"My first thought was terror." Her voice doesn't crack. It steadies. Firms up. Like she's finding the steel underneath the shaking. "I was eighteen years old, alone, in a city where I didn't know anyone, working a waitressing job for seven dollars an hour. I had no money, no family,nosupport. And the last thing the president's wife said to me before I left Sharp was that the club handles problems and the problems disappear."
That stops me.
"Jolene said that to you?"
"The night I left. She came to my mother's house. Told me to disappear. Told me what would happen if I didn't." Marlena's eyes meet mine. Dark hazel-ish brown, almost black in this light. The eyes I used to lose myself in when I was thirty-one and stupid enough to think I could have a girl like her without consequences. "I believed her, Harlan. I was eighteen and I'd watched you nearly die in a bar fight and then heard you killed the man who did it. And your wife, or ex wife, I don’t even know anymore, was standing on my porch telling me the club would make me disappear if I came back."
"So, you ran."
"You told me to leave. Your wife threatened to kill me. So yeah, I ran. What was the alternative?"
The question hangs in the air and I don't answer it because I don't have one.
Not one that doesn't make me the villain in her version of this story.
So, I set the glass down harder than I mean to.
The sound is sharp in the quiet room. "You still took my daughter and ran for twenty years. You let another man raiseher. You let her call someone else Dad. You let me sit on this ranch for two decades not knowing I had a child out there with my blood and my face. You had twenty-one years to pick up a phone, Marlena. Twenty-one fucking years!"
"It started as surviving," She's not backing down.
I can see it—the girl I knew is gone but the spine is the same. Maybe stronger. "I was scared. Of the club. Of Jolene. Of what would happen to me and my baby if I came back. And then a year passed. And then five. And then ten. And every year it got harder to tell the truth because the truth meant admitting I'd been lying, and the longer the lie went on, the heavier it got, until I couldn't lift it anymore."
"You could have called."
"And said what? 'Hi, Harlan, it's the teenager you dumped. By the way, you have a daughter'?"
"Yes. That's exactly what you should have said."
"And then what?" She stands up. The perching is over—she's on her feet, arms crossed, color rising in her cheeks the way it always did when she was angry. The flush starting at her throat and climbing.
I used to kiss that flush. Used to trace it with my mouth while she arched against me and said my name like a prayer.
"You would have—what? Left Jolene? You wentbackto Jolene, Harlan. You chose her. You chose your family. What was I supposed to do, show up with a baby and blow that apart?"
"That wasn't your decision to make."
"Everything was my decision to make! I was alone. No one was making decisions for me. Not you, not my mother, not anyone. I was eighteen with a baby and I made the best choice I could with what I had."
"The best choice." The words taste like ash. "You call hiding my daughter from me for twenty years thebest choice?"
"I call it theonlychoice that kept her safe!"
The room goes quiet.
Her chest is heaving. Mine is tight.
The bourbon is sitting in my stomach like acid and the sun is coming through the window behind her, backlighting her hair so it looks like it's on fire, and I hate her.
I hate her and I want her so badly my hands are shaking with it.
Twenty-one years. Twenty-one years since I've been in the same room with this woman and my body doesn't care about the betrayal.
My body remembers her. The smell of her, the sound of her voice, the way the air changes when she's close.
Somehow, it’s like I’m back and my body is thirty-one years old and back in this house with a girl who smelled like vanilla and tasted like recklessness, and my brain can scream all it wants about the twenty years she stole but my blood isn't listening.
She sees it. Whatever's on my face. She sees it, and something shifts behind her eyes.
