"And what's that?"
"Whether it was worth it to him." She looks up. "Coming apart in front of his whole club to say your name."
I drink the coffee so my mouth's got something to do besides answer her.
The door opens.
He comes out first, ahead of all of them, and stops in the courtyard like he forgot how the light works.
Even from here it's plain.
He's a big man standing like a smaller one, shoulders rolled down, chin dropped, and he drags the flat of his hand down his face the way a man does when he doesn't want to be seen doing it.
Then he turns and looks straight at the fire pit.
Straight atme.
Two hours in that room, and I don't know one word of what he said.
The first thing he does with his body when he comes out of it is point it at me.
My legs want to stand.
That's the truth and I hate it.
My weight's already come forward onto my feet before I know I've done it, the blanket sliding off one shoulder, and I catch myself half up off the bench, and I put myself back down on it hard enough that the stone bites through my jeans.
I’ve spent nine years being the only thing that decides where my body goes, and I'm not handing that back across a courtyard over a look on a man's face.
He doesn't come to me either.
He holds it a second. Then he nods, small, like he's agreeing with something I didn't say, and turns for the garage, and the last of him I see is his hand gone up to the back of his own neck like he's holding his head onto his body.
The wanting to go after him doesn't stop when he's out of sight. It sits in my legs and aches.
"Okay," Lashes says, low. "He's not going to push it. Good."
"How is that good?"
"Because you don't want to be pushed. And he knows it." She looks at me over Hope's head. “Most men would've already crossed the yard. He didn't."
Imani closes the folio.
"Bring the notebook," she says. "It's too cold out here to think straight."
We head inside and spread it out on a table in the main room.
The composition book in the middle.
Imani's got a legal pad, mechanical pencil, and reading glasses I didn't know she wore, and a club laptop open beside her.
Lashes sits across from me with Hope asleep in a car seat on the bench.
I've read this book a hundred times. I know it better than my own hands, better than anything I own, because for a while it was the only thing I owned.
"Eleven sets of initials," I say. "They come back. Everybody else comes once or twice and never again, but these eleven keep coming. I've got dates for all of them, and I've got the months where the same one shows up twice."
"Show me your worst one." Imani doesn't look up. "The one that's there the most."
