Page 85 of The Drifter

Over the water. Down the peninsula. The houses got farther apart and older and then there was a wall, brick, high, running along the harbor road longer than a wall has any business running.

I knew where we were. Of course, I knew.

The gates opened before we reached them.

Dominion Hall came up at the end of the drive with the harbor behind it. I sat forward without meaning to, because in years of knowing the name I had never once seen the thing, and it was not what I had built in my head. It was bigger and it sat in the land like it had grown there, like a fort. Stone and brick and windows in ranks catching the water light. Blacked-out vehicles in the courtyard like patient animals.

Here I was, going up the front steps of the biggest house in the Lowcountry, on the arm of a Dane, as his—except there was no time to feel it, no time to let it land, because the doors were already opening and the machine was already moving and we were swept inside on a current that had no interest in what I felt.

And then, in the great stone hall, there was Izzy.

She came fast across that floor and had her arms around me before I'd cleared the doorway. I held onto her, and something in me that had been white-knuckled since the phone rang loosened one notch at the sight of a face I loved.

"You came," she said into my hair. "Oh, Sasha. You came here. To this house."

"I came."

She pulled back and looked at me, and her eyes said everything—that she knew what it meant, that I was standing in the one place I'd sworn off, that the vow was all the way broken now in every direction at once. And under it, something fierce and glad, because I was here, and I wasn't alone, and neither was she.

"You're with him," she said. Not a question.

"I'm with him."

She nodded. Her jaw set, and she squeezed my hand hard. "Then, you're family. Come on. Stay close to me."

There were other women in that hall.

I knew some of their faces. The wedding planner, Portia—tall and lean and sleek, the one who ran events for these people with a tablet like a weapon—standing now with her arms folded and her cool control gone brittle, her jaw set hard against the worry. I'd met her at Izzy and Ryker's wedding. The true-crime one, Claire, the podcaster, who I'd checked in more than once and who caught my eye across the hall and gave me a small nod, one woman to another, you too, then. And Rebecca, the singer, standing near the windows—I'd never spoken a word to her, but I'd staged the whole of a night for her once, the candlelit suite and the wine and the quiet exit, and watched a Dane walk her out my front doors like she was made of something rare.

They were gathered the way women gather when the men are going to war—not helpless, not hysterical, but coiled, watchful, holding the house steady with their presence while it flew apart around them.

I understood, standing among them, that I was looking at my own future. If I stayed. If the thing between Clint and me survived whatever was about to happen. These were the women who'd broken the same vow I'd broken, or never made it, and had walked into this family and this house and this life of black SUVs and coiled waiting, and had stayed. And they had made something of it—a sisterhood, a set of jaws all set at the same angle—but the cost of it was written on every one of their faces.

This is what you're choosing, the dread said, quiet, from where it sat. Look at it. Look hard.

I looked. And I stayed exactly where I was, with my hand in Izzy's and my eyes on the hallway Clint had disappeared down.

He came back fast. He'd been somewhere with his brothers and his father—I caught only pieces, a war room, a table, voices low and hard—and I didn’t try to hear more, because it wasn’t mine.

I had spent my whole life keeping other people's dangerous secrets. I knew exactly how to stand in a room and not hear a thing.

I only watched him. That was my whole job now, the only one I wanted. I watched Clint Dane move through that house with his family around him, and I saw the thing that had happened to him—the drifter gone, the man with nowhere to be gone, replaced by something with a purpose so total it had burned everything soft out of his face. He was frightening, now. He was one of them, all the way, and I loved him, and the two facts sat in me side by side and didn’t cancel.

"We're wheels up in twenty," he said, coming to me. He took my hands. "You're sure?”

"I'm sure."

"Texas is not going to be—" He stopped. Started over, because he'd promised me the truth and he wasn't going to stop now. "It's going to be bad, Sasha. Where we're going. What we're walking into. I need you to know that."

"I know it."

"And you're still coming?”

"I'm still coming."

He looked at me like he was memorizing me again, the way he had in the bed. Then, he pulled me in and held me for the space of three breaths, and let go, because there wasn't time for four.

The plane was black, waiting on a strip of private tarmac with its stairs down and its engines already turning over. I went up the stairs behind Clint, and the cabin swallowed us in cool leather and low light. I sat down in a seat that cost more than my car and buckled myself in with hands that had gone very steady, the way they go steady at the desk when everything else is on fire.