I've got both hands over my mouth.
"He informed on a white power group at twenty-five years old to keep his mother breathing. Then he spent ten years paying for it by himself, with nobody at his back and no name to call his own." She looks around the yard, face by face. "That's a man who understood what this life costs before he ever laid eyes on our patch."
Finn isn't moving. He isn't moving at all.
"Then a woman walked up to that gate." Amara tips her chin toward me and I nearly come out of my skin. "And this man had every chance to protect himself. Lie to her. Lie to us. Keep his head down and ride it out. He told the truth at the exact moment the truth cost him everything, and then he stood at my table and told a room full of armed men that she was the love of his life and he had no right to her."
Behind me, somebody makes a sound.
"A prospect who won't defend himself but will stand up for a woman with no standing and the women she left behind in a hole isn’t a man I have to worry about." She holds the box out. "You've earned it three times over. Take your damn colors."
He takes the box.
He gets the lid off with both hands, and I watch a thirty-five-year-old man's shoulders start going.
He lifts out a leather cut with a full patch on it and a bottom rocker that reads MEXICO.
The yard comes apart.
They're on him before he can get it on.
Boulder's got him around the neck with the crutch clattering into the gravel.
Python's shouting in his ear.
Zorro picks him clean up off the ground and sets him back down.
And Doom, who I have heard say maybe four words in eight weeks, puts one hand on the back of his head and says something to him nobody else can hear, and Finn shuts his eyes and nods.
Ruby's crying. Marie's sobbing outright into Kelsey's shoulder.
I stand in the middle of it with my hands over my face, watching them put a cut on the back of the man who let a muddy dog into his mother's kitchen for me twenty-eight years ago.
Then Amara says my name. "Camila."
The yard turns around.
She's got a second box.
I look at it, and at her, and my feet don't work.
"Get over here." Amara doesn't move an inch. "I'm not carrying it to you."
I go.
It's smaller than his. She sets it in my hands and it weighs almost nothing, and I stand there with forty people watching me and I can't make my fingers work on the lid.
"Open it," Ruby calls.
I get it open.
Leather. Black, cut small, a woman's shape, and I lift it out with both hands and I don't understand what I'm holding until Kelsey says, "Turn it over, honey."
I turn it over.
On the back, in white:
PROPERTY OF ROOSTER
