Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 8

Raine read the text three more times before she put the truck in park, and none of the three readings changed what she decided to do about it, which was nothing. She wasn't driving four hours to sit in a gas station parking lot because Wren asked her nicely not to show up.

She called Cash first, mostly because not calling him felt like its own kind of decision she didn't want to make alone.

"I'm about a hundred yards out," she said, when he picked up. "Wren just texted me not to come tonight. Says she'll explain when she can. You know anything about that?"

A pause on his end, long enough that she could hear him moving, a door, gravel under boots. "No. First I'm hearing it." He didn't sound like he was performing confusion, which was its own kind of answer. "I'm not at the clubhouse right now, I'm at my place, but nothing seemed off when I left an hour ago. Wedding stuff, mostly. Denise yelling at somebody about centerpieces."

"That tracks."

"You want me to meet you there?"

"No." She was already easing her foot back onto the gas, the truck rolling forward at a crawl. "I didn't drive four hours to wait for backup."

"Didn't think you did." Something in his voice, not quite a smile, but close. "Call me after."

She hung up before he could turn it into anything softer than it needed to be, and pulled the truck the rest of the way into the lot, gravel popping under the tires, the chain link fence sliding past her window with its familiar patchwork of repairs, new sections of galvanized wire woven in next to rust spots that had been there since she was in middle school. She parked at the far edge, away from the bikes, out of habit more than strategy, the way you parked somewhere you didn't want your arrival announced by headlights sweeping across the windows.

She sat there a moment with the engine ticking as it cooled, both hands still on the wheel, giving herself permission to be nervous for exactly as long as it took to count to ten. Then she got out, duffel left behind on the seat, because whatever this visit turned out to be, she wasn't walking in carrying a bag like somebody who expected to be welcomed.

The porch light buzzed overhead, moths working it the way moths always had, and underneath the ordinary smell of cut grass and somebody's cigarette smoke drifting from around back, she caught the smell of the place itself, motor oil and old wood and the particular mustiness of a building that had been standing since before she was born. Her chest did something complicated at that, grief and comfort tangled too close together to pull apart cleanly.

The gravel crunched different under her boots than it did under tires, a sound she hadn't heard in six years and apparently hadn't forgotten either, muscle memory in the soles of her feet picking out the worn path toward the door without her needing to think about where it was. Somewhere behind the garage a dog barked twice and quit, probably one of the new rescues Duke was always taking in, another name she didn't know yet attached to a life that had kept moving on without her.

She was halfway across the lot when she heard the voices.

Raised, coming from the side door near the kitchen, the one that never quite latched right and let sound leak out into the yard whether anybody wanted it to or not. Denise's voice first, sharp in a register Raine recognized from a dozen childhood arguments she'd only ever caught the tail end of, the kind of sharp that came out when Denise thought nobody but family could hear her.

"...don't care how you dress it up, Wren, if she finds out what you actually did that year, it's not me she's going to be angry at."

Raine stopped walking.

"She's not going to find out." Wren's voice, lower than Raine had ever heard it, none of the brightness in it now, none of the performance. "Not if everybody just sticks to the story we've been telling for six years."

"Your father's not stupid. He's already started asking questions he never used to ask. Ever since that hospital bed, he's been talking about things he hasn't brought up in years."

"Then somebody needs to make sure he stops asking them." A beat, Wren's voice dropping even lower, so low Raine had to hold her breath to catch the rest of it. "I did what I did because it worked, Mom. She left. That was the whole point. I'm not about to let six years of it come apart because he's suddenly feeling sentimental on a heart monitor."

Raine's hand found the fence post beside her without her telling it to, cold metal under her palm, grounding her to a spot she suddenly didn't trust her own legs to hold without help. What year. What story. The questions piled up faster than she could sort them, each one sharper than the last, and underneath all of it a single, simpler thought kept surfacing, insistent, refusing to be buried under the others: there was a version of the last six years that she didn't know, one that apparently both Wren and Denise had been carefully managing long before tonight, long before Wren's careful little text asking her to stay away.

A truck door slammed somewhere out on the road behind her, too far to be anything, but close enough that the voices on the other side of the door went instantly, completely silent, the way voices do when the people making them have spent years getting good at hearing trouble coming.

The side door swung open.

Wren stood in the frame, porch light behind her, her hand still on the knob and her face doing something complicated in the half second before she registered who was standing in the yard, and whatever careful performance she'd had ready for anyone else in the world dropped away entirely, leaving something underneath it Raine had never once seen on her stepsister's face in eighteen years of knowing her.

It looked, more than anything else, like fear.

"Raine." Wren's voice cracked on the single syllable. "You weren't supposed to be here yet."