Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 4

The phone rang while Raine had both hands inside a bilge pump housing, and she almost let it go to voicemail out of pure reflex, the way she let most calls go to voicemail these days. Then she caught the name on the screen through a smear of grease on the glass and her whole body went still in a way that had nothing to do with the pump.

Wren Voss.

Six years and the name still did something specific to her, a kind of full-body flinch dressed up as stillness, the sort of reaction Raine had spent a long time training herself out of and apparently hadn't trained out of herself at all. She thought about not answering. She thought about letting it ring through to voicemail and dealing with whatever came next on her own terms, later, with a beer in her hand and nobody watching her face. But not knowing would have been its own kind of torture, a different flavor of the same thing, and she'd never been good at choosing the version of pain that came with less information.

She wiped one hand on her thigh, left the other buried in the housing, and let it ring a fourth time before she answered, because answering too fast would have meant something she wasn't ready to give away.

"Hello."

"Oh my God, you actually picked up." Wren's voice came through bright and easy, exactly the way Raine remembered it, the particular register that made rooms full of people lean toward her without knowing why. "I told Dad you probably wouldn't. I owe him five bucks now, so, thanks for that."

"How'd you get this number."

"Your dad had it. From Cash, I guess. Everybody's got everybody's number back here, you know how it is." A small pause, deliberately shaped, the kind of pause Wren had always been good at. "It's a small club, Raine. News travels."

Raine pulled her hand out of the housing and set the wrench down, because whatever this call actually was, it wasn't going to happen with her hands full.

"What do you want."

"I'm getting married. In October. I wanted to invite you myself instead of letting Dad do it, because I figured coming from him it'd feel like an obligation, and I didn't want it to feel like that." Wren let that sit there, warm and reasonable, exactly the kind of thing a person said when they'd rehearsed it in the mirror first. "I'd really love for you to be there."

"You could've texted."

"I wanted to hear your voice." A beat. "It's been a long time."

"Six years."

"I know how long it's been." Something flickered under the brightness for just a second, there and gone, and Raine couldn't tell if it was real or just another thing Wren knew how to produce on command. "I know you don't think much of me. I get it. I was sixteen and stupid and I wanted people to like me, and I went about it in ways I'm not proud of. I'm not asking you to forget that. I'm asking you to come watch me get married anyway, because whatever happened between us, you're still my sister, and Dad still walks around that clubhouse missing you like a limb, even if he's too stubborn to ever say it to your face."

Raine looked out through the bay door at the yard, at the shrimp boat working its way toward the dock, at the ordinary Tuesday going on around her like nothing in it had just cracked open a little.

"Cash came down here," she said, because she wanted to see what Wren would do with it.

"I heard." No hesitation at all, which told Raine everything she needed to know about how small that club really was, how little in it had ever actually belonged to her alone. "Everybody heard. He didn't exactly keep it quiet, driving four hours out of his way for a water pump job any shop in Beaufort could've handled."

"It wasn't like that."

"I didn't say it was like anything." Wren's voice went soft in a way that felt almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if she'd been cruel about it. "I just think it's funny, is all. Six years, and the second he finds you, he can't stay away. Makes you wonder what the rest of us were even fighting so hard to keep him around for."

Raine didn't answer that. There wasn't a version of answering it that wouldn't have handed Wren exactly what she'd called to get, whatever that was, sympathy or ammunition or just the satisfaction of knowing she could still get a rise out of her. That had always been Wren's real talent, not the lying exactly, but the way she could hand you a compliment and an insult in the same sentence and leave you unsure which one you were supposed to react to, so you ended up not reacting to either, which was its own kind of win for her.

"Anyway." Wren's tone shifted, brisk now, business concluded. "The invitation's in the mail, the real one, paper and everything, so you'll have all the details. October eighteenth. I really do hope you'll come."

"I'll think about it."

"That's all I'm asking." A pause, and then, almost like an afterthought, almost like it hadn't been the actual reason for the call the whole time. "Oh, and Raine. Dad hasn't been sleeping great. His heart's been doing something the doctor doesn't love, some kind of rhythm thing, nothing anybody's panicking about yet, but I thought you'd rather hear it from me than find out some other way, down the road, when it's not so easy to fix."

The bay door light seemed to shift somehow, though nothing about the light had actually changed.

"What kind of rhythm thing."

"I don't know all the medical words for it. He's fine, Raine, don't do the thing where you spiral. I just thought you should know." Another small pause, and this one didn't feel rehearsed at all. "I've got to run, they're doing the cake tasting in twenty minutes and Mom will lose her mind if I'm late. Think about October. Please."

The line went dead before Raine could decide whether she wanted to ask anything else, and she stood there in the bay with the phone still pressed to her ear and the dial tone humming against her skin, the wrench sitting exactly where she'd left it, the shrimp boat pulling up to the dock outside like the whole ordinary world hadn't just tilted a few degrees without asking her permission first.