Chapter Five
Rourke
Deacon called me the same afternoon he called Marisol, laid out the terms flat, no room for negotiation, and I understood without him having to spell it out that every one of those terms had come from her, not from him, and that he was relaying them to me exactly the way you'd relay instructions from somebody who didn't trust you to hear them any other way.
"She works the books at the Boneyard. Not the clubhouse.
You don't corner her, you don't try to work this into a conversation about the two of you, and if she asks Cassidy a question and you happen to be standing there, you let Cassidy answer it.
This is business, Rourke. You do not get to make it anything else. "
"Understood," I said, and meant it, though understanding it and having the discipline to actually live it out over however many weeks this was going to take were two different problems entirely.
"There's something else," Deacon said, and I heard the shift in his voice, the particular register he used when he was about to say something as Prez instead of as a man who'd known me my whole life.
"The review you asked for. Table's set to hear it in three weeks.
I want you to understand, going in, that asking for it doesn't buy you any goodwill in the room.
Some of the brothers are going to see it as exactly what it should be, a man owning what he did.
Others are going to see it as a performance, a way of getting ahead of a harder conversation before it happens to you instead of because of you.
I can't control which version they land on.
I just want you walking in with your eyes open. "
"I'd rather they see it as a performance and still hold me accountable than skip the whole thing because of who my father was."
"That's the right answer," Deacon said. "Doesn't make it easy to hear people say it to your face, though.
You should prepare yourself for that part too.
There's already talk that some of the older members want to bring your father's memory into it directly, ask whether you're worthy of the name on that clubhouse banner.
That's going to sting worse than anything Cassidy's numbers turn up, and I can't shield you from it even if I wanted to.
My job is to run this table fair, not to make it painless for you. "
I want to explain something about the state I was in that week, because I think it matters for what happened next.
I'd spent four days doing what I could think to do that wasn't just standing around waiting for Marisol to decide my fate, which mostly meant throwing myself at anything that felt like actual, concrete repair instead of empty apology.
I'd called Deacon myself that Wednesday morning, before Cassidy's discrepancy even came up, and asked him to open a formal review of my conduct, the kind of thing the club does when a patched member's judgment comes into serious question, the kind of review that can end with a man losing rank, or worse.
"You're asking for that," Deacon said, like he wanted to make sure he'd heard me right.
"I'm not going to sit here and let this table decide quietly among yourselves whether I get a pass because I'm Cormac's son. I want it on the record, formal, with a vote at the end of it, so nobody in this club ever has reason to think I bought my way out of consequences with my last name."
He was quiet for a second. "Your father would have hated hearing you ask for that."
"My father built this club on the idea that nobody's above the code just because of who they're related to. I think asking for this is the only way I actually honor that instead of just talking about it."
He agreed to open it. Told me it'd go to the full table within the month, that I should expect it to cost me something real, and I told him that was the entire point, that a review that didn't cost me anything wasn't worth having.
I want to be honest that some part of that decision was about Marisol, was about wanting her to eventually see that I understood the size of what I'd done well enough to ask for it to be measured properly instead of forgiven quietly.
But most of it, if I'm being fully honest with myself, was about my father, about that conversation in the garage two years before he died, about wanting, for the first time in six months, to be the version of myself he'd have actually recognized instead of the version that had let two months of grief curdle into something that hurt the people I loved most.
I drove out to see my mother that same afternoon, something I hadn't done in almost two weeks, too ashamed to sit across from Bridget Callahan and let her see what her son had done.
She still lived in the house she and my father had shared for thirty years, out past the edge of club territory where the road turns to gravel, and she was in the garden when I pulled up, gloves on, pulling weeds from around a row of tomatoes my father used to grow every summer without fail.
She didn't stop working when I got out of the truck, just said, without looking up, "Took you long enough. "
"You heard."
"Ember Creek heard, Rourke. There isn't a woman in this town over the age of forty who hasn't had an opinion about it in my kitchen this past week.
" She sat back on her heels, finally looked at me, and whatever I'd braced myself for, harsh judgment, cold disappointment, wasn't quite what I found in her face.
Just tired sadness, and underneath it, something steadier.
"Your father would be disappointed in you.
I want you to hear me say that plainly, because I think you need to hear somebody who loved you both say it out loud instead of dancing around it.
He'd also tell you that being disappointed in a choice a man made isn't the same as writing him off for good, provided the man in question does the actual work of becoming someone worth trusting again. "
"I don't know how to do that, Mom. I don't know where you even start."
"You start," she said, pulling her gloves off, "the same way your father built every single thing he ever built.
Slow, and honest, and without expecting anybody to hand you credit for it before you've earned it.
Marisol is not obligated to forgive you on any timeline that's convenient for you.
She's not obligated to forgive you at all.
If you go into this expecting a reward at the end of it, you're going to do the work for the wrong reason, and she'll see that, because that woman has always seen straight through anything false.
You do the work because it's right, because you owe it to the man you want to be, whether or not it ever gets you what you want. "
I sat with her in that garden for another hour, mostly in silence, helping her with the weeds because it gave my hands something to do, and when I left she hugged me at the truck door, held on a beat longer than usual, and said, "I loved you both together.
I still do. But I loved your father because he never once made me guess where I stood, and if you want any woman to build a life with you the way I built one with him, you're going to have to learn that same lesson, whatever it costs you to learn it now instead of never. "
Harlow called twice that Wednesday. I let both calls go to voicemail.
She texted after the second one, a single line: I need to talk to you, it's not about us, it's important.
I stared at that message for a long time, turning it over the same way I'd turned over that hair tie, trying to figure out if it was a genuine warning or just another version of the hope I'd seen on her face in the clubhouse lot, dressed up in more urgent language to get past my guard.
I didn't answer it. I told myself I'd deal with it if she reached out a third time, which, looking back, was its own kind of cowardice, one more thing I'd learn to regret once I understood how much that unanswered text was going to matter later.
She didn't call a third time. I remember thinking, at the time, that her silence after that meant the matter had resolved itself, or that she'd simply given up trying to reach me.
I understand now how badly I misread that silence, and how much simpler things might have gone if I'd trusted my own unease enough to call her back instead of letting my own convenience decide what was and wasn't worth my attention.
I sat with that phone in my hand longer than I want to admit, thinking about the flicker of fear I'd seen cross her face in the clubhouse lot, the one I still hadn't managed to explain to myself.
Some part of me wanted to believe she was manipulating me, using urgency the way she'd used comfort, another play in a game I no longer had any business being a participant in.
Another part of me, quieter and harder to ignore, kept circling back to the fact that in two months of late nights on that tailgate, I'd never once asked her a single real question about her own life, why she'd landed in Ember Creek, what she was running from or running toward, what kind of pressure might be sitting on a twenty-six-year-old woman who latched onto a grieving man's attention like it was the only stable thing she'd found in years.
I'd used her loneliness to hide from my own.
It occurred to me, staring at that unanswered text, that I still didn't actually know the first thing about what her loneliness had been made of.
I went out to the Boneyard that Thursday to check on inventory before the weekend rush, mostly because staying home alone in a house that still didn't feel like mine to occupy was its own kind of unbearable.
Deb was behind the bar when I walked in, restocking the well liquor, humming something under her breath that I didn't recognize.