CHAPTER FIVE The Prospects Questions
The shop looked almost like itself again by Wednesday morning, fresh drywall standing pale and unpainted against studs that had held through worse than one storm, and Josie found herself standing in the doorway before the crew arrived, taking stock of how much had changed in five short days.
The water damage was nearly gone. Something else, less visible and harder to name, had taken its place.
She'd woken that morning to a text from Nadia asking, not for the first time that week, whether Josie wanted to actually talk about what was happening instead of deflecting every question with a joke, and Josie had typed three different replies before deleting all of them and simply sending a heart instead, which Nadia had answered with a single word: *coward.
* She wasn't wrong. Josie hadn't found the words yet for what was shifting in her, and she wasn't sure she trusted herself to say them out loud before she understood them fully.
Cole showed up Wednesday afternoon with a delivery of paint and a question he clearly hadn't meant to ask out loud.
"You think church is gonna go bad tomorrow?
" He said it to Josie while unloading the truck, not quite looking at her, the same nervous habit she'd noticed in his brother, a Boone family tell neither of them seemed aware they shared.
"Sawyer's been weird about it all week. Weirder than usual, I mean. "
Josie kept her hands busy sorting the delivered cans by color, buying herself a beat before answering. "I don't know what tomorrow is, Cole. Nobody's told me."
"Yeah, well, nobody's told me either, and I'm the one who's gonna be standing outside the room while it happens, since prospects don't get to sit in on church.
" Cole set the last can down harder than necessary, some of his easy grin from earlier in the week entirely absent today.
"I just know it's about whatever happened three years ago.
The thing everybody in the club talks around instead of about.
And I know Reeve's the one deciding, and I know Sawyer's been walking around for a week like a man waiting on a verdict, and I hate not knowing if my own brother's gonna still have a place here by Friday. "
Something in Josie's chest tightened at the raw worry in his voice, worry that mirrored, uncomfortably, her own growing unease from the last several days. "Has he told you anything? Even a little?"
"Just that it's his to fix, not mine to worry about." Cole shook his head, frustrated. "Which is exactly the kind of thing he'd say whether it was true or not."
The frankness of it landed harder than Josie expected.
She thought of Sawyer's careful nonanswers over the last two days, the shuttered look that crossed his face every time she got close to the actual question, and felt, for the first time, the shape of something larger than a simple missing patch: an entire structure of consequence she'd only been seeing the edges of.
"Cole." She said his name carefully, aware she was crossing some line she hadn't fully decided to cross. "What do you know about the original thing? Three years ago. Whatever it was that started all this."
He hesitated, glancing toward the back of the shop where Sawyer was working, out of earshot, before answering low.
"Not much. I was a kid. I know there was talk of an old debt, something from before I was even a prospect, something the club owed somebody outside.
I know Sawyer took the fall for it publicly, some kind of cover story, and everybody just accepted the version they were told and moved on.
I always figured the story was true. Guess I don't actually know that. "
"Neither do I," Josie said quietly, and the admission cost her more than she expected, three years of certainty about her own version of events suddenly feeling less solid than it had that morning.
Cole studied her for a moment, something calculating and young in his expression, the particular sharpness of someone piecing together a puzzle he hadn't realized he was holding pieces to. "You were with him. Back then. Before whatever happened, happened."
"I was."
"And you don't know either."
"No," she admitted. "I don't."
He let out a breath, some of the tension in his shoulders loosening slightly at the shared uncertainty, as if it helped to know he wasn't the only one standing outside a locked door. "Church meets at six tomorrow. Whatever happens, I guess we'll both find out eventually."
He left not long after, the delivery unloaded, his easy confidence only partially restored, and Josie found herself standing amid cans of primer and paint, turning the conversation over with the same careful attention she gave a stubborn engine, listening for what was actually wrong underneath the sound she could already hear.
Sawyer came to find her as the light started failing, the crew already gone for the day, the shop smelling of fresh lumber instead of flood damage for the first time all week.
He looked tired in a way that went past physical work, a bone deep exhaustion she recognized from watching her father carry hard decisions home from the clubhouse when she was young.
"Cole talk to you?" he asked, without preamble.
"He's worried about you."
"He should be worried about himself. Prospects don't need my mess following them around." Something bitter edged his voice, quickly reined back in. "I told him to stay out of it."
"He loves you, Sawyer. That's not the same as staying out of it." Josie set down the can of primer she'd been holding, giving him her full attention. "I asked him what he knew about three years ago. He said he didn't know much. Said there was some old debt, some story you took the fall for."
Sawyer went very still, the particular stillness of a man who'd just heard a door open that he wasn't ready to walk through yet. "That's not the whole story."
"I didn't think it was." She held his gaze, steady, refusing to look away first. "But it's more than you've told me all week, and it came from a nineteen year old prospect who wasn't even trying to find it out."
"Josie." Her name came out rough, almost pleading. "Tomorrow. After church, whatever happens, I'll tell you everything I'm able to. I promise you that. I just need tomorrow to happen first."
She studied him a long moment, the tired lines around his eyes, the careful, controlled way he held himself like a man bracing for impact he couldn't fully predict, and felt something shift in her chest that she hadn't expected: not suspicion, not the old armored distance, but something closer to solidarity, unwelcome and undeniable.
"Okay," she said finally. "Tomorrow."
He nodded, some fraction of the tension in his shoulders easing at her agreement, though not all of it, not close to all of it.
He lingered a moment longer than necessary in the doorway, the frost already forming again on the window glass behind him as the temperature dropped with the dying light, and for a moment Josie thought he might say something else, something that had nothing to do with church or colors or old debts.
He didn't. He said goodnight instead, and walked out into the cold toward his truck, and Josie stood alone in her nearly rebuilt shop listening to the river running fast and cold two blocks east, carrying the whole width of what she still didn't know downstream into the dark.
She thought about Reeve's warning tone from three days ago, about Cole's raw worry, about the strange, growing certainty that whatever waited for Sawyer at six o'clock tomorrow evening was going to change something between them permanently, one direction or the other.
She didn't know yet which direction that would be.
She only knew, standing there in the cold with her own breath fogging pale in front of her, that she had stopped hoping for the version of tomorrow where none of this touched her at all.
Some part of her, quiet and unguarded and terrified, had already decided she wanted to be standing close enough to catch him if it went badly.
Upstairs that night, she found herself pulling out an old shoebox she hadn't opened in three years, tucked at the back of her closet under a folded quilt of her mother's.
Inside were the small, ordinary artifacts of a life she'd once been building with him: a ticket stub from a concert neither of them could really afford, a photograph of the two of them at her father's funeral reception, grim faced and holding hands like they were the only solid thing left standing in the room.
She hadn't been able to throw any of it away, and she hadn't been able to look at it either, not until tonight.
She sat on the floor of her apartment with the box open in her lap, the frost thickening on the window above her, and let herself feel, for the first time in three years, the full size of what she'd lost when the story she believed about him turned out to be, at best, incomplete.
Not just a relationship. A whole framework for what loyalty was supposed to look like, a whole inherited faith in the code her father had raised her on.
She didn't know yet whether tomorrow would restore any of that faith or finish breaking it for good.
She put the box away before midnight, but she left it easier to reach than it had been in three years, and that small, deliberate choice felt like its own kind of answer to a question she hadn't fully asked herself yet.