Page 65 of Open Road

I throw my leg over the bike and start the engine.

It is time to gohome.

Chapter Twenty-Two

JANIE

The first thing I notice is that he looks small. The thing I didn’t expect, despite everything I told myself on the ride over, despite the careful preparation, the conversation with Winchester’s lawyer, the specific instruction to keep it brief and give him nothing he can use. I prepared for the Craig I know, the one who fills a room, the one who calibrates his presence like a tool, who always seems to occupy more space than the square footage should allow.

The man on the other side of the glass is wearing a jail-issued shirt and the particular expression of someone who has spent several days recalibrating and hasn’t finished the job.

When I sit down, he picks up the phone and waits until I pick up mine, and he doesn’t say anything for a moment. He’s reading me the way he always reads me, looking for the angle, the opening, the specific frequency of my uncertainty he learned to broadcast back at me in a register I’d believe. Four years of practice. He knows my face better than almost anyone.

He doesn’t know it anymore because the woman he practiced on isn’t the one who sat down.

“Janie.” His voice through the handset is the careful voice. It’s the one that preceded the long conversations, where he’d reframe everything until the thing that had happened was somehow my interpretation, sensitivity, and failure to understand what he’d actually meant. “You came.”

“I came.”

“That means something.”

“It means I wanted to see this,” I say. I let my eyes move across the room, the glass, the phone, the shirt. I bring them back to his face. “So I came to see it.”

His expression shifts. The careful voice requires a particular kind of response from me to keep functioning, uncertainty, the slight softening around the eyes, and the unconscious lean forward that signals I’m still available to be managed. He’s not getting any of it. The calculation runs and returns with nothing usable, and I watch him decide to try a different route.

“I love you,” he says. “Whatever you think happened between us, whatever version of it they’ve put in your head, I love you. You’re my wife.”

“Not for much longer.”

“The paperwork isn’t final.” He leans forward, both forearms on the counter, the posture he uses when he wants to signal sincerity. “Nothing is final. Come back, and Rose keeps her family. Herrealfamily.” A pause, weighted, the weight deliberate. “Fight me on this, and I’ll spend every resource I have left making the custody process the longest, most expensive thing you’ve ever been through.”

The threat lands in the room between us.

I look at him.

The thing I’m waiting for—the old contraction in my chest, the cold, the calculation of how bad it could get, the instinct to find an exit, doesn’t come.

What comes instead is a laugh.

It comes up without warning, genuine, the kind with no performance in it, and I watch his face change when it arrives because he doesn’t know what to do with it. Four years, and he never once made me laugh the way the last few weeks have or gave me something real enough to laugh about. The laugh is for that. For the distance between the man I was afraid of and theman sitting across from me now in a jail shirt, deploying threats he has no machinery left to back.

“Craig.” I shake my head. “Your accounts are frozen. Your lawyer’s fees are being paid with money a judge is already looking at. Pure Ventures is evidence.” I set the phone down for a second, breathe, then pick it back up. “The divorce is in motion. It has been for ten days. What you have now is time. Plenty of it.”

His jaw tightens.

“Rose will know you’re her father,” I say. “She’ll know your name because she has a right to know where she came from. Beyond that…” I let it sit. “You lost her the night you put your hand on her. You made that decision. Live in it.”

He starts to say something.

I stand. “This is the last time you’ll ever see me, Craig.” My voice is level. Not cold or heated, the temperature of a woman who has run completely out of things to feel about this man and arrived somewhere clear on the other side. “I genuinely hope, for your sake and for Rose’s, you find something better to be, in whatever comes after this.” I put the phone down.

His mouth is moving. The guard near the door shifts his weight. I pick up my bag and turn, and behind me, Craig’s voice rises, the careful register abandoned entirely now, the management dissolved, and the raw thing underneath it finally out in the open where it always lived.

The words follow me down the corridor, but I don’t stop walking.

The door at the end opens into a waiting room. The waiting room opens into a lobby. Beyond the lobby’s glass doors is Florida’s afternoon. Full sun on the concrete steps. A bike at the curb, a silver-haired man leaning against it, arms crossed, dog tags catching the light. Beside him, Memphis, Rock’s man from the Durango chapter, darker, easy in his stance, is leaning against his own bike with the unhurried patience of someonewho has spent a long time on the road. The two of them have the comfortable quiet of men with shared history, roads crossing across chapters over the years.

Memphis came down two weeks ago with backup and a message from Rock, an open door back to Durango, work that needed someone with Roam’s particular skills, an invitation that was also something close to a pull. I heard about it from Devil, who has a gift for telling you what you need to know without making it a briefing. Roam’s answer had been short and final. He hadn’t mentioned it to me, which I think was his way of saying it wasn’t worth mentioning.