That’s my girl.
The clock counted down to half-past three. I cleansed my thoughts of hot-tongued commandos and got out of the car, joining the other parents in the crowd outside the reception classroom.
I kept my head down, like always. Jeanette had told me to be friendlier with the other parents, but it wasn’t in me on the best of days, let alone on one I’d had my remote chances of winning custody reiterated for the thousandth time. I poked at my phone instead, swiping through selfies of Ivy and Liliana. Ivy and Rubi. Ivy and Saint, which to my knowledge was the only photograph anyone had of him.
That was the power of my voracious baby girl. She made impossible things happen, and it wasn’t lost on me that it was her that kept me together in the face of the ninety-six percent failure rate of men trying to win custody of their daughters, not the 101 meetings I’d had with Jeanette. Or the three aborted mediation sessions that had ended in tears.
Mine, not Lauren’s.
The classroom door opened. I pocketed my phone as tiny children began to file out, each one directed at the parent waiting for them. Ivy was never first out. Sometimes she got snarled up with her shoes, and the laces Lauren had insisted she had instead of the Velcro that would make her life easier. We had our whole adult lives to struggle. Why start now?
The flow of kids thinned out. With no sign of Ivy, I ventured closer to the door and caught the eye of her teacher. “Is she stuck with her shoes again?”
Frowning, the teacher glanced over her shoulder, then shook her head. “Ivy’s not here. Her mum picked her up early for a dentist appointment.”
“What?”
“I’m sure it was the dentist. Give me a moment and I’ll check for you.”
My joints turned to stone. That choppy rhythm returned to my heart. But there was no thrill in it this time. No heat. Only cold dread as I stood, rooted in place, while the teacher dealt with the last few kids, then disappeared to find an answer that wouldn’t alter the fact that Ivy wasn’t here.
That after a week apart, the first weekend I had her this month was already in tatters at my feet.
The teacher came back and passed me a form, filled in and signed by a hand that made my stomach churn. “Yes, it was definitely the dentist. You’re not the first parent to forget these things. It happens all the time.”
I nodded and passed the form back. “Thanks for checking.”
There wasn’t anything else to say. Phone pressed to my ear, I trudged back to my car. Fury roiled inside me, but it was buried beneath a snake pit of other emotions. Fear. Sadness. Defeat. I knew how this went. An hour of unanswered calls, then a text message telling me Ivy wanted to stay with her mum.
Rinse and repeat all weekend long.
I slid behind the wheel of the family-friendly SUV, longing for my bike. I wasn’t a pistonhead like the rest of my brothers, but I needed the numbness of the loud engine. The clarity of the open road. Instead, the big car swallowed me whole, and I had nowhere to go except back to the compound to tell Liliana and Mateo that Ivy wasn’t coming to their party.
And to scrounge a shift behind the bar. Anything to distract me from the gaping void in my life.
I started the car, one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearstick, but my vision blurred as I stared out of the windshield. Not tears. I was too dazed for that, but something else I couldn’t name. Like I was on the roof of the car, my gaze piercing the metal and my flesh and bones to see the carnage on the inside.
Disassociation. Me and Embry talked about it sometimes. From his point of view, not mine. I was a soldier. A veteran. I’d seen a whole world of things that should’ve kept me up at night. But the only PTSD I had was from this. From life. And I was sick of it.
I drove home. Stopped the car outside the O’Brian family home that Cam had rented to me for peanuts. With Ivy’s help, and Cam, Orla, and River’s blessing, I’d been working on the front garden since last autumn. Pulling up dead shrubs and replacing them with new ones. Planting bulbs for the spring. The beds were full of hot pink tulips that Ivy called Rubi’s Bloomers and some lilac flowers I’d forgotten the name of.
The pink flowers usually made me smile. Today I wanted to drive my car over them.
I settled for driving away, putting off facing my empty house for a little longer, despite the fact I needed a shower after a late finish to the haulage run I’d just come off and the subsequent mad dash to Jeanette’s office.
The MC compound was twenty minutes away at this time of day. I pulled through the gates as a convoy of bikes were on the move. River, Locke, and Saint. They roared past me. With their visors down, I couldn’t see their eyes, but they saw mine, and Saint slowed, tilting his head at me.
I ignored him and drove on by. He was my closest brother, but I didn’t feel like a silent interrogation. Or facing his reaction to Lauren’s latest nastiness. Some people thought Saint was hard to read, but I saw his emotions all the time, and his feelings towards my ex-wife scared me.
Some days, anyway.
Today . . . ? Hell, I was trying not to feel anything at all. Except exhaustion, so I could sleep the weekend away.
I parked my car and slipped into the bunkhouse at the back of the compound, avoiding everyone and anyone until I’d sent a godawful text to Mateo. He’d already be home from the school run. Because his kid had been where she should’ve been. And now she was waiting at home for a play date that wasn’t going to happen.
Pussy that I was, I evaded putting it into words for the six minutes it took me to shower and change my clothes from the stash I kept in the building where brothers could crash if they needed a bed for the night. Locke, Ranger, and Folk had stayed here when they’d first arrived. Ranger had since moved on and Locke lived above the bar now, in Mateo’s old room.
Folk? I had no idea, and thinking about him was a mountain I couldn’t climb right now. I rummaged through the bag in my locker. Found jeans and underwear, but no shirts.
Dammit. A frustrated growl breached the vice I kept on my emotions. I pressed my forehead against the cool metal of the locker door and willed the frayed, frantic feeling to go away. The pit of despair that gnawed at me. I had responsibilities. Lots of them. I didn’t have time to fall apart.
Drawing a deep breath, I forced my eyes open. The deserted bunkhouse was still there, but something felt different, and goosebumps tingled on my skin.
Someone’s in here.
I spun around, expecting one of the prospects who cleaned up around the compound, but I was still alone. The door was still shut. The only thing different was the clean T-shirt folded on the bench behind me.
It wasn’t mine, though it was worn enough, the cotton soft and faded to the colour of stonewashed denim. It smelled of fresh air. Of the sea and something else that stirred my belly, a deeper memory I couldn’t quite reach.
I tugged the T-shirt on. It clung too tight at my shoulders, but I didn’t care. I shut my locker and walked away.
Outside, the late afternoon sun was warm against my face. Bright and happy, like Ivy.
I skulked away from it and stomped inside. It was too early for beer, but I went to the bar anyway, too caught up to notice the music filtering from the speakers until I walked into Rubi’s feet.
He was doing yoga and listening to ABBA.
Of course he was.
He sent me an upside-down smile between his newly flexible legs, then straightened up. “Deeky-pie. How goes it?”