Prologue #2
I came back inside. I shut the journal. I put it in the inside pocket of my jacket where it pressed against my ribs like a heart that wasn't mine.
Then I rode here.
I told myself I was being decent. I was returning a lost item to its owner.
It was the act of a good citizen, a thoughtful neighbor, a man who recognized the personal value of a journal and the personal cost of losing it.
I told myself all of that. I'd been telling myself stories all my life — they were how a man like me got through the day — but this was the first one I could remember not believing for a single second.
The light in her window had not gone out.
I sat on the bike and watched it. Eleven-oh-four. Eleven-oh-seven. Eleven-fifteen. I told myself I'd give it until eleven-twenty and then I'd ride off and put the journal in her mailbox in the morning and that would be the end of it.
At eleven-eighteen, the curtain moved.
I couldn't see her face. I could see the shape of her — the silhouette of a woman who couldn't sleep and was looking out at the dark for reasons the dark wasn't going to answer.
She stood there a long time. Long enough that I knew I'd been seen, even though it was too dark for her to know who she was looking at.
The bike was a shadow. I was a shape on the shadow.
She stayed at the window anyway.
There's a moment — every man who's ever lived a reckless life knows this moment — when you decide whether to keep being the man you've been or whether to do the thing that's going to change everything.
It's small. It's always small. A turn of the wheel.
A foot on the throttle. A choice that looks like nothing at all and is actually the hinge on which a door swings.
I swung my leg off the bike.
I crossed the street. My boots were loud on the asphalt and I didn't care.
I walked up the path to the side door of the parsonage — not the front door, because the front door was for parishioners and the side door was where the family came and went, and a man who knows a town knows which door says what. I climbed three steps. I knocked.
I waited.
I could hear her on the stairs. The careful, soft footfalls of a woman who didn't want to wake her parents. The pause at the landing. The longer pause at the door. The chain sliding back. The lock turning.
The door opened.
She stood there in a long white nightgown and a robe that she'd belted hastily at the waist. Her hair was down, dark and heavy over one shoulder.
She had a small smudge of ink on her thumb where she'd been writing.
Her eyes, when she lifted them to mine, were the color of strong tea and twice as warm.
She looked at me like she didn't quite recognize me.
Then she looked at the journal in my hand, and she did.
I held it out. I said the only thing I'd planned to say, and even that came out wrong.
"You left this at my shop."
She reached for it.
I held on a moment longer than I should have. I held on because once she took it I'd have no reason to be standing on her step, and once I had no reason I'd have to leave, and leaving was, suddenly, the thing I least wanted in the world.
She tugged. The journal passed between us.
I let it go.
I said, before I could stop myself, "You're a hell of a writer, preacher's girl."
I watched her face. I watched it the way I watched paint go onto curved steel — looking for the moment the color caught, the moment the surface accepted what was being put on it.
I saw the flush move up her neck. I saw her lips part.
I saw the small, terrified, electric realization that I had read it. I had read her.
She said, "How much did you read?"
I said, "Enough to know you don't belong in this building."
She shut the door.
Not slammed. Shut. The careful, controlled shut of a woman who'd been trained from birth not to make noise.
The chain slid back into place. The lock turned.
I stood on the step in the dark with my hand still raised from where I'd been holding the journal a second ago, and I felt, somewhere on the other side of the door, a woman pressing her back against the wood and trying to breathe.
I walked back to the bike. I didn't look up at her window. I didn't have to. I knew she'd come back to it the moment I was gone.
I started the engine. The Shovelhead under me — my own bike, the one I'd built from scrap — rumbled the way the Shovelhead in my shop rumbled, low and steady, the heartbeat of a machine I'd given my hands to. I let it idle for ten seconds longer than necessary. I didn't know why.
Then I rode.
What I knew, riding home, was this: there was a sentence I'd written in the back of her journal before I'd left the shop. A stupid sentence. A reckless sentence. One I had no business writing in the most private thing another human being owned.
The poem about the rider — you got the engine sound wrong. It's a rumble, not a roar. Come by the shop. I'll teach you the difference.
She would read it. Tonight, probably, sitting in the gold light of her window with her back still pressed against the door.
And the thing I had spent twenty-seven years calling freedom — that loose, unfastened thing I had carried around like proof of my own integrity — was about to discover what it felt like to be tied to something it had not chosen and could not put down.
I rode home. The wind was warm. The road was empty.
I had never been less alone in my life.