CHAPTER 9
Brothers
°°°
The clubhouse looked smaller than Emery remembered, which she understood, standing in the gravel lot with a peach cobbler balanced against her hip, was probably a trick of memory rather than architecture — the mind did that with places it had spent a long time avoiding, shrank them down to something manageable so the avoiding felt less like cowardice.
Dally spotted her before she'd made it twenty feet from the truck, sprinting across the lot with the unguarded joy of a sixteen-year-old who hadn't yet learned to hide her feelings about the people she loved. "You came!"
"I said I would."
"People say a lot of things." Dally relieved her of the cobbler with the practiced efficiency of a kid who knew exactly where the dessert table was. "Grandma Cade's already asking if you're here. She's been asking since noon."
The clubhouse's main room opened into a covered patio out back, picnic tables arranged under strings of lights that wouldn't matter for hours yet, the whole space filled with the particular chaos of a family gathering — kids chasing each other around the legs of adults, someone's dog stealing a hot dog off an unattended plate, the low steady thrum of conversation and laughter that Emery had forgotten, in eleven months of careful solitude, that she'd missed with an ache she hadn't let herself name.
She stood at the edge of the patio for a moment before wading in, taking it in the way she used to take in the shop first thing in the morning — cataloguing what had changed, what hadn't.
The same mismatched folding chairs. The same faded banner from some rally two summers back, still strung along the fence line because nobody had ever gotten around to taking it down.
A new addition, a low wooden ramp built onto the side steps that hadn't been there before, and she found out later, from Dally, that it was for one of the older members' wife, who'd had a stroke that spring and used a walker now — a small, unglamorous piece of evidence that this world kept caring for its own long after the easy, celebratory parts of belonging had passed.
Rhys's mother found her within minutes, exactly as promised, wrapping her in a hug that smelled like the same rose perfume she'd worn for twenty years and holding on a beat longer than a casual greeting required.
"You brought the peach thing," Vivian said, blinking hard, and Emery watched the older woman's eyes go bright the way Rhys had warned her they would. "I've missed you, honey. I don't care what anybody says about staying out of it. I've missed you something fierce."
"I've missed you too." It was true in a way that surprised her with its intensity, and she held onto Vivian a moment longer, some of the year's careful armor cracking in the older woman's arms.
"He's been better," Vivian said quietly, pulling back but keeping one hand on Emery's arm, her voice pitched low enough that it wouldn't carry past the two of them.
"Since you two started talking again. I don't know what all's happened between you, and it's not my business to ask.
But I know my son, and I know the difference between him going through the motions and him actually being present in a room, and he's been present in a room again lately. First time in a long while."
Emery didn't quite know what to do with that, standing in the middle of a crowded patio with a woman who'd once been her mother-in-law in every way that mattered except the legal one, and settled for squeezing her hand instead of trying to find words adequate to the moment.
She made her way through the gathering slowly, reintroducing herself to faces she half-remembered, and found the layered strangeness of being welcomed back into a world she'd deliberately left settling over her like a coat that still mostly fit.
A few of the wives eyed her with open curiosity.
A couple of the older members greeted her with the easy warmth of people who'd simply decided, without discussion, that whatever had happened between her and Rhys was between her and Rhys, and didn't change where she sat at their table.
It was Ghost who found her a plate and steered her toward a seat with the same protective efficiency she recognized from the way Rhys had described him — sharp-eyed, quiet, the kind of man who noticed everything and said little about it.
"Good to see you back," he said, settling across from her with a plate of his own. "Been a long year without you keeping this one in line." He nodded toward Rhys, currently across the yard, crouched down to referee some dispute between two of the younger kids over a water gun.
"I never kept him in line. That's a generous description of what I did."
"You kept him human." Ghost said it plainly, no particular weight behind it, just an observation offered the way a man might mention the weather.
"Man's good at his job. Good VP. But before you, he ran hot — decided things fast, didn't always ask who else was standing in the blast radius.
You slowed him down some. Made him think about consequences he wasn't always inclined to think about on his own. "
"And after?" She hadn't meant to ask it so directly, but the question had been sitting in her chest for two weeks, and Ghost's plain manner made it feel, suddenly, safe to ask. "After I left. Did he go back to running hot?"
Something shifted behind Ghost's eyes — a decision being weighed, she could tell, the specific calculation of a man deciding how much truth a question actually wanted.
"Some. Worse for a few months, if I'm honest. Then he found a different kind of hot.
