“You all right?” Colt said.
I was staring at the door she’d walked through.
My room. My door. A stranger walking in because Handful hadn’t pulled it shut. I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t cheated on Bea.
“I need to go,” I said.
Colt looked at me. He knew where I was going. “Don’t fuck it up,” he said. Then, quieter — “Good luck, brother.”
I walked out of the clubhouse and into the parking lot and for the first time in months, I could breathe.
I was going to tell her. I was going to drive to her apartment and tell her everything — the footage, the rider, the wrong room, all of it. She was going to understand. It was going to be okay. We could start again. We could go back to before.
Chapter 26
?
— Holden —
Irehearsed it on the drive.
Not the words — I’d never been good with words — but the facts. The clean line of them.There was a weekend rider. He went into my room by mistake. Glitch has the footage. I didn’t do it. I didn’t cheat on you. She slept with him. They were in my room.
That was enough. The facts would carry it.
The truck ate up the miles. Both hands on the wheel, windows cracked, cold air shoving through the cab. I’d had the radio off for weeks. I turned it on now, some country station, and let it play. I kept running the footage back in my head: the man stumbling in, walking out within an hour, going to the room next door. The wrong room. That was all it had ever been.
I hadn’t done it.
I was going to tell her. She was going to understand. We were going to find our way back. Simple. Clean. The way it should be when the worst thing you’d been afraid of turns out to be a lie.
I knocked once. Heard her cross the floor and work the locks without so much as a who-is-it through the door. It swung open.
That was the first thing wrong. The flinch was the second — small, fast, gone before it could finish, and then her jaw set and her eyes cut away before she made them come back to mine.
“Bea — what the hell. You don’t open the door without looking. We’ve talked about—” I stopped. Her eyes were swollen.Not crying now — past it, or holding it back — but the evidence was in the redness around her lashes and the careful way she was holding her face together.
She stepped back from the threshold, arms folding tight across her chest like she was cold, and her place was never cold.
I came in. Shut the door behind me. Locked it. “Who upset you?” My voice came out lower than I meant it. “Was it a client? Somebody call with something heavy?”
She made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
I looked past her — scanned the living room, the kitchen through the archway, the hallway down to her office. Nobody. “Is somebody here? Did somebody come by—”
“You.” Her voice cracked. “You upset me, Holden. I know about the baby.”
I froze.
She pressed her lips together. Held herself very still. “I was there,” she said. “At the clubhouse. Earlier. I came to — it doesn’t matter why I came. I was in the main room. I heard you talking toher.”
The relief from earlier - the dumb feeling of a man on his way to put his life back together — was gone. I knew exactly what she’d heard. “You heard—”
“I heard you tell her you’d step up. That you’d take responsibility. Whatever it took.” She unfolded her arms and then folded them again, tighter. “And then I left.”
“Bea—”
“I drove home.” She was looking at her hands now. “I sat in the car for twenty minutes before I could get out. And then I came inside and I—” She stopped. Closed her eyes. Breath in, hold for three, breath out — the thing she taught her clients. I’d heard her coach people through it over the phone from her kitchen table. Seen her use it on herself after she hung up, eyesclosed at the counter while she grounded herself. “I thought about what it would have been like.”
