Chapter 15
EDEN
Ryder came back from the prenatal trip after dark carrying an envelope full of the places I had taken his name out of.
I watched from the front window while Colin handed it to him and he read it under the exterior light, his attention going between the pages and my closed curtains.
I had spent the afternoon signing forms so the next hospital would call Leah before it called him.
Whatever went across his face out there belonged to a man finding out what things cost after he came home from choosing somebody else.
The ring stayed with Leah overnight. The bare place on my finger caught on the sheet every time my hand moved.
I wanted the missing weight to feel like freedom.
It felt like five years taken off my body in a yard while everybody watched another woman ride out in my seat.
I cried into the pillow until breathing got difficult, stopped before grief could turn into an emergency, and hated him for making me monitor even that.
By morning there was enough anger to work with. I dressed, took my medication, and walked into the common room while church went on behind a closed door. Leah was at the bar with the small envelope in front of her and the burner beside it.
“The photographs go to Mia’s safe,” I said. “Every image off that phone. I don’t want a second set of them in this house for anybody to find.”
Leah put the small envelope in my hand so the choice traveled through me before it went anywhere. “And this?”
The ring came out into my palm, low stones, the shank worn thin on the underside from five years of dough and hot water.
“It stays with me. He bought it and he put it on me and I wore it through everything he did, and I’m not paying a lawyer to hold the one thing in this that was ever mine.
It goes in the fire box. If I decide to sell it or throw it in the drainage channel, I want to be the one standing there. ”
“And the burner comes back with me.”
“Last night you didn’t want either lie in your house.”
“Last night it was a lie.” I picked it up.
It weighed nothing; it always weighed nothing, which was part of what I hated about it.
“This morning it’s an exhibit, and I’m not leaving the only original of it in somebody else’s kitchen.
Mia has the photographs. The phone and the ring go in the fire box, and the fire box is mine. ”
June had taken the civilian minutes for the part of the night when Jess and her lawyer were in the table room, and before she filed them she read me the three lines that concerned me.
Ryder had told them the truth involved an active threat.
He had asked the table for time. He had not asked anyone about my lungs.
The officers’ door opened before nine. Jax came out first, then Bear, whose anger was visible in the way men moved out of a path he hadn’t asked for. Gage stayed inside. Ryder stopped in the doorway when he saw me and looked at my left hand to check whether the ring had come back overnight.
“Church isn’t finished,” Bear told Jax. “Get Jess and her lawyer. I want the route compared against her account before he leaves this building.”
Ryder looked at me when Bear said account. He wanted to know what I had heard and what I had worked out. I gave him nothing. Not knowing had kept me awake since the porch; he could have one morning of it.
Jess’s lawyer came in from the infirmary corridor alone. “Jess is outside. The return route made her sick and she wanted air before another meeting.”
“I’ll get her,” Ryder said.
“No. She asked me to sit in any interview. She didn’t ask for you.”
Rejection was starting to look ordinary on him. Leah had refused him medical updates, June had refused him the household file, Mia had refused him my appointment. Jess had apparently learned the same word somewhere between here and the county road.
She came in through the west door with a folder from her lawyer tucked under one arm. Ryder crossed half the room and stopped short of the lawyer. “Did the return route trigger cramping?”
Jess stared at him. “I got carsick.”
“You should sit near the infirmary until Aris checks you.” He reached for the folder rather than for her, and she moved it behind her side. “You’ve had too much stress.”
“The trip is over,” Jess said, in a voice with a warning in it I couldn’t read. “You said it ended when we came back.”
“It does.”
I put myself between the table-room door and the west door, near enough that he couldn’t go around me and far enough that Jess wasn’t cornered.
“I hope you remember this room when your child asks what kind of man you are. You can tell them you drove their mother to an appointment while your wife’s hospital band was in the kitchen trash. ”
Nobody rescued him. Bear looked at the floor. June closed the household folder. Jess’s eyes filled, and mine didn’t, because tears would have given him one more thing about my body to read.
“Eden,” he said, and nothing came after it.
