By seven, I have the bedroom sorted and banana bread going in my stomach and my best friend Jess in my ear through my phone speaker while I unpack the kitchen.
"Okay, first impressions… am I jealous yet?" she asks, cutting directly to the point.
"Jess, I've been here four hours."
"That's not an answer."
"I haven't even explored the town yet." I unwrap a mug and set it on the counter. "Apparently there's a motorcycle club. The Iron Havoc MC."
A pause. "Harper."
"What?"
"You moved to a biker town?"
"A small mountain town that happens to have a motorcycle club. Patty says they're protective of the town, not criminal."
"And Patty is?"
"My landlord. I trust her. She brought banana bread, Jess. Banana bread."
"Okay, banana bread is a valid character reference." I can hear her smiling. "Go to the bar tonight. You need to actually be in your new life, not just unpack it."
She’s not wrong. I look at that couch and feel a complicated mix of things.
Not grief—I burned through that long before I left. Four years with Derek taught me how love can rot so slowly you don’t notice until it’s gone bad. Somewhere along the way I stopped arguing back, then stopped speaking up at all, until I was moving through my own life like a guest who wasn’t welcome.
The night I left, I had a cut above my eyebrow and a bag packed in under three minutes. I drove for hours, checked into a motel, and said out loud:never again.
That was fourteen months ago. The cut healed in a week. The rest is still working on it.
I am not the woman who stays anymore.
"I'm going," I tell her.
"Text me everything."
"Goodnight, Jess."
I change into jeans that fit, actually fit, no apologies, and pull on my favorite burgundy top and my jacket. I let my hair do whatever it wants, which it will anyway. The bar is a four-minute walk, close enough that I don’t need anything but myself. I came here partly to stop living like I’m always about to leave.
The night air is sharp and cold and alive. My boots click on the sidewalk. At the end of Main Street, warm amber light spills out from a building with a hand-carved sign above the door, and I can already hear the low thump of a jukebox, the deep current of voices inside.
IRON HAVOC TAVERN.
And in smaller letters, burned into the wood like a warning or a welcome, depending on who you are:
Established by the Iron Havoc MC.
I take in the row of motorcycles lined up at the curb. Big, custom, serious machines. The kind of bikes that don't apologize for the space they take up.
I think about who I was a year ago. Then I think about who I'm choosing to be now.
I push open the door.
Chapter 2 – Ronan
I'm on my third whiskey when the door opens.
