His Chubby Obsession

Chapter Seven: The Clubhouse

"You can't stay hidden in a house in the woods forever," Enzo said the next morning, watching me fold Charlotte's clothes into the duffel bag with hands that hadn't quite stopped shaking since I'd read that headline. "One person, alone, isolated — that's easy to find. Easy to corner. Numbers are safer."

"Numbers," I repeated.

"The club." He said it like it should have been obvious. "Nobody gets near you or her without twenty guys knowing about it first."

I thought about the photo of my own wedding day staring back at me from a stranger's phone screen, about Bruce's private investigators already fanning out into the world with my face in their hands, and I decided I didn't have the luxury of flinching away from motorcycle clubs anymore.

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

Charlotte, for her part, was delighted. She'd been asking about the "big man with three motorcycles" since the morning he'd brought pancakes, and when I told her we were going to see where he lived, she clutched Mr. Hoppy to her chest and bounced the entire ride there, sandwiched safely between me and the door in the back of Sofia's truck.

—

The clubhouse wasn't what I expected.

I don't know exactly what I'd pictured — something dark and windowless, maybe, thick with cigarette smoke and menace. Instead it was a converted warehouse with strings of lights across the ceiling, a long bar scarred with decades of initials carved into the wood, a pool table where two men in leather vests were arguing good-naturedly about a shot. Somewhere in the back, someone was cooking something that smelled like garlic and onions and made my stomach growl despite everything.

It smelled like a home. That was the last thing I expected.

Heads turned when we walked in. Not hostile, exactly — more like the wary curiosity of a family noticing a stray had followed one of their own home. Enzo's hand found the small of my back, not possessive, just steady, like he was silently telling the room this one's mine to protect, and I understood, distantly, that this was probably the first time in years a man had touched me in a way that wasn't a prelude to something I'd have to manage or survive.

"This is Emma," Enzo said, to the room in general. "And her daughter, Charlotte. They're staying with us for a while."

A few nods. A few assessing looks, not unlike Sofia's had been that first night. A big man with a gray beard and knuckles like walnuts looked at Charlotte and, without a word, produced a butterscotch candy from his vest pocket and held it out to her.

Charlotte looked up at me, silently asking permission the way she'd learned to ask permission for absolutely everything in Bruce's house. My chest ached at the habit of it.

"Go ahead, baby," I said, and she took the candy with a shy thank-you, and the big man — I'd later learn his name was Tiny, a joke that made more sense the longer I knew him — grinned like she'd given him something precious instead of the other way around.

—

I was starting to breathe a little easier by the time Sofia steered me toward a battered couch near the bar, a plate of the garlic-onion something pressed into my hands before I could protest I wasn't hungry.

"Eat," she said. "You look like you're one bad day away from falling over."

"I've had a lot of bad days lately."

"Yeah." She sat across from me, studying my face in that unnervingly direct way she had. "Enzo vouched for you last night. Whole room. That's not nothing, where I come from."

"I don't understand why he's doing any of this."

"Because his mother needed exactly this once and didn't get it." Sofia's voice went flat, careful, the voice of someone who'd said this too many times to let it hurt anymore, or had trained herself to sound that way. "So don't waste it wondering why. Just be worth it."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I ate, and let Charlotte fall asleep with her head in my lap on the couch, sticky butterscotch fingers curled loosely around Mr. Hoppy, and for a few minutes — a genuinely rare, precious few minutes — I let myself believe we might actually be safe here.

That was when the television over the bar caught my eye.

Local news. Muted, captions scrolling. My own wedding photo, the same one from the article, filling half the screen.

The room didn't go quiet all at once. It was more like a wave — one man near the bar noticing first, elbowing the guy beside him, both of them looking up, then at me, then back at the screen, the way you'd look between a photograph and the person it belonged to, checking, confirming.

"Hey." A younger guy, a prospect maybe, someone I hadn't been introduced to yet, stood up so fast his chair scraped loud against the concrete floor. "Hey, isn't that — "

"Sit down," Sofia said, low and immediate, but it was already too late. Every eye in the clubhouse had followed the trajectory from the screen to me, and I felt it land on my skin like something physical, like being watched through a window I hadn't known was there.

Charlotte stirred against my leg, blinking awake, confused by the sudden shift in the room's energy the way children always seem to sense a storm before the adults will admit one's coming.

"Mommy?"

"It's okay, baby," I said, and it came out steadier than I felt, five years of practice at sounding calm when I wasn't paying off in this one useless, necessary way.

Enzo was already crossing the room, cutting between the pool table and the bar with the kind of purposeful stride that made the younger prospect sit back down without needing to be told twice. He didn't look at the television. He looked at me.

"Everybody heard wrong," he said, loud enough to carry, his eyes never leaving mine. "She's not on the news. She's a friend of the club. That's all anybody needs to know."

Nobody argued with him. A few of the older members went back to their pool game, deliberately, pointedly unbothered, the way you'd model calm for a spooked animal. But I saw it in their eyes anyway — the recognition that hadn't un-happened just because Enzo told them to look away.

I saw it, and I understood something with sudden, sick clarity: I hadn't found a hiding place at all.

I'd found a room full of people who now knew exactly what I was hiding from — and exactly how much it would cost them if they were wrong to help me.