Chapter 29
MAGNOLIA
For a while, the room worked.
That was the thing I hadn't expected—that it would actually work.
The blanket over my legs and the fire and the warm weight of Beans and Tiny across my feet, all of it conspiring to hold the fear at a distance you could almost live with.
Meghan poured me a finger of her good whiskey.
I drank half of it and felt it go down warm.
Vivi told a story about the time Elias tried to keep a raccoon out of the garbage with a facial-recognition camera and lost, badly.
I laughed, an actual laugh, and for a stretch of minutes, I forgot to be afraid.
Then, I remembered.
It came back the way the tide comes back—not all at once, just a slow creep up the sand until you look down and the water's at your ankles and you can't remember it ever being anywhere else.
Cash had been gone a while now. I didn't know how long, exactly; I'd made myself stop looking at the clock on the mantel because watching the hands move was its own kind of torture.
But it was long enough. Long enough that the easy part should have been over.
Long enough that the little pit under my ribs had stopped being a pit and started being a hole.
The hole was getting wider, and every soft, ordinary sound in that firelit room—the pop of a log, the creak of the sofa, Banjo's sleeping sigh—had started to sound like the absence of the one sound I wanted, which was boots in the hall and a low, even voice saying my name.
I set the whiskey down before I finished it. It had stopped helping.
"He's fine," Claire said, without looking at me, because Claire missed nothing and had clocked the change in me. "You've got the face. I know the face. He's fine, Maggie."
"You can't know that."
"No," she admitted, because she didn't lie to me, none of them lied to me, and I was learning that was its own kind of love.
"I can't. But I can tell you that man has walked into things that would've killed anyone else and walked back out.
I can tell you Elias would already be in this room if there was a reason to be.
And I can tell you the worst thing you can do to yourself right now is get out ahead of the facts. So, don't. Stay here with us. Breathe."
I tried to breathe. I looked at the black water through the tall windows and made myself take the air in.
"Can I ask you something?” I asked. "And I need the true answer, not the comfortable one."
The room went a little still. Joy shifted in her corner of the loveseat, one hand on her belly, and turned toward me.
"Has one of them ever—" I couldn't quite get the shape of it out. I tried again. "When they go out like this. Has it ever gone bad? Has one of them ever come home—hurt? Really hurt?"
Nobody rushed to answer, and the not-rushing told me the answer before the words did.
"Yes," Sloane said finally. Flat and honest, the way she gave me everything.
"There've been close calls. More than one.
" She turned the amber glass slow in her fingers, watching the firelight move in it.
"It's not nothing, what these men do. I won't sit here and tell you it's nothing.
You'd never believe another word out of my mouth, if I did. "
"But," Meghan said, gentle, picking up the thread the way they all did, handing it around the circle, "every single one of them is still standing.
Every one. Through all of it. All these nights in this room.
" She looked at me steadily. "And there's a reason for that, and it isn't luck.
Whatever's out there tonight, Cash didn't walk into it by himself—he walked into it with a house full of brothers at his back who would each of them, every one, step in front of a bullet before they'd let it reach him.
That's not a figure of speech in this family.
That's the actual arrangement. That's what the brotherhood is. "
"They bring each other home," Joy said softly. "That's the only rule that's ever mattered to them. Nobody gets left. Nobody comes back alone." She smiled, though her eyes had gone bright. "It's the same thing you do, Maggie. It's the exact same thing. You just do it for the dogs."
And that undid me a little, because she was right, and because it should have comforted me and instead it opened the door on the very thing I'd been holding shut all night.
Because I understood, sitting there in that beautiful room full of women who'd become my family in the space of a day, exactly what I stood to lose. It hit me all at once, the whole staggering size of it.
I had spent six months in this city building a safe, guarded life.
A life carefully constructed so that nothing in it could hurt me too badly if it left, because I'd decided somewhere young that the way to survive loving things that go is to never let one all the way in.
Dogs, yes. My parents, at a safe four-hour distance.
Nothing closer than that. Nothing that could take me down with it.
Even that hadn't kept me safe—I'd let Duke all the way in, the way you can't help but let a good dog in, and he'd bled out on my kitchen floor not twenty-four hours ago. The hole he'd left was still so new, I kept forgetting and reaching for it.
Now, I had made Cash Dane the thing I could not lose.
And he was out there in the dark. I finally understood what my mother had understood, what had sent her packing—that loving one of these men means handing your whole heart to somebody who runs toward the thing everyone else runs from, and then sitting in a warm room in the dead of night waiting to find out if you get to keep it.
I would not survive it. That was the plain truth I'd been dancing around since he kissed my knuckles at the door. If that man did not come back through that door, I would not survive it. There was no version of me that walked out the other side of losing him and was okay.
"Hey." Claire's arm came around me, warm and hard. "Where'd you go? Come back."
"I can't lose him," I said, and my voice came out small and cracked and nothing like the steady one I'd spent my life perfecting. "Claire, I just found him. I waited for him and I finally got him and I can't—I don't know how to be a person who loses him now. I don't know how to do that."
"I know," she said, and she didn't tell me I wouldn't have to, because she didn't lie to me. She just held on. "I know. Every woman in this room knows exactly. That's why we sit up. Come here."
I let her pull me in, let Joy's hand find my back and Vivi drop down onto the arm of the sofa beside me and Meghan reach over and take my hand, this circle of fierce women closing around the newest and most frightened of them.
I let myself be held in the middle of my fear the way I'd held a hundred others in the middle of theirs.
For one more minute, the room worked. It held. It held me up.
Then, the door opened.
Not the way Elias had opened it before—the easy head-in-the-door, the reassuring grin, the it's-all-green.
This time the door came open fast and hard, and Elias was through it before it had finished swinging.
There was no tablet in his hand and no grin on his face.
Every screen he'd been watching all night was written across it at once.
The whole room came up off the sofas.
"What," Claire said. Not a question. Her voice had gone flat and hard. "Elias. What."
He found me. Out of every face in that room, his eyes came straight to mine and stayed.
I have never in my life wanted less to be looked at, because I already knew, I knew before he said a word, the way you always know when the thing you've been dreading finally arrives wearing the face of a friend.
"Something's gone wrong," Elias said. "Out there. It's—" His jaw worked. "Maggie."
And the room, and the fire, and the black water, and every warm and holding thing in it, fell away beneath me all at once.