"I know."
"I played it early." One corner of her mouth pulls and it's gone before I can be sure it happened. "I'd do it again. You were going to put me back on the road at hello, and now you're standing in the cold talking to me."
The wind goes through the fence.
Amara looks at her for a long time.
Then she walks back to the truck and puts her hand on the door, and she's not smiling anymore.
I don't know which one of them won.
"Get in," she says. "Both of you."
"I said I'd walk."
"You did." Amara pulls the door open. "You were also right about one thing, and I don't say that a lot, so get in the damn truck before I remember I'm annoyed."
Mila walks past me and gets in the back.
Marco's still standing outside the hut with his hands half up like nobody's told him he can put them down.
Amara points at the front seat. I take it.
Nobody talks on the drive.
I've got my hands on my knees, dried blood down my forearm, and I can see her in the side mirror the whole way.
She's not looking at the buildings.
She's looking at the ground. The run of the road, where it turns, the break in the fence line for the second gate, the culvert, the gap between the garage and the wall.
Her eyes go over all of it in a pattern and her head barely moves.
I know what that is.
I did that for two years in three states before I crossed the river and it's still in me, and I'm sitting in a truck watching her do it out the back window of my own club.
Somebody taught her that.
Somebody made her learn it.
Amara pulls up in front of the clubhouse and cuts the engine.
"Razor. Dante." She says it to the windshield. "Nobody else."
"Prez—"
"Rooster." She turns her head and looks at me for the first time since the gate. "Six years I've known you. You've never once given me a reason."
"No, ma'am."
"So you're going to walk into my office and give me all of it." She opens her door. "All of it. Because I'm about to sit across from a woman with your real name in her mouth, and I'd rather hear it from you than find out I was the last one in the room to know."
She gets out.
I sit there with my hands on my knees.
I've done it before.
