Chapter 30
REBECCA
The first thing I noticed was the ceiling.
Not Dominion Hall's ceiling—not the high plaster and the molding I'd glimpsed on the way through the house.
This was a lower ceiling, clinical, with recessed lighting set to the dim, careful level of a room designed for people who weren't ready for full brightness yet.
I lay there looking at it for a moment while the rest of my body filed its reports.
Left leg. That was the main dispatch. A deep, settled ache that ran from mid-thigh to just above the knee, wrapped in something thick and tight. I moved my foot experimentally and the ache sharpened. I stopped moving my foot.
My guitar.
The thought arrived sudden and specific—where was my guitar, had it been on my back when it happened, was the J-45 somewhere at the bottom of a Charleston harbor—and I must have made a sound because a voice came from my left.
"Hey. Easy. You're okay."
I turned my head.
The woman sitting in the chair beside my bed was not who I expected.
She was—I registered her in pieces, the way I'd been registering too many things lately in pieces because the whole was too much at once.
Dark blonde hair. The kind of face that cameras loved because the bones of it were doing all the work and the bones knew it.
She was in a cashmere sweater the color of oatmeal, legs tucked under her in the chair, a cup of tea balanced on the armrest, and she was watching me with the warm, direct attention of a woman who had decided I was her responsibility for the moment and was comfortable with that.
I knew her face.
Everybody knew her face.
"You're Lexi Montgomery," I said.
"Guilty," she said. "How's the leg?"
"It hurts."
"It's going to for a while. The doctor says you'll be fine. Long cut but it missed everything important."
I looked at the ceiling again. Tried to organize what I remembered. The pier. Tommy's hand in mine. The warmth and the roar arriving at the same time, and then nothing.
"What happened?" I asked.
"The yacht exploded."
"I gathered that part."
She smiled. It was a real smile—not the magazine smile, not the red carpet smile, but one that moved all the way through her face. "Tommy's handling the rest of it. He'll be back soon."
"Is he okay?"
"He is very much okay. He is, in fact, disturbingly okay for a man who was just knocked off a lawn by a shockwave." She sipped her tea. "I've been told this is normal for him."
I let out a breath that was most of the tension I'd been holding.
"My guitar," I said.
She reached beside her chair and lifted it into view—the case, latched and intact, a long scrape across the outside that hadn't been there before, but the latches holding. She set it where I could see it from the bed.
"It was on the lawn," she said. "Blown clear. One of the men brought it in."
I looked at it for a long moment.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it for more than the guitar.
She waved it off. "I'm Lexi, by the way. Lucas's wife. Which makes me—" she tilted her head, working it out— "your sister-in-law, possibly, if the way Tommy talks about you is any indication of where things are going."
I stared at her.
"He talks about me?"
She smiled. "I don't know Tommy well yet—we've only just all found each other, which is its own long story for another time.
But I've been around the Dane men long enough to have a read on them.
" She uncurled from the chair and stood, and she was taller than I'd expected, with the easy physical confidence of a woman who'd spent years being looked at and had made peace with it.
I looked at the door.
"Can I get you anything?" she said. "Water? Something to eat?"
"Water would be good."
She went to a small counter along the wall and filled a glass and brought it back and sat on the edge of the bed rather than the chair, which was the move of a woman who understood instinctively that sick people needed proximity rather than distance.
"How's the pain? Really."
"Manageable," I said. "I've had worse."
"Have you?"
I thought about it. "Emotionally," I said. "Tonight, before—before the explosion. I had a bad gig."
She tilted her head.
"A showcase. Three hundred people. Real venue, proper sound system.
I froze. Got through one verse and walked off the stage.
" I said it flat and factual, the way it was easier to say things that hurt when you were lying in a hospital bed with a bandaged leg and the adrenaline had burned off.
"First real opportunity I'd had and I blew it completely. "
Lexi was quiet for a moment. She looked at her tea.
"My second audition in LA," she said. "Do you want to hear about it?"
"Yes."
"It was for a studio picture. Real budget, real director, the kind of thing that could have changed everything right at the beginning.
" She paused. "I walked in, sat down in the chair, and the casting director asked me to read the first scene.
