Page 12 of Rune’s Solace

“I understand fine, keep up.” Lucy set her mug down on the dresser and put both hands on her hips now, full artillery. “You listen to me. I have been on this compound one year. One. And in that one year I have watched you run this entire place like a woman twice your size, comforting every soul who comes through that door whether they’ve got the sense to ask for it or not, taking in the ones nobody else had room for, sitting up half the night with the drunk, the grieving and the plain scared, and never once, not one single time, letting anybody do a damn thing back for you. And you know me. You know I asked around about you the second I got here, because I ask around about everybody, it’s a sickness, Spinner says I’ll get myself shot one day and he’s probably right. So I know the story. I know you loved a man who kept you at arm’s length half your life. I know you raised that man’s girl like your own when her mother passed and never asked for one bit of credit.” Her voice didn’t soften but something in it went fierce. “I made it my business to know exactly who you are, Brenda, and who you are is the strongest person on this huge sorry compound, and I include the ones who ride. So no. You do not get to let Tom Montgomery — Tom, Brenda, a man who wears pleated khakis — you do not get to let him put you in a bed for a week.”

Something flickered in Brenda’s face. The first live thing I’d seen in it in days.

Fiona caught it too. I saw her ease half a notch, the breath a woman finally lets out after holding it for days. She leaned in and pressed her mouth to Brenda’s temple. “There she is,” she said softly. “I knew you were still in there.”

“Don’t you start on me too,” Brenda mumbled, but her hand came up and caught Fiona’s and held on.

“I’m not starting anything. Lucy’s got the starting covered.” Fiona’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “I hate to leave you to it, but Bolt and I have a thing we can’t push. I’ve got to run.” She said, squeezing Brenda’s hand. “You’re getting up out of this bed today. For me. I’ll come by tonight, you’ll be up, dressed and you’ll tell me Lucy was a pain in the ass. Deal?”

“She’s always a pain in the ass,” Brenda said, and it came out almost a laugh.

“That’s the spirit.” Fiona stood, and caught my eye and Lucy’s on her way past, like she was making sure we had Brenda before she left. And there it was again, that little change around her eyes I’d been noticing all week. I still thought it was anger, but there was something else mixed up in it too, something I couldn’t quite figure out. Whatever it was, Fiona had gotten really good at hiding it from Brenda. By the time she reached the door, it was gone.

Then she was gone, and it was the three of us.

The flicker had guttered by the time the door shut, and Brenda’s eyes went to the phone lying face-down on the nightstand like it was a snake she was keeping one eye on.

“He won’t quit callin’,” she said, small. “All hours. And I can’t — ” She stopped.

And I knew exactly what she meant, because I’d heard enough of Brenda’s thoughts this week to recognize the bad ones before she even finished saying them. She couldn’t say the true thing to Tom. Not one word of it. Devil had been crystal clear the night he told her: whatever passed between her and that man from here on, nothing, nothing, about what he really was, or how we’d come to know it. The man not knowing he’d been made was worth more to the club than anything Brenda might feel like screaming at him. And Brenda, being Brenda, understood that even flat on her back with her heart in pieces. That was the part eating her alive. The one true accusation she had, the only thing that would’ve let her stand up straight and hate him clean — you used me, you’re a cop, every bit of it was a lie — was the one thing she would never once get to say out loud. She had to let him think it was just a woman gone cold on him for no reason.

And nobody had even meant to be cruel to her. It just worked out that way.

“So don’t say anything,” Lucy said, like it was simple. “You don’t owe that man a reason. You don’t owe him a word. You owe him a dial tone.” She crossed her arms. “But you’re gonna be the one to hang up the phone, not the one hiding from it under a quilt. There’s a difference and you taught it to half the women on this property. Amy. Back me up.”

They both looked at me.

“She’s right,” I said. “Not about all of it. But about that.” I got up out of the chair I’d been dying to leave for a week and came and sat on the edge of the bed. “You don’t have to explain yourself to him, Bren. You’ve said a hundred times a grown woman’s no is a whole sentence. So make it one. Close the door yourself. That’s not hiding. That’s the opposite of hiding, and you know the difference. You’re the one who showed me there was one.”

The phone buzzed.

Face-down, walking itself a slow half-inch across the wood. All three of us looked at it.

“That him?” Lucy asked.

Brenda didn’t need to check. “That’s him.”

“Okay.” Lucy’s voice came down, gentler than anything she’d said yet. “So answer it sitting up.”

And Brenda did. She pushed herself upright against the headboard first, spine straight, the way I’d bet her own mama taught her you don’t take a hard call slumped down like the world already won, and she picked it up, and she answered.

“Tom.”

Whatever he said came fast and low and a lot of it, that pleading rush of a man who’d been rehearsing into voicemail for a week and finally got a live person. I couldn’t make out words from across the bed, just the meaning of it, up and desperate. Brenda shut her eyes and let him run all the way out.

“No,” she said, when he finally stopped. “I’m not gonna tell you what happened. It doesn’t change anything and it isn’t yours to have. What I’ll tell you is it’s done. All the way done. And I want you to stop callin’ me.”

He started again. I saw her jaw flex.

“Because I said so. Because I’m a grown woman and I’ve decided, and that used to be enough for a no.” Her free hand had a fistful of quilt now, knuckles pale, but her voice stayed dead level. “You keep askin’ me what you did wrong. Stop. Some doors just close, Tom. You don’t always get to stand there and be handed the reason. Let it be closed.”

A pause. Something smaller from his end.

“Goodbye, Tom.” And she hung up, and set the phone face-down, and laid her hand flat on top of it like she was holding a lid on a pot about to go.

The room was quiet.

“He kept askin’ what he did,” she said, to nobody, wondering. “Like a man who truly doesn’t know.” Her mouth twisted. “He sounded gutted, Lucy. I know what that man is and it sounded like something broke in him.”