Page 39 of Property of the Bikers

I know better than to trust silence. I spent two years living with a man who weaponized silence, who used the quiet between moves to make you believe the moves had stopped, and I understand in the part of my brain that processes things without sentimentality that Viktor’s silence is not surrender. But the other part of my brain, the part that has been running at full capacity for almost two weeks without a break and is tired in a way that goes all the way down to the bone, wants to let the silence be what it looks like.

Just silence.

Just a day of nothing.

I let myself walk slowly across the compound and look at the mountains and breathe the cold air without cataloging it for threat indicators, and I don’t examine what that means.

Doc’s appointment was good. That helps. He checked my blood pressure twice, the way he always does, and read the second number without the particular set of his jaw that he had the first time I came in. Down four points from Monday, he said. Not where he wants it, but moving in the right direction.

The baby’s heartbeat was one fifty-six, strong and steady, and she moved during the ultrasound with the vigorous restlessness of someone who has opinions about being looked at and isn’t keeping them to herself.

Doc told me to keep walking. I’m walking.

The compound in the afternoon light is a different place from the compound at night or in the gray flat mornings I’ve been waking up to all week.

The frost on the fence posts catches the sun and throws small bright points across the gravel. The workshop has both bay doors open, and the sound of metal on metal comes out in a steady rhythm, someone working with patience and precision.

Two men at the far end of the yard are splitting wood with the easy mechanical efficiency of people who have done it so many times that the action has become thoughtless, the axe rising and falling while they talk about something that makes one of them laugh.

Normal sounds from a working place on a Wednesday afternoon.

I walk the perimeter path that Doc approved, the one that runs inside the fence line from the main house to the workshop and back, and I count my steps the way he told me to, and I look at the mountains, and I let the quiet be quiet.

In the evening, Jax comes at seven.

He brings food from the kitchen, two plates, and sets them on the small table in my room without asking whether I want company, because the two plates answer that question. He sits down, and we eat, and he talks, or I talk, or we don’t talk, and that’s fine too, and the evening moves at the unhurried pace of two people who have stopped performing anything for each other.

He tells me about a truck he’s been working on in the workshop, a restoration project that has been running for two years because he keeps finding other things to do and coming back to it.

He describes it with the particular affection people have for things they’re genuinely interested in and not trying to impress anyone about, and I ask a question about the engine that surprises him, and he leans forward and answers it with more detail than he was planning to give, and then he looks at me with the expression he sometimes wears when I’ve done something that doesn’t fit the box he put me in.

I don’t tell him that I spent four months in Bratislava doing translation work for an automotive parts manufacturer and picked up more about engines than I ever intended to know.

Let him revise the box himself.

We eat, and we talk, and at some point the plates are empty, and neither of us moves to end the evening, and the compound runs its quiet Wednesday night outside the window, and for the first time since I got on the bus in Seattle, I sit in a room with another person and don’t track the exits while I’m doing it.

* * *

Thursday morning, I’m told I’m moving again.

Maya delivers the information over breakfast with the matter-of-fact efficiency she brings to everything. Closer to the clubhouse this time, she says. Better apartment, proper furniture, a sitting room with a south-facing window. Cade signed off on it last night.

I look at my room. The vitamins on the nightstand. The gray sweater on the chair. The boots by the door.

“Third time,” I say.

“He upgrades when the operational picture changes,” Maya says. “The claiming changed the picture.”

She says it without subtext, and I take it the same way, or I try to. I think about a man who walks the fence line himself when Ghost is available to do it, who signs housing upgrades at night after church, who looked at me across a bar two weeks ago and made a decision in the space between one breath and the next.

I start packing the vitamins into the bag.

The new apartment is twice the size of the old room. South-facing window that fills the sitting room with the low winter light of a Thursday afternoon, a proper bed with a headboard, a kitchen alcove with a kettle and a small refrigerator. It smells like fresh paint and wood and the particular clean cold of a room that has been properly aired out.

I stand in the middle of it, looking at the window.

Through the glass, the clubhouse is visible across the yard, the long timber-framed building with the covered porch, men moving in and out of it, the ordinary traffic of a working day. I can see the gate from here. I can see the north fence line and the road beyond it, empty and gray and still.