The text that supposedly came from a woman who is alive, and somewhere visiting family, and chose to leave without a phone call or a forwarding address.
I read it the way I always read it. Looking for something I haven't found yet. A crack. A tell.
My mother would have called me baby girl. She always called me baby girl.
Twenty-two words and not one of them is baby girl.
My thumb hovers over the screenshot button.
For the first time in eleven months, my hand hesitates.
Something happened tonight. Something shifted.
I walked across a fire pit and put my hand in a man's hand and for ten seconds I wasn't the girl.
I put the phone down, roll onto my side, and stare at the wall.
Outside, a truck starts.
I know the sound of every engine on this compound the way I know the sound of every horse in the barn.
That's Spur's truck. The old Ford with the bad muffler that he's been saying he'll fix for two years and never does.
He's leaving.
Middle of the night. After the fire, after the bet, after he held my hand two seconds too long in front of every patched member of the Shotgun Saints.
He's running.
I listen to the engine fade down the road. Getting smaller. The way men do when they're scared of what they feel.
I almost smile.
Run, Spur. Run all the way to Austin if you want. It won't help you.
I made a bet in front of your brothers.
I said the word mine with the firelight on my face and your pulse under my fingers.
That's witnessed. That's on the record. That's the kind of thing you don't walk back from in an MC, you know it, I know it, and every man at that table knows it.
You shook my hand, cowboy.
I’m already yours. You just haven't caught up yet.
I close my eyes, but I don't fall asleep until three in the morning.
CHAPTER FIVE
Spur
I drove two hours last night and ended up back where I started.
I don't know why I left. I didn't pack a bag. I didn't tell anyone.
I got in the Ford after the fire pit cleared out, after Dakota's hand let go of mine and she walked back to the table without looking at me, and I drove west on the county road until I hit the gas station outside Mason.
Sat in the parking lot with the engine running for forty minutes.
