It's like something out of a fever dream. A motorcycle club with an actual code. With honor that isn't just a word on a patch. I didn't believe it at first. Kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for someone to mention the real business, the shit they keep off the books.
But it never came.
King left around midnight. Said I should think about his offer, that the work was real if I wanted it, that Maya would be safe here.
Then this kid, Rookie, maybe twenty-six, newest member, wandered in looking for a beer and ended up sitting with me for another hour.
Dating a cop, of all things. A fucking cop. I almost laughed when he told me, thought he was fucking with me. But he was dead serious, showing me pictures on his phone of this woman in uniform, talking about her like she hung the moon.
"Doesn't the club have a problem with that?" I asked.
Rookie shrugged. "King says as long as she's good people and I'm not compromising the club, it's my business. She hates dirty cops more than we do, so it works out."
A biker dating a cop with the club's blessing. A MC that actually gives a shit about the town instead of bleeding it dry. A president who offers shelter to strangers and doesn't ask for anything in return.
This whole town is like a fever fantasy.
And now there's Alice.
Sitting across from me with her nervous hands and her gentle dog, looking at me like I did something heroic instead of just basic human decency.
"You're staring," she says quietly, and I realize she's right.
"Sorry." I look away, focus on my coffee. "Just thinking."
"About?"
About how I don't know what I'm doing. About how I should be gone already. About how you look at me and I feel like maybe I'm not completely broken after all.
"About whether I'm staying," I say instead.
Her eyes widen slightly. "You're thinking about staying? In Blackwater Falls?"
"Thinking about it." I glance at Maya, who's now lying on the floor with Biscuit's head in her lap, both of them looking blissfully content. "King offered me work. Security, protection, that kind of thing. Says Maya would be safe here, could go to school, make friends."
"She could," Alice says, and there's something in her voice: warmth, maybe, or hope. "The elementary school is wonderful. Small classes, good teachers. I teach fourth grade there."
Of course she does. Of course this woman who walks her dog at the same time every evening and came looking for me just to say thank you is a teacher. Probably has a house with a white picket fence and bakes cookies for her neighbors and does everything right that I've been doing wrong for the last four years.
"What grade would Maya be in?" Alice asks.
"Pre-K. She'll be five in March."
"Mrs. Henderson teaches pre-K. She's been doing it for thirty years and she's absolutely lovely." Alice is warming to the topic now, her nervousness fading as she talks about something she knows. "The school has a great art program, and music twice a week, and there's a playground that the kids love."
I can picture it. Maya with friends, Maya with routine, Maya with stability. Maya with a life that doesn't fit in a saddlebag.
"What made you leave?" Alice asks suddenly, then immediately looks horrified. "Sorry. That's none of my business. You don't have to—"
"I was in an MC," I say, and I don't know why I'm telling her this. Don't know why the words are coming out when I've kept them locked down for months. "My brother and I both. Our parents raised us into it. They were true believers in the code, in brotherhood, in doing right by your people."
Alice listens without interrupting, her hands still wrapped around her coffee mug.
"They died a few years back. And after that, things changed. The MC started dealing in shit my parents would have burned to the ground. Human trafficking. Heavy drugs. We tried to stop it—me and my brother and a few other good men." I can still see their faces sometimes, when I close my eyes. Good men who died believing in something that didn't exist anymore. "The good men got killed. All of them. Everyone except my brother and me."
"Oh my God," Alice breathes.
"My brother built his own MC after that. Clean slate, good people, the kind of thing our parents would have recognized. But I couldn't—" I stop, trying to find the words. "I couldn't stay. Couldn't be in his shadow, couldn't trust that easily again. So, I left. Been on the road ever since."