— Bea —
Indira suggested coffee three weeks in.
Not at the clubhouse — she named a place on the other side of town, a small bakery with good lighting and no connection to anyone either of us knew from the MC. I understood the choice without her explaining it. Neutral ground. A conversation that didn’t have anything attached to it except two people sitting down.
I got there first and grabbed a table. She arrived five minutes later, ordered without looking at the menu, and settled into the chair across from me with the ease of a woman who’d finally found her footing as Venom Riders First Lady.
“How are you actually doing?” she said.
“I told you on the phone—”
“I know what you told me on the phone.” She wrapped her hands around her cup. “I’m asking you here, where there are no brothers anywhere nearby and you don’t have to perform anything.”
I looked at her. “I’m angry. I’m sad. I miss him. I’m angry that I miss him.”
“That’s four things.”
“Yes.”
She nodded, unfazed. Indira had been part of the MC world long enough to know what she was looking at — what it looked like when a woman who’d chosen one of those men was sittingacross from her, trying to figure out what was left. She wasn’t going to romanticize it, but she wasn’t going to condemn it either. I’d always trusted her for that. The refusal to simplify.
“Can I tell you something?” she said.
“Okay.”
“You know most of this already. From when I was your client.” She gave me a small, wry smile. “The move back. Nashville. The job. The conditions I set. You sat across from me while I walked through all of it — how I was returning for the work and not for him, how I was going to hold the line.” She turned her cup slightly. “There was a piece I never told you.”
“Go on.”
“Before the move, I spent weeks making a list. Every reason I wasn’t going to let him near the life I’d built in Nashville. Everything he’d done, everything he was. You and I talked about most of what was on it. All of it was real. The list was accurate. But I was using it as a reason, and it wasn’t really the reason.”
“What was the reason?”
“I was afraid of letting him try.” She met my eyes. “Staying gone was clean. I knew how to be the woman I’d become in Nashville — on my own, on my own terms, with a life I’d made from nothing. If I let him anywhere near me again, even with conditions, even with him on his best behavior, I was putting the person I’d just finished becoming back in reach of a man who’d already done the worst thing he could do to me. And I didn’t know if I could come back from it if he turned out to be the same man underneath.” She paused. “It’s easier to make a list of his flaws than to say I’m afraid of what it’ll cost me to let him in again. I couldn’t quite say that out loud in your office. I’m saying it now.”
I considered that.
“I’m not afraid of how much it costs,” I said. “I’m angry that he cost me something I didn’t consent to losing.”
Indira nodded as she sipped her coffee.
“He made a unilateral decision about our relationship. About what I could handle. About whether I got a say.” I put my coffee down. “Four years I said no to him. Four years of thinking through every complication, every professional boundary, every reason it was a bad idea. And then I finally said yes because I believed he understood what that meant — that I’d thought about it carefully. That I was choosing deliberately.” I stopped. “And then he took the choice away the moment things got hard.”
“Yes,” Indira said. “He did.”
“I’ve been building the case for him. He was in shock. He was protecting me. He wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“All of those things are probably true.”
A chair scraped nearby — someone leaving, someone arriving. I registered it without turning. My coffee had gone cold at some point without my noticing.
“And it still happened.”
“Yes.” She was quiet for a moment. “But here’s the thing that I’ve had to sit with, in my own version of this. The way they love you and the way they hurt you — those come from the same place. Dutch tried to keep me at arm’s length for months because he was terrified of what loving me meant, what it exposed him to. And that same impulse — that drive to control what he allowed himself to want — is part of what makes him who he is. It’s not separate from the thing I love.”
I thought about Holden. About the Road Captain brain that never stopped running contingencies. About the way he’d always known where the exits were, in every situation, in every room. “He ran an exit on us,” I said.
“Yes.” Indira held my gaze. “That’s what he does. He plans the exit before he has to use it.”
