CHAPTER NINETEEN
I sleep for three hours in the small borrowed room at the clubhouse, fitful and shallow, dreaming in fragments I can't fully hold onto once I wake, my father's hand in mine, sleet against a windshield, a hallway that keeps rearranging itself into different hospitals from different years.
I wake to the particular grey light of a Halloway Bay morning that can't decide whether it wants to snow properly or just stay locked in this flat, colorless holding pattern instead.
The clubhouse is quiet when I finally emerge, most members out on an early supply run, the garage bay echoing with an emptiness that feels different from its usual weekday quiet, more like the building itself is holding its breath along with me.
I move through the kitchen on autopilot, the same motions I performed the first morning I woke up here, coffee grounds measured by feel, and the small, unwelcome irony of it isn't lost on me, comfort and flight apparently requiring the exact same set of practiced hands.
I don't examine the decision too closely while I'm making it.
That's always been the trick, the specific skill of moving fast enough that the reasoning can't catch up and interfere.
I fold clothes I only unpacked a week ago, gather the few toiletries I'd set out on the dresser, methodical, efficient, the same competence I bring to a trauma bay redirected toward the quiet, practiced work of disappearing, and I'm reaching for my mother's cross where I left it coiled on the nightstand when my phone rings, Tabby's name lighting up the screen.
"Hey." My voice comes out rougher than I intend, and Tabby, who has known me long enough to read a single syllable like a chart, doesn't bother with pleasantries.
"What happened."
"Nothing happened. Everything happened. I don't know.
" I sit down on the edge of the bed, bag half packed beside me, and the whole story comes out in a rush I don't fully control, Everhart, the bridge, my father's forgiveness, Thane's year-old confession, the hallway at three in the morning.
Tabby listens without interrupting, the particular gift she's always had, and when I finally run out of words she's quiet for a moment before she speaks.
"Niamh. Can I say something, and you actually hear it instead of just waiting for me to finish so you can defend yourself?"
"Fine."
"You've told me, in four years of friendship, maybe six sentences about that town.
Six. I know your dad's name because you mentioned him twice.
I found out you grew up in a motorcycle club from a stray comment about oil changes, not because you ever sat me down and told me.
You've been protecting me from your own life this entire time, the same way you're apparently mad at this Thane person for protecting you from his.
That's not a coincidence, and I think you know it isn't."
The observation lands somewhere I don't have a ready defense for, and I sit there with the phone pressed to my ear, bag still half packed, feeling something crack open that I've kept carefully sealed for longer than I've known Tabby at all.
"I think I believe that if people know the real weight of things, if they know what I actually did, what I actually cost people, they'll leave.
Or they'll get hurt because of me. Or both.
" The confession comes out smaller than I mean it to, the first time I've said any version of it out loud to anyone besides my father and, last night, Thane.
"So I just. Manage it. Alone. Every time.
It's easier than finding out I'm right."
"Niamh." Tabby's voice softens, no judgment in it at all.
"You've been running that experiment for three years now, alone in that apartment with the blank walls and the view of a brick wall you never once complained about because complaining would mean admitting you wanted something better.
How's the data looking? Does managing it alone actually make you happier? "
I don't answer, because the honest answer is written into every choice I've made since I left Halloway Bay, and neither of us needs me to say it out loud.
"I have to go," I tell her instead, throat tight. "I'll call you later, I promise, a real call this time."
"Niamh." Her voice stops me before I can hang up. "Don't get back in that car. Whatever's waiting for you there, running from it isn't going to make the data come out any different than it has the last three years."
I sit with the phone dark in my hand for a long time after we hang up, turning her words over, data, experiment, three years of careful, controlled isolation dressed up as independence, and I think about how strange it is that the person who knows me least of anyone in Halloway Bay somehow sees the shape of my life out there more clearly than I've let myself see it in years.
The bag still sits open beside me, half packed, and I don't know how long I've been sitting there when I hear Gilda's footsteps in the hallway, unhurried, familiar, stopping just outside my open door.
"Going somewhere?" she asks, no accusation in it, just plain, direct observation.
"I don't know." It's the most honest thing I've said all morning.
Gilda steps into the room, taking in the bag, the cross still coiled on the nightstand, my face, which I suspect is telling her far more than my words are. She sits on the edge of the bed beside me, unhurried, the way she's sat beside every scared person in this building for thirty years.
"Last time you sat in a room like this with a bag half packed, I was three states away and didn't get a call until it was already done." She says it without bitterness, just fact, laying it plainly between us. "I don't intend to let that happen twice, if I can help it."
"I didn't tell anyone last time because I didn't think anyone would try to stop me. I'm not sure that would have changed anything anyway."
"Maybe not. But you'll never know, will you, since you didn't give anyone the chance." Gilda's voice stays gentle even as the words land with real weight. "That's the trouble with running quiet, Niamh. Nobody gets the opportunity to tell you you're wrong before it's too late to matter."
"You know that chair's been empty three years because everyone in this club was waiting, don't you.
" Her voice is gentle but doesn't leave room for argument.
"Not because we gave up on you. Because we didn't. Every single one of us, Niamh, including the man you're currently upstairs from, deciding whether to run from. "
"I'm not running. I'm just."
"Packing a bag at ten in the morning after a hard night, same as you did three years ago, same season, practically the same rain.
" Gilda's eyes are steady on mine, kind but unflinching.
"I've watched you build a life for yourself out there that keeps everyone at exactly the distance you can survive losing them from.
I understand why. I do. But honey, I need you to ask yourself something honestly before you zip that bag the rest of the way.
Are you leaving because you actually need to, or are you about to prove your own worst fear right on purpose, just so you never have to find out if staying might have worked? "
The question sits in the small room between us, heavier than anything Tabby said, heavier than anything Thane said in that hallway, and I feel something in my chest finally, fully crack open, three years of careful architecture buckling under the simple, unbearable weight of being seen this clearly by someone who loves me.
I don't zip the bag. I sit there instead, hands still, staring at the half folded clothes, and I let myself, for the first time since I drove out of this town on a Tuesday three years ago, actually consider the possibility that leaving was never the safety I told myself it was.
Gilda doesn't push further, doesn't ask for a decision on the spot.
She just stays there beside me for a while longer, her presence a quiet, steadying weight in the small room, and eventually she reaches over and closes the lid of my bag gently, not zipping it, just closing it, a small, deliberate gesture that leaves the choice entirely mine while still, somehow, making it a little easier to make.
"I'm going to go make more coffee," she says finally, rising from the bed with the particular unhurried grace she's carried through every crisis I've ever watched her weather.
"You come find me when you've decided something, whatever that ends up being.
No rush. This building's not going anywhere, and neither, I suspect, is he. "
She leaves me alone with the closed bag and the coiled cross and the grey light still refusing to commit to snow, and I sit there a long time afterward, turning Gilda's question over in my mind, running it, running, proving my own worst fear right on purpose, until the words stop sounding like an accusation and start sounding, slowly, like something closer to a diagnosis I've finally been handed after three years of refusing to look at my own chart.