CHAPTER 6
Damon
She doesn't say another word to me in the diner. Just stares at me with her jaw set and her eyes gone hard and wounded all at once, and then she stands, collects Mia and her crayons with hands that are visibly shaking, and walks out the front door without looking back.
I let her go. Everything in me screams to follow, to explain, to fix this the way I fix everything — fast, direct, no room left for doubt — but some older, harder-won instinct tells me this isn't a problem I solve by chasing her across a parking lot in front of half the diner's lunch crowd.
This is a problem I solve by giving her room to be furious, and then showing up anyway when she's ready to hear it.
Clara catches my arm on my way out ten minutes later, her grip surprisingly strong for a woman built like a sparrow.
"You scared her," she says, no preamble, sharp eyes pinning me in place. "I don't know what you said, but that girl walked out of here looking like she'd seen a ghost."
"I said too much." I scrub a hand down my face, feeling twelve years of careful silence unraveling faster than I know how to manage. "Clara, how much do you know? About her. About why she's really here."
Clara's quiet a long moment, weighing something behind her sharp eyes.
"Enough to know she didn't come to Oakhaven for the scenery.
" She lets go of my arm, steps back, crosses her own arms over her chest. "I know she flinches at loud voices.
I know she checks the locks on this diner twice before she leaves every night, even though I've got a security system that cost more than her car.
I know she's never once mentioned a man in two years of working for me, not a boyfriend, not a father for that little girl, nothing — which tells me there's a man in her past worth never mentioning.
" She fixes me with a look that could strip paint.
"And I know you showed up in my diner four minutes after two strangers walked in asking for her by name, which tells me you already knew a lot more than you're telling. "
"I do."
"Then you'd better go tell her instead of me.
" Clara jerks her chin toward the door. "That girl's spent two years building a life out of nothing but grit and double shifts.
She doesn't deserve to find out the man circling her life again has secrets too.
Go fix it, Damon. Properly, this time. Not with a toolbox. "
I drive to the cottage that evening with nothing rehearsed, which isn't like me.
I've spent twelve years being a man who plans everything three moves ahead — every conversation with the club, every negotiation with rival charters, every hard call I've ever had to make as president — and tonight I've got nothing except the truth, unpolished, and the growing certainty that the truth is the only thing left that might actually work.
She opens the door before I knock. Must have heard the truck in the driveway, watched me walk up through the window same as she did the first night I brought the toolbox.
Mia's nowhere in sight — down for the night already, or close to it — and Selene's standing in the doorway with her arms crossed tight over her chest, gaze flat and guarded in a way that makes my chest ache with how familiar it is.
I put that look there once already. Twelve years ago. I put it there again this afternoon.
"You don't get to just show up," she says, before I can say anything. "Not after what happened today. You knew his name, Damon. You knew Richard's name and you let me sit there for a week thinking you were just some old friend fixing my sink out of nostalgia."
"I know." I keep my hands loose at my sides, unthreatening, a man who's used to commanding rooms deliberately making himself smaller in this one doorway. "Can I come in? I'll tell you everything. All of it. But I'd rather not do it standing on your porch where the whole road can hear."
She studies me a long moment — long enough that I think she might shut the door in my face, which I'd deserve — and then she steps back, wordless, and lets me in.
We sit at the same kitchen table where I ate dinner with her and Mia four nights ago, except tonight there's no rotisserie chicken, no easy chatter about dinosaurs and stolen crayons.
Just Selene across from me with her arms still crossed, waiting, and me trying to find the beginning of a story I've never told anyone outside the club.
"I have Bear running a security rotation on your house," I start, because it's the most immediate thing, the thing that got us here today.
"Started the night your car broke down. Two Prospects, round the clock, watching from a discreet distance.
That's how I knew about the two men at the diner before you called anyone — Bear spotted their vehicle, recognized it didn't belong, called it in.
I was already close because I check on the rotation myself most evenings. "
Her face goes through several things in quick succession — shock, then something sharper, something that looks a lot like violation. "You've had men watching my house. For days. Without telling me."
"Yes."
"That's — Damon, that's not protection, that's surveillance. Do you understand the difference? I spent two years running from a man who thought watching me, controlling every piece of information about my life, was the same thing as loving me. And you did the exact same thing without asking."
The words land like a blow, and they should, because she's not wrong — I see it now, sitting across from her, see the shape of what I did through her eyes instead of my own, and it's uglier than I let myself examine when I was making the call at three in the morning four nights ago.
"You're right," I say, and mean it. "I didn't ask. I should have asked. I made a call based on twelve years of instinct instead of six days of actually knowing who you are now, and that wasn't fair to you. I'm sorry."
Something in her posture loosens, marginally, at the apology — not forgiveness, not yet, but a crack in the wall wide enough for me to keep going.
"How did you know his name," she says again, quieter this time. "That's the part I need to understand. Not the rotation. The name."
I take a breath. This is the part I haven't said out loud in twelve years, the part that lives locked in a box in my closet along with a piece of paper that cost me everything.
"I didn't know his name before today," I say.
"Not for certain. But I've spent twelve years learning how to read danger before it fully arrives, Selene.
It's the whole reason the club exists the way it does now — the whole reason I rebuilt it from the ground up.
And the second I saw you in my garage, soaked through, holding Mia like a shield, driving with both hands on the wheel like the world might come at you sideways — I knew.
Not the name. Just the shape of it. A woman running from something powerful enough that the running never fully stopped. "
"So you guessed."
"I guessed, and then Bear's watch confirmed it, and then two men walked into Clara's today and said your name out loud like they had every right to it, and I put the pieces together fast enough to say his name before you'd told me. That's the truth. All of it."
She's quiet a long moment, studying me across the table, and I let her take whatever time she needs, because pushing right now would undo whatever ground the apology just bought me.
"Tell me the rest," she finally says. "All of it. Who he is. What he did. I need to hear you say it, because I've spent two years not saying it to anyone, and I think I'm too tired to keep carrying it alone tonight."
So she tells me.
Richard Vance. A name I've heard once or twice in passing — timber and shipping money out of Seattle, old family wealth stacked on new corporate leverage, the kind of man who owns half a dozen board seats and answers to nobody.
She met him at twenty-one, waitressing her way through community college, and he was charming in the particular, practiced way men like that learn to be charming — attentive, generous, endlessly interested in every detail of her life, right up until the wedding ring went on and the attention curdled into something else entirely.
Control disguised as devotion. Cameras at every door of the house, framed as security.
A driver assigned to her every outing, framed as convenience.
Friendships that mysteriously dissolved one by one, framed as coincidence, until she woke up four years into the marriage and realized she didn't have a single person left in her life who existed outside Richard's awareness.
Then Mia was born, and something in Richard shifted — not toward warmth, but toward a colder, more calculating kind of ownership, treating his own daughter less like a child and more like an asset, a line item in whatever long game he was playing that Selene never fully understood until it was almost too late.
"I found out he'd hired someone," she says, voice gone flat and careful, the voice of someone reciting a memory they've worked hard to distance themselves from.
"A man who specialized in — I don't even know the right word for it.
Making people disappear, legally. Making custody disputes end in his favor no matter what a judge might otherwise decide.
I found the contract by accident, going through his home office for something unrelated, and I understood in about thirty seconds that if I ever tried to leave him and take Mia with me, he had a plan already built to guarantee I wouldn't win. "
"So you ran first."