Page 49 of Open Road

“I know where the compound is.”

We go out the staff door into the Florida evening. The street is the same one I assessed two hours ago, the evening version of it. The delivery van is gone, the temperature is down two degrees, and the streetlights are on. Her car is in the side lot, but she doesn’t move toward it. Instead she moves toward the bike.

The compound at night is quiet, the way it gets when the men are paying attention. Two men are on the gate instead ofone. Inside, the common room carries the weight of a situation without appearing to, with men in the room or near it, the television on and unwatched, and everyone alert in the way men are alert who have been doing this long enough to know the difference between noise and signal.

Creed is running the headcount.

He doesn’t do it formally. No list, no announcement. He moves through the compound the way he’s always moves through it, with the attention of a man who has been counting his people for years and doesn’t need to appear to be counting. He’s through the common room, down the back hall, and has a word with the gate men. He glances through the workshop window to count the heads inside, then back through the far corridor.

Creed sees Nova the moment we come in. His gaze shifts to her, then to me, and his expression does what it always does—nothing obvious from the outside, everything from the inside. He files the information away without comment and keeps moving.

After a beat, he gives a single nod.

Nova takes the compound in with the same eyes she takes in every room, steady and no wasted attention. Dani briefed the girls at five as she knows the shape of what’s happening. She is not a woman who needs facts explained past their essential form.

Later, the compound settles into its night rhythm. The common room is down to two men and a hand of cards, the sound system long since switched off, while beyond the window the yard sits quiet and still.

I’m in the back hall.

The east corridor is twelve steps to my left. Second door from the end, the one with the window facing the yard. I know this without having checked. The way you know the exitsin a building you’re responsible for, the way you know which floorboards carry sound, the body takes inventory before the mind decides to. I noted it without deciding to.

Nova’s there.

Second door from the end.

I know it the way I know the route to Bare Assets, and I could run it in the dark.

Forty-three.

The number sits without drama. Twenty-three years in this club, the last ten as sergeant at arms. The road was the road, and I chose it at twenty, and I’d choose it again. I’m not looking for an exit. There isn’t one, and more to the point, I don’t want one. This compound, this gate, the phone at two in the morning with a problem requiring the sergeant at arms. In twenty years, I’ll still be standing in this hall, the faces at the table different, but the job is the same.

She’s twenty-six and eighteen months from a nursing degree—a plan with a timeline she’s been executing from a dressing table with an earbud in. Nova is building something real, something with a license, a salary, and a future you can put on paper. She chose the fastest route to where she’s going, and she’s not embarrassed by the vehicle. She does the work and doesn’t explain herself to the room.

The question is not whether I’m interested.

Three weeks of inventing errands, forty-five minutes over a booking sheet, and her hand in mine in the hallway, no grip on it, no performance, the question held open, waiting for my answer.

I know my answer.

I’ve known it since a Thursday morning with a confirmed drinks order I hadn’t needed to check in person.

The question is whether a woman who is going somewhere wants to tie herself to a man who is already where he’s going tobe. She’s building a career, I’m keeping a gate. She’ll have letters after her name in eighteen months, and I’ll still be the man who takes the block twice before he parks.

Seventeen years between us.

What does a woman with a plan want with a man who will still be standing in this hall long after the plan is finished?

The east corridor is twelve steps away.

Close enough that I could walk there without thinking about it.

Close enough that I spend far too much time thinking about it anyway.

I go to bed.

And for a long time, all I do is stare at the ceiling and think about the woman on the other side of those twelve steps.

Chapter Seventeen