Page 71 of Open Road

The dress is where I left it this morning, hanging on the closet door where I’d put it last night so I could see it first thing and get used to the idea. The getting-used-to-it hasn’t progressed as far as I’d hoped.

It’s red. The kind of red that doesn’t ask permission. Bought three weeks ago on a lunch break, tried on in a fitting room smaller than a confessional, stood very still in front of the mirror while something in my chest did something complicated. It fits every curve. Craig’s word for that was ‘exposed.’His other word was ‘inappropriate.’His other words were worse, and I’m not giving them space here. Not tonight, not in this room with the sound of my daughter’s voice carrying in from the yard.

The dress doesn’t know what Craig called it. The dress is just red.

Devil lifts it off the hanger without ceremony and holds it out.

Argument rises in my throat. I consider it. Then I consider the last four months, the compound and the legal aid office, the paperwork on the kitchen table, and the laugh that lives close to the surface now, and I take the dress.

Devil zips it up. Steps back, and doesn’t say anything for a moment, which from Devil is its own form of communication.

“Yeah,” Lucy says quietly.

My reflection in the closet mirror looks back at me. The curves are there. The softness of my belly, the fullness of my hips, the weight of me in the fabric. Everything Craig cataloged and handed back to me as evidence.

The dress doesn’t agree with him.

The dress is on my side, apparently. Red, fitted, and unambiguous.

Craig’s voice runs its usual commentary. Quieter than it used to be. Considerably quieter than it was in July, when it was loud enough some mornings to fill the whole room. It’s still there. I don’t expect it to vanish entirely, but I’ve stopped expecting that. The director was right about how long it takes, but tonight it’s background noise behind something else. Something that sounds like my own voice telling me I’m walking out of this room in this dress, and that’s the whole of it.

“Okay,” I say.

Devil smiles. Not the wide one, the small one. The one that means she knew.

“Go show him,” she says.

***

The ceremony is at dusk.

The whole chapter is there. The yard is lit with strings of lights Scout spent three hours hanging and complained about for two, the tables are pushed back, the bikes lined up at the far end because these men will not stop being who they are for an occasion, they simply include the occasion in who they are. Reaper is in his usual corner with his arms crossed in a way that communicates festivity through pure contrast. Scout has already located the drinks. Memphis, Rock’s man from the Durango chapter, flew in yesterday and has the easy, watchful bearing of a man taking in everything about a new chapter without appearing to. He’s good at it, but I’ve gotten better at spotting it.

Rock is on his tablet propped against a speaker. Durango is visible through the screen behind him, the mountain dark that means something different from Florida dark. He raises a glass when the connection comes through and says something to Creed that makes Creed do the thing that is almost a smile.

Rose is wearing her yellow dress. She decided this without consultation and defended it on multiple grounds, the primary one being that Mr. Rabbit prefers yellow events. The case was airtight.

Roam is across the yard talking to Reaper when I walk out, and he stops mid-sentence.

Reaper’s eyes move to me briefly, then back to Roam, and something shifts in his expression, the dark humor he keeps mostly internal finding a rare public moment. He lifts his drink and moves away with a deliberateness that is its own form of comment.

Roam doesn’t move.

He looks at me the way he looked at me three months ago, standing in the doorway of that room before I knew he was there. He looked then like a man who didn’t understand what I was seeing in the mirror. He looks now like a man who sees me, specifically and completely, and finds the view in exact opposition to Craig’s accounting of it.

The yard is full of people. He crosses it without looking at any of them, then he stops in front of me. One hand comes up, the back of his fingers near my jaw—the almost-touch of a man who knows the difference between taking and asking.

“Red,” he says.

One word. His entire opinion of the dress. Of me in it. Of the three months it took me to get here. Delivered flat and certain, the way he means everything.

“Red,” I agree.

The corner of his mouth moves.

***

Creed stands at the head of the yard. This is what claiming looks like in the Royal Bastards, not performance or theater, it is a declaration inside the family, in front of the people who will beasked to honor it. A man standing up in front of his chapter and sayingthis one, without qualification.