Chapter 13
EDEN
The suitcase was still open at the foot of my bed, packed with clothes Ryder had watched me choose for an exile he arranged.
I had carried it upstairs Sunday believing the house belonged to the club, the savings belonged to him and Jess, and my safest option was a serviced car parked near men with guns.
It had spent six days under the bedroom window while I listened to my husband take care of his supposed child through walls that had never once kept his voice out.
Friday afternoon, with traffic moving through the open gate, I took every shirt out of it and hung them back up.
Leah sat cross-legged on the floor sorting clean clothes from things that still smelled of smoke.
June worked at the desk with three sets of forms. Tessa had the doorway, where she could see the porch and the path Ryder used between the clubhouse and the bunks.
None of them treated the unpacking as proof I was better.
I was putting my life back where he had tried to take it from, and that mattered enough to make me fold each pair of jeans myself after my arms went.
“He expected me to leave,” I said, sliding an empty hanger between two dresses. “Car ready, medicine in it, money gone before Jess ever came to the porch. Then the gate opened this morning and the first thing he did was look at my hands to see whether I was carrying luggage.”
“I saw him.” Tessa turned from the window. “Gage reminded me Bear banned civilian bloodshed until the north wall is repaired.”
“Bear banned nothing,” June said, not looking up. “He told you not to hit a Road Captain during a security transition.”
“You’re not hitting him for me.” I shoved the empty suitcase into the closet. “If Ryder loses teeth, it should be over something he did to you. What he did to me is mine.”
Leah set a smoke-marked sweater aside. “What does keeping it look like?”
She wanted instructions before she helped, and the consideration in that made me hate my husband again with an energy grief had nearly finished.
“I stay in my bedroom. I use my kitchen, my mixer, my car, and the clubhouse whenever I want. Anybody who asks, I tell them Ryder left me for Jess and got her pregnant, and I don’t lower my voice for his rank.
He sleeps in a bunk and wonders whether I’m home, whether I’m sick, and who’s with me. ”
We worked through the rest of the afternoon at the kitchen table.
Leah became my emergency contact with June as alternate.
Ryder came off the pharmacy release, the insurance permission, the roadside account, and the compound’s civilian call sheet, and every piece of paper with his name on it was routed to a locked mail slot in the common hall.
The humiliating part wasn’t counting the places his name lived.
It was remembering why I put it in each one.
He knew which medication made my hands shake and which emergency room I avoided after a doctor wrote panic on my chart.
He had driven forty miles through ice for a controller refill I left in Leah’s guest room, swearing at the road the whole way while I listened on the phone.
I had written his number everywhere because I trusted him to come, and he had looked at that and decided I was easiest to save if I knew nothing.
“The beneficiary change needs a witness who isn’t receiving anything,” June said. “Mia can do it Monday.”
“Put my aunt.” Beth had taught me to carry a knife and had never once asked me to hand it over, and she was the only person alive whose opinion of Ryder had been correct in the first year. “If I die, he doesn’t get paid for the inconvenience.”
Leah’s pen stopped over the form. “You want me to call her?”
“No.” I hadn’t called Beth since the porch.
I had picked up the phone twice and put it down both times, because the moment I said any of it out loud she would be in her truck for the two hours of state road between her kitchen and mine, and she would arrive and be kind and I would come apart in front of her, and I wasn’t ready to spend that hour yet.
“She’s in your phone. Write the number on the form and let me do it when I can hold my face together. ”
“All right.” Leah wrote it out. She didn’t say Beth would want to know. She knew I knew.
I took the small scissors from the junk drawer and cut the hospital band off my wrist. Ryder had looked at that band while asking Jess about bleeding.
It had stopped reminding anyone that I needed care and started reminding me how much cruelty he could fit around concern.
I dropped it in the trash and went back to the beneficiary page.
By evening the front room was mine again.
His boots were gone, his keys were out of the bowl by the door, the suitcases were empty in the closet, and upstairs the chessboard sat under its dish towel on the table by the bedroom window where I had left it.
