Page 25 of My Broken Biker

"Clint's been asking after you," Knox says. "Not in the way of keeping track. In the way of actually asking."

"I know," I say. "He's been inviting me in since I got out of the hospital."

"And?"

"I didn't know what I was going in as," I say. "What I was good for."

Knox is quiet for a moment. "You could ask him," he says.

I look at the kitchen window. Through it I can see the edge of the counter and the three plates in the rack. "Yeah," I say.

"He's up late," Knox says. "He always is."

We talk for a few more minutes about nothing specific and something significant, the way the two of us talk when we're actually talking, and when we hang up I stay in the yard for a minute with the phone in my hand.

Then I call Clint.

He picks up on the second ring, which means Knox was right about him being up.

We talk for twelve minutes. By the end of it I have a formal role, a real one, not the piecework I've been doing from a kitchen table but a proper coordination position alongside Cain that uses what I'm actually good at and doesn't ask anything of me that the leg can't give, and Clint says it the way Clint says things, which is plainly and finally and without making me feel like a charity case, which I was prepared for and which doesn't happen.

I go back inside.

Harper is at the kitchen table with her hands around a mug and she looks up when I come in.

"Knox," I say, sitting down across from her. "And then Clint."

She's still. Waiting.

"Clint's the president of Vigil," I say. "He's been trying to get me back in the clubhouse since I got out of the hospital. I've been turning it down." I look at the table. "Tonight I called him and told him I was ready. He offered me a formal position doing what I've been doing contracted, intelligence coordination, but properly, as a full member. I said yes."

She looks at me for a long moment.

"How does it feel?" she says.

"Strange," I say. "Like a door that's been stuck."

She nods slowly and looks at her mug, and then she looks up at me and says, simply and without particular emphasis: "Did they say they don't need you, or did you decide that for them?"

The question sits between us.

I look at her.

She's not doing anything with her face. Not waiting for a specific response.

She asked a real question the way she always asks real questions, directly and without padding, and she's just looking at me with those hazel eyes that show whatever they show.

"I decided," I say.

"Okay," she says.

"Two years," I say. "I decided it two years ago and I sat in it."

"I know," she says. "You told me this morning."

"I know I told you," I say. "I'm saying it again because it's different hearing you say it back."

She's quiet for a moment. Then: "You're allowed to have been wrong about it."