Chapter Ten
Marisol
Ten days after the wall went up white again, I found myself sitting alone in the Boneyard's back office at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night, going through the last unreconciled stretch of the vendor account with a cup of coffee gone cold beside me, because Deacon had asked, and because I hadn't yet figured out how to say no to a request that so plainly served a purpose bigger than my own comfort.
The club had put security patrols on the property every night since the graffiti, a rotation of patched members taking two-hour shifts through the dark hours, floodlights installed along the back fence line that hadn't been there before, motion sensors wired into a tablet that pinged whoever was on duty the moment anything larger than a raccoon crossed the property line.
I'd watched the whole operation come together over those ten days with a strange, complicated mixture of gratitude and grief, gratitude that the club was finally treating the threat with the seriousness it deserved, grief that it had taken a spray-painted wall and eighty-one thousand dollars to get there.
I'd started staying late on the nights I worked anyway, telling myself it was more efficient to finish a thread of research while I had the momentum instead of picking it back up cold the next morning.
That was true, as far as it went. It also wasn't the whole truth, and I knew it wasn't, even if I hadn't said the rest of it out loud to Essie, or to myself, in words I was ready to fully own.
The truth, if I let myself look at it directly, was that some part of me had started arranging my schedule around the small, careful overlaps where I knew Rourke might be on patrol, and I hated how easily I'd fallen into that pattern, hated it enough that I hadn't examined it too closely, the way you avoid looking directly at a bruise because looking at it makes it hurt more than just carrying it quietly does.
I heard Rourke's bike pull into the lot a little before midnight, recognized the particular sound of it the way I recognized everything about him after eight years, and felt my whole body go alert in a way that had nothing to do with the Iron Coyotes and everything to do with something else I hadn't let myself examine closely.
He came in quiet, saw me at the corner table, and stopped just inside the door. "Didn't expect anyone still here this late."
"Finishing a thread on the transfer history. Figured I'd rather do it while it's fresh than lose the trail overnight." I gestured at the second chair across from me, an invitation I hadn't fully decided to offer until it was already out of my mouth. "You're on watch tonight?"
"Midnight to two. Volunteered for it." He hesitated, then sat, keeping a careful distance even at a small table, the same deliberate restraint I'd noticed in him since the day I came back to work the books.
"Figured if I was going to ask this club to trust me with anything again, showing up for the unglamorous shifts nobody wants was a decent place to start. "
He'd changed since the last time I'd really looked at him closely, I noticed, sitting there under the office's single overhead light.
Thinner around the face, a new tiredness settled permanently into the lines near his eyes that hadn't been there two months ago, the specific wear of a man who'd stopped sleeping easily and hadn't yet found his way back to it.
I wondered, not for the first time, how much of that toll was guilt, and how much was genuine fear for what was coming, and whether he'd even fully separated the two in his own mind by that point.
We worked in a companionable, mostly silent rhythm for a while after that, him doing a walk of the perimeter every twenty minutes or so, checking the cameras, checking the new motion sensors somebody had installed along the back fence, me cross-referencing numbers that were slowly, finally, starting to form a complete picture.
It was somewhere around one in the morning, both of us tired in that particular loose, unguarded way exhaustion produces, that the conversation shifted into something neither of us had planned.
"You ever think about what he'd say," I asked, not looking up from my screen, surprising myself with the question. "Your father. About all this."
Rourke was quiet long enough that I looked up, worried I'd pushed somewhere I shouldn't have, and found him staring out the window into the dark lot, something raw crossing his face that I hadn't seen from him in the two months since I'd come home.
"I think about it constantly," he said finally, voice lower than I was used to hearing from him.
"I think he'd be disgusted with what I let happen while you were gone.
I also think, and this is the part I haven't said to anybody, not even Dutch, that some of why I let it happen traces back to how badly I was failing to be him after he died, and how much I hated admitting that to myself, let alone to you. "
"What do you mean."
"I mean he ran this club for twenty-six years and never once, as far as I ever saw, let anybody watch him struggle.
Not with grief, not with the weight of decisions, none of it.
He carried everything alone and made it look like strength, and I spent my whole life thinking that was the model, that a real man handles his own weight without ever letting the people who love him see him buckle under it.
" He turned to look at me, and something in his eyes was more open than I'd seen since the porch, since before any of this, maybe since years before any of this.
"Six months after he died, I was buckling under more than I knew how to carry, and instead of doing the one thing that might have actually helped, which was telling you how badly I was drowning, I found somebody who didn't need me to be strong for her, because I couldn't stand the thought of you seeing me be anything less than what I thought you deserved. "
I sat very still, feeling something crack open in my chest that I hadn't given permission to crack, something I'd been holding shut for two months with sheer, stubborn will. "That's not an excuse," I said, my voice quieter than I meant it to be.
"I know it's not. I'm not offering it as one.
I'm offering it because you asked what my father would say, and the honest answer is he'd tell me I inherited the worst part of him without ever learning the parts that actually made him good, the parts where he let my mother see him break sometimes, in private, where the two of them carried things together instead of him carrying everything alone and calling it protecting her.
" His voice caught slightly, just once, and I watched him work to steady it.
"I've spent six months grieving a man I only understood half of, and two of those months I spent proving I hadn't learned the half that mattered. "
"Tell me something specific," I said, surprising myself again with how badly I wanted to know. "Not the general shape of it. Something actual, about him, that you haven't told anyone."
He was quiet a moment, considering, and when he spoke again his voice had gone softer, further away, the voice of a man reaching back into a memory he didn't often let himself visit.
"The week before he died, we were out in the garage working on his bike, the same one he always worked on even though it ran perfectly fine, because I think by then he understood he needed somewhere to put his hands that wasn't about running the club.
He told me he used to wake up at three in the morning some nights, early on, when he first took the patch, certain he'd made the wrong call about something, certain the whole thing was going to fall apart because of a decision he'd made that day.
He said he never told anybody that. Not my mother, not his own VP, nobody.
He just carried it alone until the fear passed, over and over, for years, and somewhere along the way people started calling that strength, and he let them, because the alternative felt like admitting he wasn't equal to what he'd taken on. "
"And you decided that was the model to follow."
"I decided it without ever deciding it, if that makes sense.
It was just there, the whole shape of what a Callahan man does with fear.
Bury it. Handle it alone. Let people see the calm surface and never the water underneath.
" He looked at me directly then, something almost pleading in his expression.
"I'm not telling you this to excuse anything.
I'm telling you because I think it's the actual root of it, underneath the loneliness, underneath the grief, underneath even the drinking on that tailgate that started the whole thing.
I didn't know how to hand you my fear instead of hiding from it, because nobody ever showed me that was allowed. "
I didn't say anything for a long moment.
I didn't trust my voice not to give away more than I was ready to hand him.
But I reached across the small table, before I'd fully decided to, and put my hand over his, just for a moment, just long enough to feel the surprise in him at the contact, the way his whole body went still like he was afraid moving might make me take it back.
"I'm still furious with you," I said. "I need you to understand that this doesn't undo anything."
"I know it doesn't."
"But I believe you meant that. About your father.
About what you didn't learn." I pulled my hand back, because I could feel myself softening in a way that scared me more than any of the anger had, and anger, at least, I knew how to survive.
"That's the first time in two months you've told me something about yourself instead of just about what you did. There's a difference."