Chapter 10 #2
He takes the phone in one big scarred hand and he reads it, scrolling slowly, and I watch the thing happen in his face that I've only seen a few times in my life.
He goes very, very still in the way that means something in him has gone past anger into something cold.
He hands the phone back to me himself.
He doesn't say anything about the post.
He looks at me instead, his whole attention, the way he looked at me in that courthouse hallway seven years ago.
"Look at you," he says.
It's not what I expected, and it stops me cold.
"Your phone blows up with the worst thing a person can be called," he says lowly, just for me.
"Your woman's name dragged through every gutter in that town, and you stood up off that concrete, and you didn't put your fist through anything.
You didn't get on your bike with murder in you.
" His jaw works, the shine coming up in his eyes he'll deny to his grave.
"Seven years ago, this would've ended with you in a cell or a box. And here you stand. Steady."
He grips the back of my neck, heavy and warm, the way he's done since I was small. "I have watched you climb your way back from a place most men don't come back from. I don't say it enough. I'm saying it now. I am proud of you, son. Prouder than I've got words for."
I can't speak.
My father isn’t a man who hands out words like these.
I could count on one hand the times I've heard him reach for them, and he's speaking them now, on me, in a parking lot, with my hands still black from another man's bike.
"This girl," he says. "She means something to you?"
"She does," I manage. "More than I know how to say standing here."
He nods once, slow and final, the way he nodded at me in that hallway.
"Then she's ours," he says. "You hear me?
If she's yours, she's ours. That's how this family works, and that's how it's always worked.
Your mother'll have her in the kitchen inside a month, teaching her to make the cornbread, and may the gods help her, because that woman teaches like a drill sergeant.
" The corner of his mouth moves, then sets.
"Nobody does this to a woman of ours and walks around after. "
A woman of ours.
He's never met her.
He's seen a school photo with a slur stamped across it and heard thirty seconds of his son's voice crack, and that's enough for him.
That's all it takes.
And right then, while that's still going through me warm and enormous, the next text comes in.
It's from Sophie again, but it's different. Just one line this time, and under it, a screenshot of a message she got.
My dad just sent me this.
I open it.
It's from her father. The deacon. Three lines on a gray screen.
Sophia, you need to turn yourself in to the proper authorities and let them help you. This is a sickness, the same one your sister carried, and hiding from it is not God's way. Come home and let us pray over you before this gets worse.
I read it twice.
I have to look up at the sky for a second because the gap between those two things is so wide, I can't hold both ends of it at once.
Her father looked at a lie and chose the lie.
He looked at his own child—a good woman, the best I know—and decided the machine was telling the truth, and she was the one who'd gone wrong.
Come home and let us pray over you.
Like she's a thing with a demon in it.
Like the answer to a daughter being destroyed is to destroy what's left of her certainty that she's sane.
I think about my father's hand still warm on the back of my neck.
I think about come home to us, the way mine said it through a locked door seven years ago, when they had every reason in the world to be ashamed of me and chose to drive an hour every week instead.
And I shake my head slowly because there's no sense to be made of it.
A man gets a daughter like Sophie and throws her in the fire to keep his own good name dry.
I came up out of a warehouse with three men dead behind me, and my family said come home.
She graded papers and fed her dog and sat in her pew her whole life and hers says turn yourself in.
I don't understand it. I don't think I'm built to understand how fucked up this is.
I think about Sophie last night—she told me about it in pieces over the phone this morning, before any of this broke, her voice going flat the way it does when she's holding something heavy very still.
Her father telling her she sounded like her sick sister. Her mother looking at her plate.
The whole family choosing this fucked up fabrication over the girl they raised.
And now this, on top of it.
A second knife in the same wound, twisted by the same hand that should've been the last one in the world to hold it.
My family had every reason to throw me out.
I gave them blood, a trial, a locked ward, and so much more.
Not one of them ever once looked at me the way that text looks at her.
I know which kind of man I want to be standing next to her when the smoke clears.
I text her back before I'm even fully decided because my hands have decided for me.
To: Sophie
I'm coming home. Right now. Don't answer the door for anybody but me. Don't read the comments. I'll be there in an hour.
The three dots come up. Stop. Come back.
From: Sophie
Okay. Please hurry.
"Go," Runes says behind me. He's read it over my shoulder, all of it, and for once he doesn't make me ask. "We've got the work up here. Dag's already moving. You go be where you're needed."
I'm pulling my gloves on before he finishes.
Bjorn catches my arm at the bikes. "You want me to ride down with you?"
"Not yet." I swing my leg over. "Soon, maybe. Not tonight. Tonight she doesn't need a clubhouse on her porch. She only needs me."
He nods, and squeezes once, and lets go.
I take the highway south with the sun dropping off to my right and the wind pulling the worst of it off me, mile by mile.
Somewhere around the halfway point, with the city behind me and the pines closing in on both sides of the road, I clock what I'm doing.
I'm going home.
That's the word that's been sitting under everything since I got on the bike, and I finally let myself look straight at it.
Home.
A low brick house an hour south with a hole in the fence and a lazy hound who loves my company, and most importantly, the woman I’m falling for.
My woman.
I run the check. I can't help it. It's reflex now, like the way I breathe.
No lift. No race underneath it. No bright climbing certainty trying to dress itself up as love.
My heart's going the way any man's heart goes when he's an hour from the person he wants and can't get there fast enough, and that's all it is.
The sickness took a lot from me.
It took a piece of my own mind I'm still not sure I got all the way back, but it doesn't get this.