" She looked at me steadily. "I read it in the wrong accent.
The whole scene. I'd prepared for the wrong version of the character.
I'd had the sides for two weeks and I'd prepared the wrong arc entirely. "
"What did you do?"
"I finished reading, thanked them for their time, walked out to my car, and sat in the parking lot for forty-five minutes.
" Her mouth curved. "Then I drove home, learned the right version, called my agent, and booked the next thing that came in.
Which was smaller and paid less and was not the studio picture.
" She paused. "And then the one after that was bigger.
And the one after that was bigger again. "
I looked at her.
"The showcase will come around again," she said. It wasn't consolation. It was just information, delivered with the certainty of someone who'd learned it through the evidence of her own life. "Those opportunities don't happen once. They happen until you're ready for them."
"How do you know when you're ready?"
"You go back," she said. "That's the whole answer. You go back."
The door opened.
Tommy came through it.
He looked—I ran the inventory the way I always did, because I was a woman who'd been trained by circumstance to assess damage quickly. A cut above his left eyebrow, butterfly-taped. Soot on his neck that someone had mostly but not entirely cleaned away.
His eyes landed on me and something in his face did the shift I'd come to recognize as the rearrangement that happened when he'd been in a different mode and then encountered me and had to come back from wherever he'd been.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said.
Lexi looked between us with the expression of a woman watching something she recognized and was not going to narrate.
"How is she?" Tommy said to Lexi, not taking his eyes off me.
"She's right here and she can tell you herself," Lexi said pleasantly.
"How are you?" he said to me.
"My leg hurts and someone told me a yacht exploded."
"Two someones, if you count the yacht."
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
"Tommy."
"She said it's a little funny," Lexi said, to no one in particular. "I was in the room."
"I didn't say it was funny," I said.
"Your face did," Tommy said.
"My face is heavily medicated."
"Your face is a terrible liar, even when it isn't."
Lexi stood up from the bed with her tea and looked at Tommy with the fond, exasperated expression of a woman who had been around this particular flavor of man long enough to have developed a whole vocabulary for it.
"She's been awake twelve minutes," she said. "She has a hole in her leg. Could you not?”
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing the thing."
"What thing?”
"The thing where you deflect with jokes when you're scared, Thomas.” She pointed at him with her teacup.
"Nobody calls me Thomas."
"I do, when you're being an idiot about your feelings."
I looked at Tommy. He looked at me with the expression of a man who had been accurately diagnosed and was deciding whether to contest it.
"She's right," I said.
“I suspect she's always right," he said. "It's extremely annoying."
Lexi smiled, picked up her teacup, and moved toward the door. She paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at me.
"Rebecca," she said. "Are you good? I mean really good. At the guitar and singing."
I thought about the Revel Room. The thin, pale sound that had come out of my mouth. And then I thought about The Piazza. The woman's real smile. Three tables asking Luis if I'd be back. Tommy's face going still and serious at the end of my set at The Carolinian.
"Yes," I said. "I am."
She nodded, like she'd expected that answer. "Good. Come find me when you're back on your feet. I have an idea." She glanced at Tommy. "Be gentle with her."
"Always."
“I’m guessing you've never been gentle with anything in your life."
"I've been gentle with her."
She looked at me for confirmation. I thought about his hands in the shower, moving over my shoulders like he was learning me by feel.
"He has," I said.
She smiled the real smile again. Then she was gone, and the door clicked shut, and the room went quiet around just the two of us.
Tommy came to the bed.
He pulled the chair close and sat down in it and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, which put his face close to mine. The cut above his eyebrow looked worse up close. I reached up and touched the edge of the butterfly tape lightly.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Liar."
"A little," he said.
We looked at each other.
"Tell me what happened," I said.
"Which do you want—the long version or the short version?”
"Long," I said. "I want the long one."
He looked at me for a moment. Deciding, the way he always decided—not whether to say it, but how much truth to use and in what order.
Then he sat back in the chair and started to talk.
He started with his father.
