Chapter 12 #3
"How many barrels?" Gary said.
"Eleven. Maybe twelve now." She looked at him.
"They move them at night through the tunnel that runs from the far end of the storage room to the old barn.
Load them onto a flatbed from the barn side.
From there Brett drives them to a dock on the creek — the one the tunnel used to come out at before the 1927 collapse sealed that section — and they transfer to a boat.
The buyer is the owner of a restaurant about forty minutes east. High-end place, private clients, the kind of operation that can absorb a twenty-thousand-dollar bottle without the paperwork.
" A long pause. "The restaurant owner has connections I don't fully understand.
But I know that when product doesn't arrive on schedule, Jed comes home scared, which is the only time I've ever seen Jed scared. "
Gary sat with this. Eleven or twelve barrels, at twenty thousand dollars minimum each. A buyer with connections and a low tolerance for supply problems. And Jed's sponsorships gone, which meant this wasn't supplementary income anymore — it was the income.
"The cash he hands you," Gary said.
Belle was quiet for a moment. "I knew it wasn't from the circuit. I didn't ask." She looked at him steadily. "I was trying to figure out how to leave and I didn't have the money to do it cleanly and I told myself it was complicated."
"It is complicated," Gary said.
"It's not complicated enough to excuse it." She took the cloth from him, refolded it to the cooler side, pressed it back gently. "I told Jed two weeks ago. That I was done. That if he didn't stop the whole thing I was going to say something." She paused. "That was before I met you."
Gary looked at her. "Belle—"
"I'm not saying this is about you," she said.
"It would have happened anyway. Meeting you just—" She searched for it.
"You're the first person I've talked to in two years who actually listened.
Who didn't have an angle or a reason to need me to be something specific.
" She shook her head slightly. "My grandmother needs me to be the Steele heir.
My dad needs me to be fine. Jed needs me to be quiet. " A pause. "You just listened."
The apartment was quiet around them — Marv's slow breathing from the floor, the distant muffled sounds of the campus still faintly celebrating Halloween outside, the particular intimacy of a late night with someone when the walls are down.
Gary put his hand over hers where it rested on his jaw, careful.
"What are you going to do?" he said.
"Tell Lou," she said. "Not tonight. But soon. I've been in contact with someone—" She stopped. "Someone who can make sure my grandmother and my father are protected when it comes out. That they didn't know." She looked at him. "Will you help me figure out the rest?"
"Yeah," Gary said. "I will."
She looked at him for a long moment in the low light of the apartment — the jaw darkening, the butterfly wings folded on the coffee table, Marv stretched between them like a warm draft stopper — and something in her expression shifted from the carrying weight into something lighter.
She leaned forward and kissed him softly, once. The careful kind, conscious of his jaw.
He kissed her back the same way.
"You should sleep," she said quietly. "You got hit in the head."
"I've been hit in the head before."
"Also not the reassurance you think it is."
He smiled, which hurt less than laughing.
Belle helped him to the bedroom with the gentle, unhurried care of a woman doing it because she wanted to rather than because it was required — got him horizontal, pulled the blanket up, and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment just being there.
Marv appeared in the doorway, decided the situation was under control, and lowered himself to the floor with the long, settling sigh of a dog completing his rounds.
Belle lay down beside Gary in the dark, still dressed, on top of the blanket, and he felt her shift until she was comfortable — her head near his shoulder, not quite on it, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her.
"You don't have to stay," he said.
"I know," she said.
She stayed.
Her hand found his in the dark, loosely, the way you hold someone's hand when you're not trying to say anything specific with it, just acknowledging that they're there.
Gary lay on his back and looked at the ceiling of his apartment and felt the ache in his jaw, his side, the particular, complicated warmth of a woman who had just told him the truth lying beside him because she chose to.
Outside, Halloween wound down around Renton. Somewhere across campus a group of students were making their way home, voices carrying and fading. Marv exhaled once more from the floor and went still.
Gary closed his eyes.
The last thing he thought before sleep found him was that whatever came next — Lou, the tunnels, Brett, the buyers with their connections and their patience wearing thin — at least he wasn't the only one standing in it anymore.