"You built it from the inside." It comes out lower than I mean it to. "I know the outside. Neither one of us has the whole picture alone."
She holds it a second.
"No," she says. "We don't."
It's two words about a map.
But it's the first thing out of her mouth since I walked out of that sunroom that isn't a wound, and I look back down at the image fast, before anybody in the room reads what it does to me, before I do something stupid like let them see my eyes go.
We all talk about the run for three more hours and I don't say much. I don't need to.
Once she and I set the two maps on top of each other the rest of them can run with it, and they do.
She stays focused on it the whole time, sharp and exact, and every little while she looks at the screen and then at me to check a thing about the ground.
Every time, I answer it plainly.
It's an ugly thing to know about a man, that planning a raid on the place that broke her is the nearest he's come to happy in a decade.
But she's alive, across this table, and she's asking me which way the water runs, and I'll take it.
When it breaks up I catch Amara at the door.
"Prez. One thing."
She stops.
"I know I'm not supposed to leave the property. I know I'm earning it back and I'm not asking you to move any of that." I keep it low, the room still emptying behind us. "But I want to take her to dinner. Tonight. Off the property, an hour in the city. That's all."
Amara looks at me.
"You're confined, Rooster."
"I know."
"If you leave and something happens, that's mine to carry. I bend my own rule, and a man on my watch walks off with a woman he's compromised over, I answer for it in front of the whole club." She's not saying no. She's naming the price. "Give me one reason it's worth me carrying it."
"Because for six years I've done what I'm told and asked you for nothing. And you told me to quit being sorry in a corner and go through the open door." I hold her eyes. "This is me going through it. I'm not bracing to lose her, Prez. I'm reaching for her. You said reaching was the one I was allowed."
Amara looks at me for a long moment.
One corner of her mouth pulls.
"One hour past reasonable and I send the boys to drag you out of the restaurant by your collar," she says. "Take her. Back by ten. And Rooster—" she's already walking off "—put on something without grease on it. You look like a transmission."
* * *
Mila's in the main room with a coffee she's not drinking.
I stand in the doorway a second and gather up what nerve I've got, which isn't much, and go over.
She looks up.
"Amara says I can leave the property tonight." My heart's going harder than I'd like and I keep my voice even over it. "One hour. Two if I push."
She doesn't say anything.
"I know what I've got no right to. I'm not asking for any of it." My hands want somewhere to be and I leave them at my sides. "I'm asking if you'll let me buy you a plate of something that isn't Ruby's and sit across a table from you somewhere that isn't this club, and be two people from Sierra Vista for one hour before we go back to being whatever we are."
