Chapter 17 #2
“You put no sexual contact in writing,” I said. “You protected your fidelity in the contract and left me to think I was sleeping in a bed you’d shared with her.”
“That clause isn’t mine.”
“Say that again.”
“She asked for it.” He didn’t move his hands.
“She’d been in a room with a man who told her what she owed and how she was going to pay it.
When I came back with fifty thousand dollars, she wanted it on paper before she’d say yes, and her lawyer wasn’t in this yet, so what she had was me and a piece of paper.
She dictated the line. I wrote it. I signed it in a rented room with the door open to the walkway. ”
“And you hated it.”
“I did, and I signed it anyway, and I put the pen back in my pocket afterward like a man closing a job.”
“Why?”
He looked at the clause and not at me. “Because putting it in writing meant admitting out loud what kind of arrangement it was. A woman only needs that sentence when she has reason to think she’ll need it.”
“So the one page that protected me from believing you’d fucked somebody else exists because a twenty-two-year-old was frightened enough to demand it.” I turned the paper around so it faced him. “You didn’t give me that. She did.”
He had no answer, and I didn’t want one.
The burner transcript came next, and I only needed one line of it. He read it from where he sat without touching the page. Stay where I put you. I’ll come get you.
“You said that through the bathroom door,” I said. “I was on the floor with the fan on and I wouldn’t unlock it because I couldn’t stand you watching me be afraid, and you sat out there and said it and waited. Then you put it in a phone for me to find.”
“I knew you’d recognize it. I told her nothing about where it came from.”
“That’s worse. You kept the memory and gave away the sentence.” I pushed the transcript down the table to Mia before I could tear it. “The account. How long did the number take you?”
“A hundred twelve dollars and thirty-eight cents. Twenty minutes, maybe. I pulled the recurring charges, added them, and left enough that nothing would bounce before you looked.”
“Say what that is.”
“I worked out the exact amount of money it would take to frighten you and keep your lights on.”
Leah made a sound and turned it into moving her chair.
I let it sit. The refrigerator cycled on behind me.
“Now the part you’ve all been managing around,” I said. “Am I still being hunted?”
Nobody moved. Mia’s pen stopped.
“Do you have a name for the man who put that light on my chest? Anybody? Yes or no.”
“No,” Ryder said.
“Does anyone know if he was working for Silas, or for Dez, or for himself?”
“No.”
“Was he ever photographed, followed, identified, or stopped?”
“No.”
“So the west trail. Denver. The thing everything else was for.” I looked at him until he had to look back. “Does it hold?”
“It holds while nobody near Silas hears that my marriage was a lie.”
“Say the rest of that.”
“The trail is a story about a man who left his wife for a pregnant woman and doesn’t care where the wife went. The day that stops being true out loud, the reason for them to look west stops with it.”
“And you’re about to say it out loud to forty people in this compound.”
“That’s the trade I made at four this morning when I stopped arguing with Bear.”
“So it holds for how long? A week? A month?”
“I don’t know.”
There it was. I sat in my own kitchen with my rescue inhaler eight inches from my hand and understood that I had been put through a porch, a lockdown, a hospital, and an ambulance, and at the end of it nobody could tell me the name of the man who had aimed at me, or whether he was still out there, or whether anything I’d been made to live through had bought me one hour of safety that would outlast the truth.
“Bear,” I said, without turning around.
His boot came up on the bottom step. “Perimeter’s doubled and the routes are all rewritten. I won’t tell you it’s finished. Nobody in this club is going to tell you a thing is finished again.”
That was the only answer anybody gave me that day that I believed.
I pulled the route file toward me. Mia had copied the church record for me on Monday and I’d read it twice, at the kitchen table, with a pencil, the way I read a supplier invoice when the numbers feel wrong.
There is a page in it that logs the westbound movement.
It is a security page, not a story, which is why nobody had thought to keep it from me.
Subject departed 6 July, 06:20. Female. Blond.
Silver sedan. I-70 west. Interim stops logged 7, 8, 10 July. Colorado line 11 July.
“Who is this,” I said, and put my finger on the line.
He didn’t ask to see it. He knew which line it was. “A woman the source hired.”
“To do what?”
“To drive west with a phone I loaded, stop where I told her to stop, and be seen doing it.”
“She’s been doing it since the sixth of July.”
“Since the sixth.”
“The sixth is the day after the photograph.” I kept my finger on the page. “Jess didn’t stand on my steps until the twelfth. So for six days before anybody said the word pregnant to me, you already had a paid woman driving your lie to Colorado.”
He said nothing.
“She’s blond and she’s small and she was two hundred miles gone before I ever poured her a glass of water.
She was already doing it. The trail was already going west without me in it.
” My voice was doing something I couldn’t control, so I slowed it down and made it flat, the way I do when a customer is wrong about their own order.
“You had a woman who could carry the whole thing. You’d bought her.
She agreed. She’s never met me, she doesn’t have asthma, and she doesn’t love you. And you used your wife anyway.”
The refrigerator cycled off. Somebody crossed the yard outside, and the gravel sound went past the open back door and away.
“Answer her,” Mia said.
He opened his mouth. I watched a sentence get as far as the front of his teeth and stop there, because every answer required me to be gone, and the woman in Colorado had already been gone for six days.
Nothing came out.
Mia wrote for four or five seconds, then read it aloud, flat, for the recorder. “No answer given.”
I stood up. The chair legs shrieked on the floor and Bear was at the screen before I had straightened, and I put my hand up and he stopped.
“Stay there,” I said.
Ryder didn’t move from his chair. Leah asked if I wanted the inhaler or air and I said air, and I walked out through the front room onto my porch, and his knife was lying on the boards where he had put it before he came in, the black handle warm from the sun.
I picked it up.
“Eden,” Bear said. “Tell me what you’re doing.”
“Something expensive.”
I opened it and crossed the yard. Ryder came out of the house behind me and Bear put an arm across his chest at the bottom of the steps.
Men came to the clubhouse windows. Jax came out of the table room with Gage behind him, and Tessa started toward me until Leah said, clearly, “Let her do it herself.”
The Silverado sat where he’d parked it Monday after the appointment that didn’t exist. The passenger seat was forward of where I’d left it.
My bent sunglasses were gone from the console, and the console was clean, and the clean was what did it, because he had wiped a five-year-old truck out for her before he drove her past me.
I crouched at the front passenger tire and put the blade against the sidewall.
It didn’t go. Rubber is not a pie crust and it is not a shoulder of pork; it is a wall, and I had to get both hands around the handle and put my chest over the top of them and drive down with my whole body.
It went through with a bang and the air came out hot across my wrists.
The second one took less. The third one took more, because by then my arms were shaking.
And then my chest closed.