Page 16 of My Broken Biker

The mornings are harder than people who haven't had this kind of injury understand, and I'm not interested in explaining it, I just navigate it.

The leg needs a few minutes of weight and movement before it agrees to the day. I stand at the bedside and let that happen, the dull deep ache of it working through its stages, and I pull on the jeans from the floor and go down the hallway.

She's at the kitchen counter in her yellow dress from last night, her back to me, bare feet on the tile.

There are two mugs out and the coffee is already made and she hears me before I say anything, because she says, without turning around, "it's ready," and then turns and hands me one.

I take it.

She's got her hair down and loose from sleep, and there's a quality to her in this light that's quieter than any other version of her I've seen, and she's looking at me directly the way she always looks at things, without performing any particular expression, just waiting for what comes next.

She got the amount right without asking.

"Thank you," I say.

We sit at the kitchen table across from each other, the morning coming in hard through the east window with no particular gentleness about it.

"I need to tell you things," I say.

"Okay," she says. Just that. No performance of preparation.

"The leg first," I say. "It doesn't get better. That's not how this works. There are good days and bad ones, and the bad ones are bad enough that I'm not much company. There are mornings where I don't move from a chair for three or four hours because the pain outranks everything else I might want to be doing. There are things I can't do and won't be able to do and that's permanent." I stop. "I'm not looking for a response to that. I'm telling you what you'd be walking into."

She holds her mug in both hands. "Okay," she says, meaning the same thing as before, which is that she heard me and is still sitting at the table.

"The work I told you about," I say. "The intelligence work, tracking, finding things. That's part of it, but not all of it." I look at her. "I'm a member of a motorcycle club. Vigil MC. I've been in eleven years. The intelligence work is for the club primarily, some contracted through it."

She's still. Looking at me.

"I know what that sounds like," I say.

"Tell me what it actually is," she says. "Not what it sounds like."

"It's people I trust completely," I say. "It operates outside the law in significant ways. We have a code and the code holds, but the code isn't the same thing as the law. We protect Bloomfield and the people in our orbit and we use whatever we need to use to do that. Sometimes that means things that don't look good examined from the outside."

She sets her mug down and looks at the table for a moment. When she looks back up: "I grew up in a city with a club. Different kind, from what I understood of it. But I know what that world does to neighborhoods. I know what it does to people who get caught in the edges of it."

"It's different," I say.

"How?"

"The code is real and it holds and it has lines that don't move," I say. "We don't touch civilians. We don't run drugs through the town we're supposed to be protecting. We don't use people outside the club as leverage. There's a president named Clint who has held that line for over a decade and the club holds it with him." I pause. "I'm not asking you to take any of that on faith. I know what it sounds like and I know what you left behind and I know that my saying it's different doesn't make it proven. I'm asking you to know it exists and that I mean it, and that the rest is something you'd see in time."

She's quiet for a while. Long enough that I don't fill it.

"What does it cost?" she says, finally. "Not the moral side. Practically. What does belonging to it cost you and what would it cost being near you?"

"Time," I say. "The club comes before plans and before anything I've scheduled, when something needs handling. That's not negotiable and it doesn't happen on a schedule I can control. There's danger in it, though less for me now that I'm not riding. The kind of danger that has never directly come to the people close to me, but I won't pretend the potential isn't there, because it is." I stop. "And if Angela were in my life, she'd be in the club's orbit. Which means she's protected in ways most people's kids aren't, genuinely protected, but it also means she's in a world with edges. I need you to know that before you decide anything."

She looks at me steadily. She's thinking and not reacting, which is one of the things about her I've noticed since Thursday afternoon on the sidewalk.

She processes before she responds.

"Your brother," she says, after a moment. "Knox. You've started to say his name twice now and stopped both times."

I set my mug down.

"He's in the club," I say. "He was the one who brought me in, eleven years ago when New Mexico didn't work and I came back to Bloomfield. He was already established in Vigil and it made sense." I look at the table. "Two years ago we were running a supply route together. There was an ambush, three men positioned at a bend in the road. I took three bullets, one of which shattered my femur, and Knox was in the second vehicle and he was pinned down by the crossfire. He couldn't get to me for seven minutes."