Page 72 of Rune’s Solace

“There’s my girl.”

She patted my cheek once, brisk and firm, like that was about as much emotion as she was willing to tolerate from herself at one time, then kept walking before I could answer.

Everybody kept calling me their girl that day. I kept letting them. I felt like somebody’s girl for once and not somebody’s problem.

I had that.

And then it got dark, and Rune came down the path with his face wrong, and I lost it all in about four sentences.

* * *

I knew before he opened his mouth. I always know. I read faces the way other people read weather, it’s the first thing I ever learned to do, back when reading a face right was the difference between a bad night and a worse one, and I took one look at him coming through the pines and every good thing I’d been carrying all day went cold and heavy in my chest.

“What happened,” I said. Not hello. We were past hello.

“Sit down with me.”

“I don’t want to sit down. Tell me what happened.”

He didn’t argue, and that was how I knew it was bad. Rune didn’t tell me I was getting ahead of myself or ask me to calm down or give me one of those careful little lies people use when they’ve already decided you’re not strong enough for the truth. He stood in the doorway of his cabin, looked straight at me, and gave it to me.

“There’s a man,” he said. “He’s been watching you. Not just the once, in the garage. For weeks. At the school. On the street. He’s the reason your car quit, Amy, it wasn’t the radiator going, somebody put a hole in it. It was him.” He watched my face while he said it, not flinching from any of it. “He’s dangerous. He’s done time, hard time, and he’s fixed on you, the club’s known enough to be worried for a while now and today we learned enough to be more than worried.”

The garage.

The face in the garage.

I put my hand out and found the doorframe, because the floor did the thing it does. All those weeks. All those weeks of the feeling on the back of my neck, the shadow at the edge of the parking lot, the man standing too still. All those weeks of me talking myself down, it’s nothing, it’s the damage, it’s just the thing he left in you that goes off at shadows, all that careful work I did convincing myself my own alarm was broken.

It wasn’t broken. It was right. It was right and I called it a liar every single day.

“It’s him,” I said. It wasn’t a question. My voice came out flat and far away. “The man. It’s my father.”

Rune went still.

“I knew in the garage,” I said, and my voice sounded far away even to me. “I saw him and I knew, and then I spent weeks telling myself I didn’t because I’ve seen him in a hundred men who weren’t him. A shoulder. A walk. Somebody standing at the wrong angle. I’ve been wrong so many times I thought I had to be wrong again.” I swallowed, but my throat wouldn’t open all the way. “Guess eventually you get lucky.”

“Amy.”

“It was always going to be him.” I heard the little laugh come out of me and hated the sound of it. “That’s the joke, isn’t it? You don’t get away from somebody like that. You just get a couple years where he lets you think you did.”

Rune didn’t tell me that wasn’t true. He didn’t tell me my father couldn’t hurt me or that everything was going to be fine, and God help me, I loved him for that, because Rune has never once made a terrible thing smaller just so he could feel better standing next to it.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s him.”

“How long have you known?”

“Some of it a while. All of it, today.” That closing thing passed behind his eyes again, quick, the thing I’ve never been able to read. “There’s pieces the club’s still running down. But it’s him. You’re not imagining one bit of it, and you never were.”

He took a breath, and I pulled everything in tight, because I could see there was more and I could see it was the part he’d come down here to say.

“Here’s the hard part, and I’m not going to pretty it up for you.” His voice stayed even. “You’re safe on this property. He can’t get to you here, not with what we’ve put up. But you can’t leave it. No more school. No more crossing the river. Not till this is finished. You don’t go past that gate, you’re not in a room without one of us, and at night you’re here, with me.”

And just like that, he took my life out of my hands.

I know that isn’t fair. Rune didn’t do it. My father did. Rune was only the man standing in front of me saying the words, but all I could see was my eight o’clock biology class and Sawyer shoving half a muffin at me because I’d forgotten breakfast, my car on the bridge with the radio down and those ten minutes when the water went pink-gold and nobody on earth knew where I’d come from. I saw the nursing program I’d barely gotten my foot inside, the girl I was trying so hard to become, the one in scrubs with steady hands who walked into somebody else’s worst day and knew what to do.

All of it stopped because Cal Rickard had walked out of prison and remembered he had a daughter.