"I know." She reaches across the table and takes my hand. "Tell me what I need to know. Not the club business. Just the things that keep us safe. Me and EJ."
The way she said that.Me and EJ. Like it's already a category. Like he's already hers to protect.
I look at her sitting at my kitchen table with her hand around mine, ready to take what comes, asking for the information she needs without flinching from it.
I've loved this woman my whole adult life. I've known it in the abstract for ten years. But this moment, this specific moment, is the one where I know it the way you know the ground under your feet. Certain. Permanent. Not going anywhere.
She fits here.
I tell her what she needs to know. She listens and asks one more question. I answer that too and then we sit there for a while in the quiet kitchen. At some point she puts her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. Neither of us says anything.
We'll be ready.
We're always ready.
CHAPTER 18
Austin
Six Months Later
Six months of mornings where I wake up and she's there.
Six months of EJ calling her Savvy like it was always her name. Six months of Rosie stopping by with food she doesn't need to bring, just because she wants to, and Jules asking Sav if she wants to learn to grow tomatoes, with Sav saying yes like she's been waiting to be asked. Six months of her medical office filled with patients who come in for their appointments and leave talking about the new doctor who actually listens. Six months of the compound shifting, the way a room shifts when someone sits down in the empty chair, and everything settling back into a shape that's better than it was before.
She moved her things into my house at the end of month two, which was EJ's idea. He told her she was sleeping there every night anyway and her apartment was just costing money that could be spent on something else. She told him that was very logical. He said thank you. She looked at me and I shrugged because he was not wrong.
Month three she finished the drawing with EJ. He'd been working on it since the Sunday she came to the compound for the first time, practicing girl-on-a-bike sketches on whatever paper he could get his hands on. When he finally added her to the wall she stood there for a long time looking at it. I asked her later what she was thinking. She said she was thinking that she was in the right place.
Month four I came home late from a run and found her asleep on the couch with EJ asleep on her chest, the book they'd been reading open face down on the floor beside them. I stood in the doorway for a while. I didn't take a picture because I didn't need one. I just put it in the part of my memory I don't touch and left it there.
The first time she was here for Church, she didn't go in. Old ladies never go in. That's not the rule, it's just not how it works. But she was in the kitchen with Jules and Rosie and Meg when the men filed past on the way to the table. I watched Razor stop at the kitchen doorway for half a second and nod at her, just once, and she nodded back.
Then Brick went past and stopped and looked at her with his arms folded.
"Sprog's old lady," he said. Not a question. Not an introduction. Just naming the thing.
It was the first time anyone had called her that.
I watched her face. She took it in for a moment and then something in her eyes settled, something that had been holding itself at a slight distance for six months finally let go, and she smiled at Brick, and he nodded once, and he went into Church.
Afterwards, she came and found me in the yard, stood next to me and said, "Is that how it works? Someone just says it and then it's real?"
"In this club," I said. "Yeah. That's pretty much how it works."
She thought about that. "I like it," she said.
I put my arm around her, and we stood there in the yard in the late afternoon light, and I thought about being eighteen years old, I thought about Cherry Lane and a girl I was too young to keep and somehow got back anyway, and I thought, yeah. This is where everything was always headed.
It'sa Friday night six months in and EJ is at Lily-Rose's for a sleepover. The clubhouse is loud in the way it gets on a Friday, the brothers spread out, old ladies at the corner table, someone's music on too high and nobody's turned it down yet.
I'm at the bar with Decker when I feel it.
It's not something I can name. Just a current in the room, a thing running underneath the noise that shouldn't be there. I've felt it before, in the months before the hotel raid, and the back of my neck goes tight.
"You feel that?" I ask Decker quietly.
He looks at me. He's got sharp instincts for a prospect, army-bred, the kind of awareness that doesn't switch off. "All day," he says. "I was on the gate this afternoon and there were trucks going past too slowly. Three times in two hours."