Chapter 13 #2
He clicked the pen and closed the notebook.
“If something comes to you later, that number goes to my sergeant. Second device puts this with the state police — they’ve got a task force out of the Wabash Valley working the whole string of it, so the file’s going to travel.
Don’t assume anything you tell us stops here. ”
He thanked me and went to find June, and I sat at the window with my purse in my lap and no idea why I had done it.
Not loyalty. Not fear of Bear. The nearest I could get was that the burner was the only evidence I owned about my own marriage, and I had watched Ryder control every fact in my life for a week. Nobody made me say no.
The Copper Kettle called at noon. Brenda had expected fundraiser samples Monday and had heard enough in Hadley Creek to know there had been an attack, an ambulance, and something wrong in my marriage.
It is less than twenty minutes from that gate to her front counter, and news makes the drive faster than I do.
“I can refund the deposit today,” I said.
“Keep the deposit and take another week.” Brenda has run that kitchen for twenty-six years and does not decorate anything. “I have rolls. What I don’t have is you dead in a ditch making Monday. What happened out there?”
I stood in the doorway of the clubhouse kitchen in a fitted mask with two prospects wiping down the counters behind me, and told her.
My husband left me. There is a woman here who is pregnant with his child.
He moved our savings. I was in the hospital Tuesday and I am not driving anywhere until my lungs work.
I said it in a normal voice, in a room with eight men in it, and I did not lower it at the part about the baby.
The pause on her end lasted long enough for me to hear her put a tray down. “Eden.”
“Don’t. If you hear it in town this week, you heard it from me first. I’d rather be the source than the subject.”
“You’ll be both,” Brenda said, which was true and which I hadn’t worked out yet. “When you can stand up straight, come use my kitchen off-hours. Six to eleven, nobody in it, my mixer’s a twenty-quart. You pay me in bread.”
It was small, practical, and mine, and Ryder had nothing to do with it. I hung up and sat on an upturned crate for a minute before I could give the prospects their next instruction, and I couldn’t have said whether that was the lungs or the kindness.
Mia found me at the end of the long table afterward.
She set a leather folder down and stayed standing until I moved a chair for her.
“Jess has been referred to a lawyer outside the club. I don’t represent her, Ryder, or the property company in anything touching your marriage.
I can meet you at my office Monday, or we can do the urgent points here with Leah present. ”
Ryder had stopped near the west door when she said urgent. I wanted him to hear it. He had arranged my car and moved our money while I slept beside him; he could listen to the legal end of the marriage without getting a chair.
“Here.”
“Briefly, then.” Mia opened the folder. “The entry restriction is a club occupancy order, not a deed. The property company owns the house. A permanent transfer takes a sale, a gift, or a court order, and I’ll get the file from the LLC and tell you what can move without his cooperation.
The joint account stays marital property no matter which account he parked it in; we request records Monday and ask for an order against withdrawal.
And removing him from a pharmacy portal does not remove a spouse from every emergency room in Indiana.
You need an advance directive and a health-care representative. Name the person.”
“Leah. June is alternate.”
Leah reached for my hand, stopped short of it, and left hers on the table beside mine. Across the room, Ryder’s shoulders changed. If my lungs went again he could stand outside a door and wait for somebody else to come out and tell him whether I was alive.
“Divorce, separation, or both?” Mia asked.
The room got quieter than it had any business getting. “Both. I’m not filing today. I want the account records, the house papers, the beneficiary forms, and a list of everything he can still touch, before I pick up anything he could use on me.”
“Reasonable. A consultation commits you to nothing.”
Ryder came one step back into the room. “Do you want copies of the account statements I have?”
“I want them from the bank.” I turned the folder so the page faced away from him. “You already built one account history for me to find.”
The words were out before I could stop them, and I heard how true they were.
He had left that phone where I would find it.
He had left a hundred and twelve dollars in an account he could have closed.
Every single thing I had learned about my husband in six days was something he planted for me to discover in the order he chose.
Even my heartbreak had been arranged for me.
Mia was watching me. “Eden.”
“Nothing.” I put the thought down as carefully as I would have put down a hot pan with no clear place for it.
I couldn’t do one thing with the idea. It wouldn’t hold up for a lawyer, a judge, or Bear, because all I had was a feeling at a table, and the only person who could give me proof was a twenty-two-year-old woman with a lawyer and a reason to lie.
Proof meant asking Jess. I wasn’t strong enough yet to hear what she might say.
“Write down that I want everything from the bank directly. Nothing from him.”
“Eden.” Ryder hadn’t moved from the door. “One question about your discharge instructions.”
“You need nothing about them.”
“The common kitchen uses bleach after raw deliveries.” He kept his hands visible. “Were you cleared to be near it? I can move the cleaning to tonight.”
Bleach had put me on my knees twice. Asking made me remember him carrying me down two flights out of our first apartment after a landlord mixed cleaners in the hallway, and sitting on the curb with me until sunrise with his hand under my hair while I coughed.
I wanted that man in the room. Ryder had used him to make the affair convincing.
I had the folding knife out of my pocket and open before I decided to. “If you call the clinic, search the portal, ask Aris, ask Leah, or use this club to learn one word off my discharge papers, I’ll cut the fuel line on your Harley and let you find out about it on the road.”
“Don’t touch the bike.” He didn’t come closer. “Fuel on your hands can set you off.”
“Eden.” Bear said it from the end of the table without raising his voice. “Put that away. Not in my clubhouse.”
Eight men were looking at me. I closed the knife, and I did not apologize, and Bear did not ask me to.
He looked at Ryder a good deal longer than he had looked at me, then went back to the delivery sheet, and the room started up again around us like water closing.
I had wanted to be the one holding the blade in a room that had watched Jess cross it in my husband’s jacket.
Instead I had handed Bear a reason to say my name in the voice he used on prospects.
Leah slid a blank sheet across to me. “Write down the records you want. We’ll ask for every one.”
I listed the dormant account, the house, the insurance, the retirement plan, and the vehicle titles. The writing steadied my hands. Ryder could refuse me the fight I wanted, but he could not stop me finding out how much of my life had been running on his permission.
Sunday evening I stood on my porch while June carried the household file back to the clubhouse.
Ryder sat on the bunkhouse steps two hundred and forty feet away cleaning road dust off his boots.
His Harley stayed under the equipment shelter, untouched, though I had spent an unreasonable part of the afternoon working out which hose would inconvenience him most without risking a fire.
He watched Leah leave my kitchen, and Tessa cross to the clubhouse, and me test the new lock.
I didn’t say anything to him. I turned the deadbolt, pulled the door once to hear it hold, and went upstairs. I carried my own medication to the nightstand, set the legal folder on the side of the bed where his hand used to be, and left the porch light off.