"That's good," I say.
"It is good." Cam leans on the bar again. "She'll be great. Anyone who can walk out of a clubhouse like she did with her head that far up is going to be great at whatever she puts her mind to."
I look at her then. "You watched her leave."
"I watch everything." No apology in it. Just the truth. "I saw what she was when she walked in and what she was when she walkedout and they weren't the same thing. That's a resilient woman, Austin. She'll be fine."
I nod. My emotions are complicated, making a knot in my throat that threatens to suffocate me and I wait for it to pass.
"She's not coming back, you know," Cam says, and her voice is quiet now, under the music and the noise of the room. Not unkind. Just honest.
"I know," I say. "That was the point."
Cam looks at me for a long moment. Outside of the bar a burst of laughter goes up from somewhere and a song changes and two of the sweetbutts dance past behind us. The room is bright, warm and full of people enjoying a Friday night but we’re not a part of that. Cam looks at me with something in her expression that I can't entirely read, somewhere between understanding and something sadder.
"What will she be studying?" she asks.
"Medicine."
"How long does that take?"
"She was accepted in a scholarship for the BS/DO program, it is really competitive, but she is going straight to med school. She will be there for six years; two years as an undergrad, and then four years in med school. She will do two of clinical rotations and then her residency. It’ll be years before she's fully qualified."
"Right." Cam absorbs this. "So, you've got a while."
I frown. "A while for what?"
She smiles, small and private, and picks up her cloth again and moves down the bar to someone who needs a refill. As if shehadn’t just left without answering my question. She just lets it sit there.
I sit with it.
A while for what? I turn it over once in my mind and then I put it away with everything else I'm not letting myself think about directly. I put Cam’s statement in the place where I keep all the things that have a future tense I'm not ready to look at yet. I put it there and close the drawer.
I finish my beer and watch the room. Down the bar Cam is pulling a pint and laughing at something Knuckles said. Knuckles looks almost human when he laughs which is startling every time. Seb is dancing badly with one of the sweetbutts and grinning like an idiot. across the room Brick is talking to Pops with that particular stillness he has that means whatever they're discussing is serious but not urgent.
My club. My people. My life.
I don't feel it yet, not fully, not the way I'll feel it eventually, but I can see the shape of it from here and it looks like something I can live inside. Something I can build a version of myself inside. The version that patches in, the version that earns the trust of men like Razor and Knuckles and Pops, the version that becomes someone worth the choice I made.
I signal Cam for another beer, and she brings it down without looking at me. She slides it across without stopping her conversation with the man beside her, and I settle in for the rest of the night. I don't think about Savannah.
Much.
Cam comes back when the rush at the bar thins out around ten. She tops up her own glass with something that looks like soda water and leans on the counter, and we exist in companionable silence for a minute, both watching the room, both content not to perform at each other about it.
"Ruby's pie or the diner on Route 9?" I ask.
She looks at me. "For what?"
"Pecan. Best pecan pie in the county. Where is it?"
Cam considers this with the seriousness it deserves. "Ruby's, but not by as much as Ruby thinks. The Route 9 diner has better pastry. Ruby's filling is richer." She taps the bar. "Depends on what you're after."
"What are you after?"
"The filling. Always the filling. Pastry is just the vehicle."
"Brick know you have opinions about pie?"