Chapter Four #2
"Then I hire an outside firm and hope they're half as good as you, and I lose weeks I'm not sure this club has to spare. I'll respect whatever you decide. I just want you making that decision with the full truth in front of you instead of a partial one."
I thought about hanging up. I thought about telling him to find somebody else, some outside accountant with no history in this town, no memory of flip-flops on a porch.
But I also thought about six years of Sunday mornings with a calculator, about the shoebox of receipts I'd turned into something clean, about the fact that whatever was happening in those accounts had happened on my watch, in a business that carried my fingerprints all through it even with my name freshly off the deed.
Somebody had gotten into something I built and I'd built it well enough, carefully enough, that finding the hole was going to take somebody who understood exactly where I'd have hidden a discrepancy myself if I'd been the one trying to keep it invisible.
"I'll do it," I said. "On my terms."
"Name them."
"I work the books at the Boneyard, not the clubhouse.
I don't want to be walking into church meetings or sitting at that table.
I want access to the accounts, I want Cassidy available when I have questions, and I want it understood, by everybody, including Rourke, that this is business, not an invitation for anybody to think I'm coming back to anything else. "
"Understood," Deacon said, without hesitation, which told me he'd expected some version of that list before he ever picked up the phone. "I'll make sure it's clear."
I hung up and sat at Essie's table for a long time after, tea fully cold now, thinking about what it was going to feel like to walk back into a building where a woman had sat in my seat, where brothers I'd known for years had watched it happen and said nothing, where Rourke was going to be somewhere in the building the whole time I was there whether I saw him or not.
Essie came in from the other room and read my face without me having to explain anything. "You're doing it," she said. Not a question.
"Somebody has to. It might as well be somebody who's actually good at it."
"That's not why you're doing it and you know it."
"It's part of why," I said, which was as honest as I could manage that night. "The rest of it I haven't figured out yet."
Essie sat down across from me at her kitchen table, pulled her own mug of tea toward her, and studied me for a long moment in the particular way she has, the one that's been reading me accurately since we were seven years old sharing a booth at her mother's diner.
"You know I'll support whatever you decide here.
I want that said plain before I say anything else.
But I've watched you build a wall around yourself for two weeks now, brick by brick, and I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually answer it instead of deflecting the way you're so good at. "
"Ask."
"Is going back into that building to find the money actually about the money, or is it the safest excuse you could find to be near him without having to admit that's what you want?"
I sat with that question longer than I wanted to, because it was a fair one, and because some part of me had been avoiding asking it of myself since the moment Deacon's number came up on my phone.
"I don't know yet," I finally admitted. "I know I'm furious.
I know I don't trust him. I also know that business is mine in every way that actually matters, and I'm not going to let it fall apart because I'm too proud to walk through a door.
Those two things can both be true at once. "
"They can," Essie agreed. "Just don't lie to yourself about which one's doing the heavier lifting, whenever you figure it out.
You're allowed to want him back and be right to make him earn it.
Those aren't opposites. But you have to actually let yourself know which feeling's in the driver's seat, or you're going to end up somewhere you didn't mean to go. "
I didn't have an answer for that yet. I'm not sure I had one three weeks later, either, but I appreciated, sitting there with cold tea and my best friend's steady, unflinching eyes on me, that she'd been the one to ask the question honestly instead of letting me hide behind spreadsheets the way I clearly wanted to.
I drove out to the Boneyard three days later, on a Friday morning before it opened, my laptop bag on the passenger seat where the box of my mother's jewelry had sat two weeks earlier, and I sat in the parking lot for a solid five minutes before I made myself get out of the truck.
The building looked exactly the way it always had, hand-painted sign over the garage door, the same chipped paint on the trim I kept meaning to have somebody fix, and looking at it, I felt the strange double pull of a place that was still, in every way that actually mattered, mine, and a place I no longer had any legal claim to at all.
I thought about the flip-flops on the porch.
I thought about the drawer, the toothbrush, the seat at church.
And underneath all of it, quieter but no less real, I thought about the sheer bullheaded satisfaction I was going to feel when I found exactly where somebody had tried to hide a hole in books I'd built to be impossible to hide anything in.
Whatever else this week was going to cost me, that part, at least, I was looking forward to.
I got out of the truck and walked toward the door.
I stopped once, hand on the handle, and let myself notice the small brass plaque bolted next to the frame, one I'd had made three years back and mostly forgotten about since: BONEYARD GARAGE & TAVERN, EST. under it, and beneath that, small enough most people never noticed, a single line I'd insisted on despite Rourke telling me nobody would ever read it closely enough to care: Built by hands that don't quit.
I'd meant it, at the time, as something general, a little motto for the business itself.
Standing there with my laptop bag digging into my shoulder, two weeks out from the worst month of my adult life, it landed differently.
I didn't quit building this place when it was a shoebox of receipts and a leaking roof.
I wasn't going to quit finding whatever was wrong inside it now, either, no matter whose fault it turned out to be, or how much it hurt to be the one who had to find it.
I thought, standing there, about the version of me who'd first walked through this door six years ago, twenty-eight and stubborn and half convinced I had something to prove to a room full of men who didn't yet believe a woman could keep a club's books straighter than any of them managed on their own.
That version of me hadn't needed Rourke's love to justify the work.
She'd needed it to make the work feel less lonely, which isn't the same thing, and standing on that same threshold now, I found something almost steadying in remembering the difference.