Or he might look at me the way he had in that corridor. Like I was the first real thing he'd seen in years.
Three weeks after the test, I sat at my kitchen table at midnight. A glass of water in front of me, a silence around me that only existed when you'd run out of ways to avoid the truth.
I could hide it. Loose shirts, careful angles, a few months of grace before my body made the announcement my mouth couldn't. I could leave town. Disappear. Start somewhere nobody knew my name.
But my father would tear the state apart looking for me. Ghost would never know he had a child. And I'd spend the rest of my life carrying a secret heavier than any truth.
I didn't run from things. I was my father's daughter, and whatever else that meant, it meant I looked people in the eye and said what needed saying, even when it cost everything.
Ghost had a right to know.
The decision came slowly, over two days, the way water settles into ground. No flash of courage. Just the steady stubbornness of a woman who'd examined every option and rejected the ones that required her to be less than she was.
On Saturday morningafter doing some jobs around the clubhouse. I told my father I was running some errands. Another half-truth to add to the growing pile.
The drive took forty minutes. I'd made the drive to the Forsaken Angels place twice before. The first time with Sarah, oblivious, bringing me to the edge of a cliff she didn't know was there. The second time alone, with my keys in my hand, and choosing to jump.
This time I was carrying Ghost’s child and the weight of two clubs on my shoulders. I wasn't jumping. I was walking to the edge with my eyes open because standing there looking over the edge forever was no longer a life I could accept.
I pulled into the lot at Angel's Rest. Turned off the engine and sat with my hands on the wheel.
Then I got out and walked inside.
FOUR
GHOST
Every time someone came through the front entrance at the Angel’s Rest, I looked up and part of me hoped. But it was truckers, locals, brothers. Women who weren't Lola. I told myself I wasn't watching the door, and the lie had become so familiar it barely registered anymore.
Club business continued. A run to Billings. Jackals pushing boundaries on the northern routes, testing, probing. Angel called church and I sat in my chair and said the things that needed saying. None of it reached the part of me that was still standing in a dark corridor with the warmth of her body fading from my skin. This girl had got under my skin and the feeling was refusing to leave.
Razor caught it first. We were on the porch after church, him smoking, me with a coffee I'd forgotten to drink. He was looking out into the compound, I was watching the highway for no particular reason I told myself.
"You waiting for someone?" he asked.
"No."
He took a drag. Let the smoke out slow. Razor ran hot in a crisis, volatile, unpredictable. In the quiet moments he wassharper than people gave him credit for. He didn't push. Just sat there smoking, and the question hung in the air between us.
I drank my cold coffee and gave him nothing.
The weeks had dragged. I did the work, kept the routine, held the line. But the routine felt hollow in a way it hadn't before. The room I slept in felt like a room instead of a home. Before Lola, I'd been comfortable alone. After her, I knew the comfort had been a lie I'd told myself so long I'd mistaken it for truth.
Priest found me one night staring into the distance, my expression giving nothing away. He was the newest of the brothers, intense, carrying whatever weight had brought him to us with a private ferocity that I recognized because I'd worn it myself. He leaned against the fence post and didn't say anything for a long time.
"You good?" he asked eventually.
"Fine."
"You've been standing here for an hour."
"I like the view."
He looked around. Looked at me. Whatever he saw, he kept to himself. "Okay," he said. And walked away. I liked Priest. He understood that some things couldn't be helped by talking about them.
I was in love with her. I could say it now, in the privacy of my own head, stripped of the tactical justification and the self-deception I'd been running since the night she walked through the door. I was in love with a woman I'd spent one night with. A woman whose father would put me in the ground if he ever found out. I was in love and I had no way to reach her, no right to try and it felt ridiculous even in my own head.
Then she came back.