Ryder crossed the inner road as Colin came down my steps with the last clothing bin.
He had changed into a clean shirt out of one of the boxes, and the sight of that dark blue across his shoulders turned my stomach, because I had bought it after he complained that every store cut sleeves for men with thinner arms, and he had kissed me in the fitting room with my hand shoved under the hem and worn it out of the store.
Colin stopped on the bottom step with the bin against his chest. He looked at the rail, then at the road, then at me, and said nothing.
“You can talk to me,” I said. “Nobody’s put me off limits.”
The relief on his face embarrassed both of us. He was nineteen. “Nobody told me either way, ma’am. Eden. I didn’t want to be the guy who says the wrong thing to you and gets sent home.”
“If anybody sends you home for being polite to me, come tell me first.”
Ryder took the bin from him at the bottom of the steps. His eyes went past me to the open screen door. “Anything left inside?”
“Dust. I’ll get rid of that too.” He looked down at the shirt and understood, and I let him stand in it. “Your mail goes to the locked slot in the common hall. Packages, letters, club notices, bills. If something comes here by mistake, I’m not carrying it across the road.”
“Leave it on the porch. I’ll send Colin.”
“No. You don’t get to use your mail to build a reason for men to come to my door.” The idea had come from June, who understood that small excuses turn into habits faster than open violations do. “I’ll mark it refused. Update your address.”
His hand closed on the bin handle. “I’ll update it.”
He took every consequence in the same flat voice he used to promise he would fix a pipe or replace a battery.
I wanted him to argue so I could fight him.
Instead he let me take another piece of his life and walked it up the road, and I stood on my own porch wondering whether losing the house cost him less than keeping Jess.
June came up beside me with my copy of the compound form. “He signed it this morning, before the gate. The entry restriction stands through the security transition. Any change needs your written request or a qualifying emergency.”
It had taken a day and an open gate to turn Bear’s voice into Bear’s signature. I put my thumb over the date because I wanted to feel how long that was.
The deputies came Saturday morning.
Two of them, county sheriff’s office, in a marked car that waited at the inner gate while a prospect walked the length of it.
Bear met them in the yard with his hands where they could be seen, and the whole compound arranged itself around that car the way a kitchen arranges itself around a hot pan.
June set up in the common hall with a sign-in sheet and a pitcher of water, working down her list of the civilians present for both explosions and keeping the ones with children near the front so they could go home.
The men gave the deputies the same three sentences in six different mouths.
Loud noise from the west side. They were inside.
They didn’t see a vehicle. Nobody lied and nobody volunteered, and the rehearsal in it was obvious enough that the younger deputy stopped writing halfway through the fourth statement and listened.
Mine was taken at the table by the front window, where Ryder used to sit on Sunday mornings with the parts catalog. The older deputy had a spiral notebook and a pale band on his ring finger where a ring used to be.
“I can record this if it’s easier for you,” he said. “Your choice.”
“Notes.”
“Notes.” He turned to a clean page. “Ma’am, I’ve got you at the hospital Tuesday. Respiratory. That’s the second device?”
“The second one. I was in the common room.”
He walked me through it in order and let me set the pace, which meant he had done this before with people who couldn’t breathe.
The times. Where I stood. What the air did.
Whether I had seen anyone on the property I didn’t recognize in the week before.
That one caught, because I had, and her name was Jess.
“A woman came Sunday,” I said. “She’s a guest of the club. She’s still here.”
He wrote it down without asking me what she was to me, which told me Bear or June had already given him the shape of it.
“Last thing,” he said. “Anything unusual in your household in the days before the first device? Change in routine, arguments, visitors, money, anybody your husband was worried about. Anything that struck you at the time as off.”
The burner was in my purse, six inches from his notebook, holding ten weeks of a life my husband had built and handed to me to read.
I could have put it on the table. I could have told him my husband serviced my car for a trip he never mentioned, moved ninety-four thousand dollars two days before a stranger came to my door, and knew where I would be standing before I did.
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”