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Colt grinned and gave me a thumbs-up. Holden lifted his coffee in my direction. Handful leaned so close to the camera that all I could see was one eye. “Virtual Glitch,” he said. “Same personality. Takes up less room.”
Dutch shoved him back into his chair. He let them settle, then turned that hard stare of his on me. “You want to explain,” he said, “why you rode out before six without waking a single brother?”
“No.”
“Say again.”
“I found the first real lead in a year. After that, I had one focus. Wren. I planned the route, checked the weather, packed my laptop and went for my bike. It turned over first touch.” I looked at Holden. “Thanks for keeping it road ready.”
Holden tipped his chin.
“Then I left.”
“Without thinking to wake us,” Dutch said.
“Without thinking about anything except getting to Wren. Looking back, I wouldn’t do it differently.”
Every man at the table frowned at me.
“Colt, your little girl is a few months older than the baby I haven’t met yet. Dutch, Holden, Handful—yours are about the same age as mine. If I’d woken one of you, the whole club would’ve been up. The old ladies would’ve been up. The babies and the older kids would’ve been up. Every man at that table would’ve been pissed at me for waking his house before dawn.”
Holden nodded first. Handful followed. Then Dutch.
“That’s not the point,” Colt said.
Dutch waved him off. “You’d have complained about it for the whole four-hour ride.” He looked at me. “Well played, Glitch. Well played.”
Dutch turned to look at the men in the room.
“On Thursday, I told him to get his kit moving. That was me buying us time. Now we settle it properly.” He looked at me through the screen. “Same systems, same alerts, same response time?”
“Yes. Anything goes outside pattern, String and I both get it.”
“String?”
String spoke up from the end of the table. “I can hold anything routine if he has to step out. Most of the specialist work too, for a while.”
Dutch looked at me. “You sure you want to stay in Kettlewell and keep doing your job from there?”
“Yes.”
“Then it goes to a vote.” He looked down both sides of the table. “All in favor?”
Every hand went up.
“Done. You stay where you are. You keep your officer’s patch and you do the job from there. But when a ping goes out, you answer. Not when you’ve finished what you’re doing. Not when it’s convenient. Wherever you are, whatever you’re in the middle of, you answer it.”
“Understood.”
“And you’re on that screen every time church is called.” He tapped the table. “You don’t go dark on us again. That’s not an order from your president. That’s a request from your brothers. Don’t do that to us again.”
“I won’t.”
Rohan cried somewhere beyond the closed door. A moment later, one of the brothers brought him into church. Dutch held out his arms, and the brother handed him over before leaving and pulling the door shut behind him.
Everybody had been careful around me since that onesie arrived. Four of the old ladies were pregnant then. Colt stopped talking about Lilac’s scans. Conversations changed when I walked into a room. It didn’t stop me noticing their pregnancies or doing the math every time I saw one of them. Same week. Same month. Wren would be this far along. Our baby would be about this big.
Then their babies arrived, one after another. They brought their children home while I still didn’t know whether mine had been born, whether the baby had survived or whether I had a son or a daughter.
