Page 17 of My Broken Biker

The kitchen is quiet. The refrigerator hums.

"Seven minutes is a long time to be on the ground alone with that kind of injury," I say. "I was conscious for most of it. Knox knows exactly how long it was and I know it and neither of us has said it directly to the other, not once, not since." I pick the mug up and put it back down without drinking from it. "I stopped going to the clubhouse after the recovery. Clint's kept the invitation open. I haven't taken it. Some of that is about the leg and what it took from me in terms of what I could contribute. Some of it is about standing in a room with my brother and having both of us know what those seven minutes cost."

"Have you asked them whether it matters?" she says. "The other members. Have you asked any of them directly what they need from you now?"

I don't answer.

"Okay," she says, quietly, and she doesn't press it.

The street outside does what it does in the morning, a dog being walked past, someone's sprinkler system going on a timer two houses down. We sit in it.

"Your turn," I say. "The person you left."

She looks at her mug for a moment. "Derek," she says. "We were together for eighteen months after Angela. He was never violent, I need to say that clearly because it matters for what I'm about to describe." She stops. Then: "He reorganized my life very slowly and with a lot of patience. My friendships went first because we were always doing something with his people instead. My opinions started coming out already shaped around his. I stopped noticing the difference between what I actually wanted and what I'd been trained to want." She pauses. "One morning Angela was two years old and I looked at her and understood that I was raising her inside that version of me, and that was the thing I couldn't survive."

She says it simply. Just the fact of it. No drama in the telling, which somehow makes it land heavier than drama would.

"He wasn't graceful when I left," she says. "He showed up at my work twice. I got a restraining order. Bloomfield was chosen because there was nothing connecting it to him, no mutual people, no reason he'd think to look here." She looks at me. "He doesn't know where I am. As far as I know."

"He won't find it," I say, and I mean it as information rather than comfort, and she receives it that way.

"Is that a Vigil thing or a Jace thing?" she asks.

"Both," I say.

Something in her face settles. Some specific thing completing itself.

"I need to say the rest," I say.

"Go ahead," she says.

"I'm all in," I say. "Not the version of this where we see how it goes and keep the exits available. I mean this specifically. The leg and the club and two years of living deliberately alone in this house, and I'm forty-one years old and I don't know how easy any of this is going to be, and I know what I'm saying and I'm saying it." I look at her. "Are you?"

She doesn't answer right away and I don't push her.

"Angela first," she says. "That's not a condition, just the first true thing. If you're in, you're in with her. That's what in means."

"I know," I say.

"And I need you to know I won't do the quiet thing," she says. "The making myself small thing. I did it twice and I know exactly what it looks like from inside and I won't do it again. You get the full version of me or you tell me that's too much and we're both adults and we deal with that."

"I'm counting on the full version," I say.

She looks at me for a moment longer. "Yes," she says. "I'm in."

The word sits between us in the morning kitchen and neither of us adds anything to it, because it doesn't need anything added.

At some point her eyes go to her phone on the table. "Deb said ten," she says. "It's already quarter to nine. I need to go home and change."

She finds her shoes at the front door and her bag in the hallway, and I walk her out to the front step and she turns at the bottom of the path and looks up at me.

"Coffee tomorrow," she says. It is not about coffee.

"Coffee tomorrow," I say.

She nods once, and goes.

I watch her to the car and down the street and around the corner until the street is just a street again, and then I go back inside and close the screen door behind me.