Page 26 of My Broken Biker

I look at her. "You're allowed to have been wrong about Derek," I say. "Both times."

Something shifts in her face, and then settles. "We're both very good at deciding things," she says.

"Apparently," I say.

She looks at me across the table in her kitchen, in the house with the dinosaur drawings and the three plates drying in the rack and Angela asleep at the end of the hall, and I look back at her, and the kitchen is warm and the evening is what it is, and this is what I said yes to.

"Stay," she says.

"Yes," I say.

She reaches across the table and takes my hand, the same way she did in the hallway, both of hers around mine, and we sit there in the kitchen for a while longer without it needing to be anything other than what it is.

Then she turns off the kitchen light and we go down the hall, past Angela's closed door with the faint sound of her breathing through it, and into the bedroom, and she moves around it in the dark with the ease of someone in her own space, and I sit on the edge of the bed and put the cane against the nightstand, and she comes and sits beside me.

"Three plates," I say.

"What?" she says.

"In the rack," I say. "When you were putting Angela to bed. I was in the kitchen and there were three plates drying."

She's quiet for a moment. "Yeah," she says.

"I looked at them for a while," I say.

She doesn't say anything to that. She takes my hand again, her thumb moving across the back of it, across the scarred knuckle of the middle finger and the one beside it, and she's just holding my hand in the dark.

"Three plates," she says, eventually, quiet, like she's noting it.

"Three plates," I say.

We lie down in the dark in her bed and she pulls the blanket up and I'm on my back looking at the ceiling and she's on her side against me, her hand on my chest, and the house is quiet and Angela is down the hall and somewhere out past the edge of this neighbourhood the road goes long and straight through the fields and I don't need to drive it tonight.

I put my hand over hers on my chest.

After a while her breathing changes and she's asleep, and I lie there for a long time looking at the ceiling of a room that isn't mine in a house that isn't mine that doesn't feel foreign, and I think about Knox saying he was glad I called, and Clint's voice on the phone the way it always is, even and without ceremony, and the twelve minutes it took to come back to something I'd decided I was finished with.

I think about three plates in a rack.

Eventually I sleep.

Epilogue — Harper

Three Years Later

Angela's poster is the third from the left in the third row, which I know because she told us exactly where it would be on the drive here and made Jace repeat it back to her to confirm he'd been paying attention.

"Third from the left," he'd said, eyes on the road.

"Which row?"

"Third."

"And how many from the left?"

"Third," he'd said. "You already asked that one."

She'd considered this. "I wanted to make sure it stuck," she said, and looked out the window, satisfied.