Njal glances over and catches me at it.
He doesn't say anything, but the corner of his mouth goes up.
He reaches across and rests his hand on my thigh, and we ride the last twenty miles like that, my hand in the wind and his hand on me.
Hannah's already at the table when we walk into the little café she picked, and she stands up so fast, her chair scrapes back and nearly goes over.
Then I'm in my sister's arms away from our hometown that tried to break us both.
Neither of us says a word for a while, because there's nothing that needs to be said.
"Look at you." She holds me back at arm's length, blinking hard. "You got out of that damn town."
"I sure did."
"And you brought the biker." She looks past me at Njal, sizes him up the way only an older sister can, head to boots and back. Whatever she finds makes her nod, slow and satisfied. "Hannah Crockett." She sticks out her hand. "The other damaged one."
"Njal." He takes it. "There's nothing damaged at this table."
Hannah's eyebrows climb.
She shoots me a look that saysoh, I see why,and heat crawls up my neck.
The apartments we look at after lunch are the kind I never let myself picture.
Njal's got a list—the club helped, which I'm learning is how it works, that there's always somebody who knows somebody.
We drive to three of them with Hannah crammed in the back of the truck delivering commentary nobody asked for on every one.
The third is the one.
It's the top half of an old house with a porch, in a neighborhood thick with big trees, ten minutes from the clubhouse and fifteen from Hannah's place.
There's a fenced in yard out back Hoagie's going to lose his whole mind over.
The light comes through the front windows, gold and easy in the late afternoon.
I walk the empty rooms slowly while Njal talks square footage with the landlord out on the porch.
The kitchen's small and the cabinets are old. Somebody painted the radiators a terrible green sometime in the eighties, and I love every flawed inch of it, because nobody handed it to me and nobody gets to take it back by deciding I'm not worthy of it.
I run my hand along the windowsill.
I put a couch under that window, in my head.
I put Njal's boots by the front door and my truck in the drive and think about Hannah coming over on Friday nights for a couple glasses of wine.
My eyes are wet before I notice they've gone that way.
"You're crying," Hannah says gently, from the doorway.
"I'm not." I am. "It's just—I've never picked anything. My whole life happened to me. The town, the church, the school, the lie. I never once got to stand in an empty room and decideyes, this one, this is where I'm going to be happy." I drag my wrist across my face. "I didn't know I was allowed."
Hannah crosses the room and stands at the window beside me, both of us looking out at the yard going gold.
She takes my hand the way she did when we were small and the house we grew up in got loud.
"I cried in my first apartment too," she says. "Sat down on the floor because I didn't have a chair yet and cried for an hour. Not because I was sad. Because it wasmine,and nobody in it was ever going to tell me what I was." She squeezes. "Welcome to the rest of your life, baby sister."