Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 10

"How long."

Duke's voice came out low, rough at the edges, aimed at Wren but somehow filling the whole yard anyway, the way his voice had always managed to do even when he wasn't trying.

Wren didn't answer right away. Denise moved toward him instead, hands out like she was approaching something that might bolt. "Duke, come inside, you're not supposed to be standing out here, the doctor said-"

"I heard my daughter say she got lied about for six years and you're worried about the night air." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. Thirty years of running a room full of men twice his size had taught him exactly how much volume a sentence needed to land, and this one needed almost none. "How long, Wren."

"Since I was sixteen." Wren's chin came up, not defiant exactly, more like someone bracing for a hit they'd decided they deserved. "I told you. I told Raine. I don't know what else you want me to say."

"I want you to tell me why nobody thought I deserved to know this before tonight." He looked at Denise when he said it, not Wren, and something passed between them that Raine couldn't fully read, old and complicated and clearly not new territory. "Six years, Denise. You're telling me you didn't know."

"I didn't know the details." Denise's voice had lost its smoothness entirely now, gone thin and defensive. "I knew Wren felt guilty about something from that year. I didn't press her on specifics. I thought it was easier for everyone if the past stayed in the past."

"Easier for who."

Nobody answered that. The porch light buzzed on, indifferent, moths still working it, and somewhere out past the garage the idling bike engine finally pulled away down Mill Road, the sound fading into the ordinary dark like the whole conversation hadn't just cracked something open that had been sealed shut for six years.

Raine watched her father's hand tighten on the door frame, knuckles going pale, and she thought about the hospital bed Cash had described, the gray color he'd gone, the two nights at Baptist, and some old instinct in her, one she hadn't used in years but apparently hadn't lost either, kicked in before she could stop it.

"You need to sit down," she said.

"I need to understand what happened to my daughter."

"You need both. They're not mutually exclusive." She crossed the last few feet of yard between them, close enough now to see how tired he actually looked under the porch light, the kind of tired that didn't come from one bad night. "Dad. Sit down. We can talk. Just not out here, not standing up, not with your heart doing whatever it's been doing."

Something in his face softened at that, just slightly, the fight going out of his shoulders by a degree or two. "You're worried about me."

"Don't sound so surprised."

"Six years of silence, and the first thing you do when you get here is tell me to sit down." A ghost of something that might have been a laugh, rough and short. "That's about the most thing you could've done."

Denise stepped forward again, visibly relieved to have a task, something to manage. "I'll get the kitchen table cleared off, we can-"

"Not in there." Duke's eyes stayed on Raine. "Not with everybody listening through the walls. Garage."

Wren made a small sound, something between protest and surrender, but Duke was already moving, slow and careful, one hand trailing the porch rail for balance, and Raine fell into step beside him without deciding to, the way you fall into step with someone you've walked beside a thousand times before words were even necessary. Behind them, she heard Denise say something low to Wren, and Wren's answer, sharper, before the kitchen door clicked shut and cut the rest of it off, whatever was still unresolved between mother and daughter apparently not meant for Raine's ears tonight.

They crossed the gravel in silence, Duke's steps slower than she remembered, more deliberate, a man counting his own balance the way he used to count revs on an engine that wasn't idling right.

The garage smelled exactly the way she remembered it, motor oil and metal shavings and the particular staleness of a space that didn't get enough fresh air, and under the bare bulb hanging from its cord, the old workbench sat exactly where it had always sat, tools hung on their outlines on the pegboard the way he'd taught her to keep them, a habit she'd carried into every shop she'd ever worked in since. A half finished project sat under a tarp in the corner, something low and long, and she wondered briefly what he'd been working on before his heart decided to interrupt him, before deciding she didn't actually want to know yet, not with everything else sitting unresolved between them.

Duke lowered himself onto the stool by the bench, slow, careful, a man managing his own body like a piece of equipment he no longer fully trusted. Raine stayed standing, arms crossed, putting just enough distance between them that she could still leave if she needed to, old habits dying slower than she wanted them to.

"I told you on the phone there were things I never told you straight." He wasn't looking at her now, looking instead at his own hands, scarred and spotted with age in a way she wasn't ready for, hands that had once lifted her onto the back of a bike before she was old enough to hold on by herself. "What you just heard from Wren, that's only half of it. The smaller half, if I'm honest."

"What's the other half."

He was quiet long enough that she heard her own pulse in her ears, loud in the stillness of the garage, and when he finally looked up at her, something in his expression had gone past guilty, past ashamed, into territory she didn't have a name for yet.

"The other half is mine," he said. "And it's going to be harder for you to forgive than anything Wren just told you."