Memphis, sensing an opportunity, has positioned himself directly between us on the kitchen floor, squarely in the most inconvenient possible location, watching the dishes with the focused optimism of a dog who believes deeply that something worth eating is eventually going to fall within reach.
“Memphis.”
He doesn’t move.
“He’s fine,” Sophia says, reaching down to scratch behind his ear with her free hand while still managing to dry a glass with the other. “He’s just hoping.”
“He’s always hoping.”
“Smart dog.”
“Don’t encourage him.”
She laughs, small and unguarded, like she didn’t mean to, and the sound of it moves through the kitchen, settling somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Passing her another glass without looking at her, she dries it without saying anything else. Memphiseventually accepts that nothing is coming his way and relocates himself to the doorway with a dignity that is frankly impressive for an animal who’s just been ignored.
Finishing the dishes, we head back outside, beers in hand, the night air cooler now and full of that clean desert stillness.
Lighting the fire pit, we settle into the low chairs beside it. Sophia tucks her feet up beneath her the way she had at dinner, wrapping both hands around her bottle, looking out at the darkness beyond the pool.
The fire catches, climbs, and casts everything in warm shifting amber.
Memphis drops at our feet with a long exhale of pure contentment, and we sit in silence for a while.
“Were you always like this?” Sophia asks, her eyes still on the fire.
“Like what?”
“Quiet. Contained.” She glances at me. “Like everything you’re thinking stays behind your eyes.”
Considering that for a moment, I say, “Probably.”
“Ryan was the opposite,” she states. A small smile crosses her face. “He filled every room he walked into. You always knew exactly where he was and what he was thinking because he’d already told you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He was.”
The fire crackles between us.
After a moment, she turns her bottle slowly in her hands, eyes dropping to the label, and says carefully, like she isn’t sure she wants the answer, “Did he ever talk about me? When he was with the club?”
The question lands in the night air and stays there.
I look at the fire for a moment before I answer, “Yeah,” I say. “He did.”
She looks up at me.
“All the time. More than men in his position usually talk about their women, which, in that world, means something.”
She is very still. “What did he say?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.
Turning the beer bottle in my hand, I think back, not having to search very hard, because the memory comes without any effort at all. Tracker and I were sitting on the back step of the Blood Brothers’ clubhouse, maybe six months before everything went sideways, sharing a beer in the dark the way we sometimes did when the noise inside got to be too much.
‘She doesn’t know this world,’ he’d said. ‘And I’m glad she doesn’t. But she knows me, the real me, not the patch, and I don’t know how to explain to you what that means when you’ve spent years making sure nobody gets that close.’
My eyes move to Sophia.
“He said you knew him. The real him. Not the patch, not the reputation. Just Ryan.” A pause. “He said he didn’t know how to explain what that meant to him. But I could see it on his face when he said it, so I understood anyway.”
Sophia’s eyes fill with tears, and she doesn’t try to stop them, just lets them fall, her hands wrapped around her beer, her gaze somewhere in the middle distance beyond the fire.
