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He was quiet long enough that I thought the call had dropped.

“Do it,” he said.

“That easy?”

“No. We settle the terms in church on Saturday. Until then, get your kit moving and answer your fucking phone.”

He ended the call.

That afternoon, I called Handful. He picked up on the first ring. “Dutch said you’d be calling. Tell me what you need.”

I told him—both towers, the drives, three monitors and the bench gear.

“Right,” he said, and I heard him writing.

He didn’t ask about Wren. Not whether I’d seen her, what she’d said or whether I’d seen the baby. He had to have a hundred questions, and Austen would have a hundred more about her friend. He didn’t ask one. He took the list and got on with it. I didn’t know how to thank him for that, so I didn’t try.

“The wall,” he said just as I was about to hang up.

“Trash it.”

“Glitch—”

“There’s nothing on it I need. It’s a map of everywhere she wasn’t. It did its job.”

He was quiet. “There’s the photo,” he said.

Wren on a beach, laughing at me for taking it, one hand raised against the camera. I’d pinned it there in the first week. For three hundred and sixty-five days, searches ran on the screens beneath it and I looked up at her. Where are you, Wren? I remembered the sand on her legs, her laugh when I caught her around the waist and the way she’d leaned back against me when I put my mouth to her ear. Good girl. Back when those words still belonged to us.

“Send the photo,” I said. “Trash the rest.”

I called him back an hour later. “There’s one more thing and I need you to hear all of it before you answer.”

“Go on.”

“Her things. They’re still in our room. Nobody’s touched them since she left. I need them sent here, but I can’t pack them, and I’m not having you, Colt or any other man in that clubhouse go through her drawers. She’d hate that, and she’s already got enough reasons to hate me.”

“You want Austen?”

“I want to ask Austen. Wren is her friend. But it’s your call.”

Handful took a while over that one. “She’ll say yes before I finish asking.”

“Tell her to pack it the way Wren would want. If Austen finds anything private, she decides what happens to it. She doesn’t need to ask me.”

“Where’s it going?”

I knew Robin’s address and I knew Wren was living there. Neither fact was permission. I couldn’t send fourteen boxes to her brother’s house and call it a gesture.

“Here,” I said. “With my gear.”

The boxes would come to the cottage. They would stay closed until Wren told me what she wanted done with them.

❧

Church was Saturday morning. I took the call at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee.

They’d put the tablet at the head of the table so I was looking down its length as if I’d been there. First remote church in Venom history. Dutch in the middle. Colt, Holden and Handful down the sides. String at the end. Brothers standing behind them because there wasn’t room.