Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 11

"Say it," Raine said. "Whatever it is. Don't make me stand here guessing."

Duke's hands were flat on his knees, fingers spread, the way a man sits when he's trying to keep his own body from shaking. The bare bulb overhead buzzed faintly, the same low hum it had always had, and somewhere outside a screen door banged shut, Denise or Wren moving through the house, giving them a wide and deliberate berth.

"I knew," he said. "Back when Wren was still spreading it. I found out about three months before you left."

The garage seemed to tilt a half inch under her feet, though nothing in it had actually moved.

"You knew."

"Marcus told me. He'd heard one of the younger guys repeating something that didn't sit right with him, and he came to me quiet, the way he does, because Marcus has never once in his life wanted to be the one holding bad news." Duke's jaw worked, like the words cost him something physical to produce. "I confronted her. Wren. Told her I knew what she'd been saying and that it needed to stop, that night, no more of it."

"And did it stop."

"For about a week." He laughed, short and humorless, nothing like a real laugh at all. "Then I made the mistake of telling Denise I'd confronted her, because I thought, stupidly, that she'd back me up. Instead she told me if I humiliated Wren in front of the whole club, made her stand up and admit what she'd done publicly, she'd take Wren and leave. Said I'd be choosing a public apology over keeping my own family together."

"I was your family too."

"I know that now." His voice cracked on it, the first real c***k she'd heard all night, worse somehow than anything that had come before it. "I didn't let myself think of it that way then. I told myself you were strong, that you'd weather it, that you didn't need me standing up in front of forty people making a scene on your behalf. I told myself a lot of things that year that let me keep doing the easy thing instead of the right one."

Raine's hands had curled into fists at some point without her noticing, nails biting half moons into her palms, and she made herself uncurl them, slow, deliberate, because hitting something wasn't going to change a single word he'd just said. She thought of all the nights she'd lain awake in Marsh Hollow running through every version of that year, trying to find the exact moment she'd stopped being wanted here, as if there had been some flaw in her she could locate and fix if she just looked hard enough. There hadn't been a flaw. There had only been a decision, made by people who were supposed to protect her, to let her carry a weight that was never actually hers.

"So you knew. The whole time I was getting frozen out, watching my friends go distant, watching the invitations stop, you knew exactly why, and you let me think it was just happening to me. You let me think there was something wrong with me."

"I let the lie keep running because stopping it meant a fight I wasn't brave enough to have." He looked up at her then, and whatever composure he'd been holding onto finally gave out completely, his eyes wet in the bare bulb's light, a sight she'd never once witnessed in eighteen years of calling him her father. "I've had six years to practice saying this in my head, Raine. It's never once sounded as bad out loud as I knew it actually was."

"You could have told me. Any point in six years. A phone call, a letter, anything."

"I know."

"Instead I left here thinking I just didn't belong anymore. Thinking it was something about me. I built an entire life around getting as far away from that feeling as I could, and the whole time, you knew it wasn't even true."

"I know, Raine." His voice had gone to almost nothing now, barely above the hum of the bulb overhead. "I've got no excuse that makes this smaller than it is. I'm not going to insult you by trying to find one."

The garage felt suddenly too small, the smell of oil and old metal pressing in closer than it had a minute ago, and Raine found herself breathing through her mouth, measured, the way you breathed when your body was deciding between several bad options and hadn't picked one yet. Somewhere above them a moth had gotten into the garage too, batting itself against the bare bulb in a rhythm that felt almost cruel in how ordinary it was, how little it cared what was being said underneath it.

"Did Cash know," she asked. "Any of it. Back then."

Duke hesitated, just a fraction of a second, but long enough that she caught it, filed it, another piece of a puzzle she was only now understanding had been missing half its pieces this whole time.

"Not the details. He knew something was wrong. He asked me about it once, actually, not long before you left, asked straight out if there was a reason everybody had started acting different around you." Duke's hands tightened on his knees again. "I told him no. Told him to leave it alone, that he was imagining things."

Raine felt something in her chest go very still and very cold at once.

"You lied to him too."

"I lied to everyone, Raine. That's what cowardice does when you let it run long enough. It doesn't stay contained to one conversation. It spreads."

She opened her mouth to say something, anything, and found she didn't have words ready for the size of what was sitting in the room with them now, six years of quiet reorganized into something she hadn't braced herself to carry.

The garage door creaked open behind her, hinges groaning against the night air, and she turned to find Cash standing in the gap, headlights from his truck still cutting white across the gravel behind him, his face telling her, before he said a single word, that whatever had brought him here this late wasn't good news either.