, which is what a man says when he has stopped counting in anything but days.
My bunk had the clothes Eden threw out, stacked in suitcases a prospect set against the wall. The shaving kit on top, one side stained from the wet porch. No pillow. I stood in the door long enough to understand that I didn’t know which answer I wanted about the pillow, and left the bags shut.
After dark I took the east-row path as part of the rotation.
The house windows were open a few inches after the air inspection and light came out of the kitchen across the porch rail, which meant Leah had run an extension off the clubhouse line for the night.
I stopped short of the steps with no reason on earth to go up them.
I nearly asked whether the new treatment made her hands shake. Every question I had belonged to a husband I had told her was gone.
Leah moved inside the kitchen, her voice coming through the window over dishes in the sink. “I can stay downstairs again. Gage has the kids with my mother, and he knows I’m not leaving you alone tonight.”
Eden answered from somewhere near the table, faint enough that I turned my right ear to the window before I could stop myself. “You don’t have to guard me from him. Ryder isn’t coming inside.”
“I know.” Then, closer: “Do you want me here?”
“Yes.” She coughed and waited until she could go on.
“I keep waking up thinking he’s beside me.
Then I remember the porch, and Jess in his jacket, and him asking whether she was bleeding after I almost died.
My husband died before my body did, Leah.
I don’t know why Ryder keeps walking around in his clothes. ”
Water ran for a while and nobody said anything else.
The kitchen light went out late. I stayed where I was until the prospect on the rear wall coughed and moved off along the fence, then crossed to the bottom step, which is the only part of that porch that was ever mine, and put my hand up under the rail where the bolts come through.
They held. I had checked them every spring for four years.
I checked them again and went back to the west line.