He told me about the door opening at Dominion Hall and the man on the other side of it with Tommy's hairline and his jaw and his hands—the man he hadn't seen since he was eleven years old, who had, apparently, been alive all this time and who had, apparently, been connected, in ways Tommy was still working out, to the house we were sitting in right now. He told it flatly, without self-pity.
I didn't say anything. I just listened.
He told me about the brothers. Not two brothers, not seven brothers.
Twenty-one brothers, total. Most half-brothers.
The same father, Byron Dane, who had apparently scattered himself across enough women and years to produce a small army of sons, and who had apparently also produced Dominion Hall—or had been the reason for its creation, depending on which version was true, and Tommy didn't know yet which version was true.
"The men here," he said. "Lucas. Elias. Noah. The others I haven't met yet. They're mine. Half-mine. And they've been building this place—" he gestured at the ceiling, the walls, the surgical suite we were sitting in— "for years. For all of us. That's what I was told tonight."
"By your father."
"By my father."
I looked at him.
"Tommy," I said.
"Yeah."
"How are you?"
He looked at the floor for a moment. Then back at me.
"I don't know yet," he said. "I'll let you know when I figure it out."
I nodded. That was honest. That was Tommy.
"And the FBI," I said. "The explosion. What's—what's actually happening?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"There are people who don't want Dominion Hall to exist," he said. "Or who want to control what it does. The FBI piece is complicated—we don't know yet how dirty it goes or how high. The explosion tonight was somebody's message." He paused. "Somebody who's been watching me."
"Am I in it?" I said. "The watching. Am I—are they watching me, too?"
He held my gaze.
"I'm not going to lie to you," he said.
"Then don't."
"Yes," he said. "They had photographs. You were in some of them."
The room was very quiet.
I looked at my bandaged leg. I thought about the pier.
His hand in mine and then the roar and then the ground coming up sideways.
I thought about a fire exit in an alley behind the Revel Room and a cab I'd never taken before and a gate swinging open in the dark, and how all of those things had led me to a pier at the wrong moment.
"You should stay here tonight," he said. "At Dominion Hall. You're safe here."
"Are you sure about that? The yacht—"
"Was at the pier. Not in the house. The house is—" He paused. "The house is the safest place in Charleston right now."
I looked at him.
"Do you trust me?" he said. Low and direct.
I thought about every reason not to. The money and the world I didn't understand and the fight this morning and the shower knob and the stage I'd failed and the pier I'd been standing on when something exploded and the photographs of me I'd never asked to be in.
I thought about his hands holding the Gibson back out to me with both hands. His forehead against mine. I need you, in a text.
"Yes," I said.
He reached out and took my hand. His thumb moved over my knuckles.
"Then, let me handle what needs handling," he said. "And let me keep you safe while I do."
I looked at the ceiling.
"I don't love that I need keeping safe," I said.
"I know you don't."
"I want to be a person who keeps herself safe."
"You are that person," he said. "Tonight was different. Tonight wasn't about you."
"It felt like it was."
"It wasn't." He squeezed my hand once. "It was about me. You got caught in the edge of it. That's my fault, and I'm going to fix it."
I turned my head and looked at him.
"Tommy?”
"Yeah."
"I really blew the gig tonight. Before all this. It was bad. I walked off the stage after one verse."
He didn't say anything right away.
"I know," he said.
"I just—I wanted you to know that I'd already failed before any of this happened."
"You didn't fail," he said.
"I walked off the stage."
"You had a bad night," he said. "That's different from failing. Failing is not going back."
I looked at him.
"Are you going back?" he said.
I thought about Lexi. Those opportunities don't happen once. They happen until you're ready for them. You go back. That's the whole answer.
"Yes," I said.
"Then you didn't fail."
Outside the clinic's window, Charleston was doing its slow, quiet thing in the dark. The harbor. The gas lanterns. The church bells somewhere counting an hour I'd long since lost track of.
I was in a surgical suite in a mansion I didn't understand, with a hole in my leg and a man holding my hand who had twenty brothers and a father he'd thought was dead and an FBI deputy director somewhere in the city and two men on a boat in the Intracoastal who had photographs of me.
I thought about Dolly walking out of the mountains with nothing but her voice and her nerve.
I thought: at least, it's a story.
I closed my eyes.