Quieter. Angrier at himself than at anybody else, which is its own kind of dangerous, but at least he stopped taking it out on the club. "
"What do you mean, worse?"
Ghost hesitated, and she watched him glance once toward the patio's far end, where Preacher stood talking with two members she didn't recognize, before he answered.
"There was some cleanup needed. After you left.
Before everybody understood the full shape of what happened.
" He said it carefully, each word placed like he was setting down something fragile.
"Preacher handled most of it quiet. Kept it from touching the club's business, kept people's mouths shut who might've talked otherwise. I figured you knew that part already."
She hadn't. The plate in her hands suddenly felt very heavy, and she set it down on the table with more care than the motion required, buying herself a second to steady her voice before she spoke again.
"Kept what quiet, exactly?"
Ghost's expression shifted, the specific look of a man realizing he'd said more than he meant to. "That's not really my story to tell, Emery. You should ask Rhys."
"I'm asking you."
"And I'm telling you to ask Rhys." Not unkind, but firm, the same steady patience she imagined he brought to every difficult conversation in this club. "Man deserves the chance to tell you himself before somebody else does it for him. Especially this."
She let it go, though the not-knowing sat in her stomach like something swallowed wrong, and the rest of the afternoon passed in a strange double register — warm on the surface, the gathering exactly as easy and welcoming as she'd once loved it, and underneath that warmth, a current of unease she couldn't quite name pulling steadily at her attention.
She watched Rhys across the yard, laughing at something one of the younger prospects said, effortlessly dangerous in the way he moved through this world of leather and loyalty and old hierarchy, and then, twenty minutes later, watched him crouch down to help Dally's friend fix a bicycle chain with the same careful patience he'd once used to fix things in their own garage, and understood all over again the contrast that had first pulled her toward him nine years ago.
Dangerous to the world. Gentle with the people who mattered.
A group of the younger kids had commandeered the far corner of the lot for some elaborate game involving a frisbee and a set of rules Emery couldn't follow, and she watched Rhys get roped into refereeing a dispute over an out-of-bounds call with the same seriousness he'd probably bring to an actual club matter, crouched down at eye level with a nine-year-old who was absolutely certain she was right.
He lost the argument gracefully. The kid ran off triumphant, and he caught Emery watching him from across the yard and gave her a small, helpless shrug, like he knew exactly how he looked and wasn't sorry about it.
She found him near the drink cooler as the afternoon wound toward evening, the crowd thinning by degrees, Dally off somewhere with a group of other teenagers who'd drifted toward the far end of the lot.
"Can I ask you something," she said, echoing, without quite meaning to, the same words she'd used weeks ago in his office.
"Always."
"What did the club cover for you? After I left. What did Preacher handle quiet, that I wasn't supposed to know about?"
His whole body went still, the easy warmth of the afternoon draining out of his face in real time, and she watched him understand, with visible dread, exactly what conversation he was now standing in the middle of.
"Who told you that."
"Does it matter? Is it true?"
He was quiet for a long moment, the cooler humming between them, the distant sound of Dally's laughter drifting over from the far end of the lot. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone low and rough, stripped of all the easy warmth from twenty minutes ago.
"Yeah," he said. "It's true."
"Tell me."
"Not here." He glanced around the thinning crowd, some old protective instinct flaring even now, even about this. "Not with half the club still in earshot. Give me — give me tonight to figure out how to say it right, and I'll tell you everything. I promise you, Em. This time I mean everything."
She studied his face, looking for the old evasion, the old managed half-truth dressed up as protection, and found instead something that looked like genuine dread — a man facing a reckoning he'd been avoiding for eleven months and finally, visibly, out of room to keep avoiding it.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Not tonight. I don't want you rehearsing this into something easier to hear. I want the version you tell me when you haven't had time to soften it."
Something crossed his face — respect, maybe, or the ache of being asked to do the harder thing when the easier one was right there available. "Tomorrow," he agreed. "I'll come to you."
Across the yard, Preacher had gone still too, she noticed — watching them from a distance with an expression she couldn't fully read, something that looked like he already knew exactly what conversation had just started, and wasn't looking forward to whatever came after it.
He didn't approach them. He simply stood there a moment longer, a half-finished plate in one hand, watching his nephew's face the way a man watches weather rolling in that he knows he can't stop, and then he turned and made his way back toward the clubhouse's main room, unhurried, his shoulders carrying something heavier than they had an hour ago.
Emery watched him go, certain, without being able to fully explain why, that whatever reckoning was coming wouldn't stay contained to just her and Rhys for very much longer.