“You know more words than that. You spent months of them on the burner.” I made myself look at Jess and see the frightened woman separately from the man arranging her. “Did the doctor say everything was all right?”
Jess’s hands closed on the folder. “I can’t talk about medical information.”
“I’m not asking for a diagnosis. You told my whole porch you were pregnant. I want to know whether Ryder drove you away from a real appointment with a different problem to hide.”
Her lawyer touched her elbow and waited for permission before moving her toward a chair. “You don’t have to answer anything from the club or from Eden. If you choose to answer, use your own words.”
Jess sat. “Nothing happened on the route that needs a doctor.”
Ryder moved to her right, not touching her, standing where the room had seen him stand all week. “Aris should look at her after that drive.”
I crossed to the infirmary door and called for Aris, and he came out with his reading glasses in his hand and looked from Jess to Ryder before he put them in his pocket. He is a careful man. In six years I have never known him to leave a frightened person with nothing to hold.
“Did you arrange yesterday’s appointment?” I asked.
“No. I made no referral, and no one has requested records from me.”
“Have you examined her?”
“I won’t answer that.” He said it kindly and he said it flat, and he did not follow it with anything.
He didn’t say she was under care. He didn’t say she was well, or any of the six harmless sentences a doctor gives a woman in a room full of men when there is something real behind him to protect.
Aris gives reassurance the way other people give water.
He had none to give, and that was the whole answer.
He held the door a moment longer before he went back through it.
Ryder was watching Jess. Jess was looking at the folder.
“When was your first appointment?” I asked her.
“Eden, stop,” Ryder said. “She doesn’t owe you her history.”
“You made her history part of my marriage. Stay out of the answer.”
Jess looked at her lawyer, who gave her nothing but time. “Last week.”
The messages on the burner had dates on them.
June nineteenth, Jess telling him an appointment had gone well and the doctor wanted her back after spotting.
June twenty-first, Ryder asking whether the spotting had stopped.
June twenty-third, money promised for rent and prenatal vitamins.
Those were dates on a screen, and I had photographed all of them.
What I had from Jess herself, spoken out loud, was two things: on my porch on the twelfth of July she said she was about eight weeks along, and just now, in this room, she said her first appointment was last week.
“The phone says you saw a doctor on June nineteenth.”
Jess looked at Ryder. His face gave her nothing, but she had rehearsed with him for weeks. Her fingers started working at the corner of the folder. “I meant the first one at that place.”
“Which place?”
“The clinic.”
“The one with no name printed on the card?” Jax said from beside Bear. He opened the route folder and laid a copy of the appointment card on the table. “Yesterday you told me you had that card from an earlier visit.”
Jess shut her eyes. Her lawyer took the folder out of her hands before the paper cut her. “This interview ends unless my client chooses to continue. She is protected from Dez regardless of anything she says about Ryder.”
“That protection stands,” Bear said. “Ryder has no say in it.”
Jess sat back. She had come through that gate frightened of Ryder’s wife and dependent on Ryder’s money. Now a lawyer sat at her elbow and Bear had put the club behind her. I could see why her answers were failing, and not yet what was under them.
“I want to talk to Jess,” I said. “No Ryder. Her lawyer stays. Leah and Mia stay if Jess agrees. I won’t touch her, threaten her, or ask where she’s being relocated.”
Ryder came toward me. “You aren’t doing this here.”
I took the knife out of my pocket and kept it closed in my fist. “Give me one more order about which truth I’m allowed to hear and I’ll do your tires first and your clubhouse windows after.”
He stopped. Nobody laughed.
“Put it away, Eden,” Bear said. “Second time. There won’t be a third.” He waited until my hand was in my pocket. “Eden decides whether she speaks to Jess. Jess decides whether she agrees. Ryder goes back in the table room.”
“Don’t let this turn into a crowd,” Ryder said.
“That isn’t yours to manage.” Mia came in from the civilian office and took the chair beside Leah with my folder. “Jess has counsel. Eden has counsel. Bear can stay for security if both women want him. You have no role in their conversation.”
He looked at Jess. “You don’t have to answer questions that put you at risk.”
“You are the risk in this room,” I said. “Go.”