Chapter Eight — The Photograph
1522 Words
Kael finds me that evening.
Not at the diner. Not at Margaret's. He finds me at the creek.
I discovered it by accident after my shift, following the sound of water down a narrow path behind the hardware store that nobody mentioned but everybody probably knows about. The creek is wider than I expected, slow moving and quiet, with flat stones along the bank and trees on both sides that lean toward each other overhead like they are sharing a secret.
I am sitting on one of the flat stones with my shoes off and my feet not quite touching the cold water when I hear footsteps on the path behind me.
I know it is him before I turn around.
I am starting to recognise the particular quality of stillness that arrives with him. The way the air changes. I do not fully understand it and I am not sure I want to.
He sits down on a stone a few feet away without asking if he can and without apologising for finding me here. He just sits, forearms resting on his knees, looking at the water.
We are quiet for a while.
It is not uncomfortable. That is the strange thing. It should be uncomfortable, sitting in silence with a man I have known for three days who has been keeping secrets about my life since before we met. But the creek makes its quiet sound and the trees hold their lean and the silence between us is just silence.
"Nadia came to see me," I say eventually.
"I know."
"She said my mother left the city because someone made it dangerous for her to stay."
He nods slowly.
"Are you going to tell me who?" I ask.
He is quiet for a moment. Then he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and he takes out something and holds it toward me.
A photograph.
Old. The edges soft with age, the colours faded to that particular warmth that photographs from a certain era always have. I take it carefully.
Two people standing outside a building I do not recognise. A man and a woman. The man is tall with dark hair and a serious face and a leather jacket. The woman beside him is laughing at something outside the frame, her head slightly turned, one hand raised like she is mid conversation.
I know that hand.
I know the way that laugh sits in a face even though I cannot see it fully. I know the angle of that shoulder and the particular way that hair falls and the small silver ring on the chain around her neck that catches the light.
My mother.
Young. Younger than I have ever seen her, maybe mid twenties, laughing like a woman who does not yet know what is coming.
My throat tightens.
"Where did you get this?" I ask. My voice comes out quieter than I intend.
"My father had it," Kael says. "He kept it with the things that mattered to him."
I look up at him. "Your father knew my mother?"
"They grew up in the same town," he says. "A place called Harrow. About two hundred miles east of here. Small town. Not unlike this one." He pauses. "They were friends. Good friends, for a long time."
I look back at the photograph. At my mother's laugh. At the easy way she stands beside this man, comfortable and unguarded in the way you only are with people you have known long enough to stop performing for.
"Who is he?" I ask. "The man beside her."
Kael is quiet for just a moment.
"His name was Daniel Reeves," he says. "He ran a crew out of Harrow. Not a motorcycle club then. Just a group of men who had grown up together and looked out for each other and somewhere along the way started looking out for the town too."
"Was he a good man?"
Kael looks at the water.
"He tried to be," he says. "In the way that men in that kind of life try to be. Which is not always enough but it is not nothing either."
I turn the photograph over in my hands.
On the back, in faded ink, someone has written two words and a year.
Elaine and Danny. 1996.
"They were close," I say.
"Yes."
"How close?"
Kael looks at me steadily. "Close enough that when things went wrong, Danny was the one she called. And when she needed to disappear, he was the one who helped her do it."
I look at him.
"What went wrong?" I ask.
He takes a slow breath.
"Your mother was involved with someone before she came to the city," he says carefully. "Someone who had money and power and the kind of connections that make people very dangerous when they feel like they have been wronged."
"Involved how?"
"Engaged," he says. "Briefly."
I stare at him.
"My mother was engaged to someone before she left?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
He looks at me for a long moment. The creek moves quietly between its banks and somewhere above us a bird calls once and goes silent.
"A man named Victor Hale," he says. "He ran most of the land and money in that part of the state. Old family. Old power. The kind that does not like to be refused."
"She refused him?"
"She left him," Kael says. "Without warning. Without explanation. She took the ring, which had been in her family long before Victor Hale came into the picture, and she disappeared." He pauses. "Victor Hale has been looking for her since 1997."
The number lands on me like something physical.
I was born in 1999.
"He never found her?" I ask.
"No," Kael says. "Danny made sure of that. He moved her, changed her paper trail, helped her build a life in the city under a version of her name that was hard to trace." A pause. "It worked for a long time."
"Until now," I say quietly.
He looks at me.
"Until now," he confirms.
I look down at the photograph again. My mother laughing. Young and unafraid in the way she never quite managed to be by the time I knew her. Always slightly watchful. Always slightly braced for something.
I understand now what she was bracing for.
"Danny," I say. "Your father. He helped her."
"Yes."
"Where is he now?"
Kael looks back at the water.
The silence that follows is a particular kind of silence. Heavy and shaped. The kind that has a specific thing inside it that has not been said yet.
"He died," Kael says. "Twelve years ago."
"How?"
He is quiet for a long moment.
"Protecting someone he made a promise to protect," he says.
I look at him.
And I understand without him saying it directly. I understand in the way you understand things that hit too close and too hard to be mistaken.
His father died protecting my family.
The creek moves on below us, indifferent and soft, and I sit with that knowledge and feel the weight of it settle into my bones.
"Kael," I say quietly.
He looks at me.
"I am sorry," I say. "About your father."
Something moves across his face. Brief and unguarded and gone before it fully forms. But I see it.
"He made his choice," he says. "He did not regret it."
"That does not make it easier."
"No," he says quietly. "It does not."
We sit by the creek as the last of the light goes out of the sky and the water turns dark and the trees stop being shapes and become just sounds around us.
After a long time I hold the photograph back toward him.
He shakes his head.
"Keep it," he says. "It belongs with you more than it belongs with me."
I look down at my mother's laugh one more time.
Then I fold it carefully and put it in my pocket, close to the ring, close to the things that matter.
"Victor Hale," I say. "Those men in the diner. Marsh and the others."
"His people," Kael says.
"They were checking if I was her daughter."
"Yes."
"And are they going to come back?"
He looks at me and his eyes are steady and certain and completely without comfort in the way that only honest eyes can be.
"Yes," he says.
I nod slowly.
I put my shoes back on. I stand up and brush the creek bank from my clothes and I look at this man who has been carrying a promise his dead father made and has not yet told me everything but has told me enough for tonight.
"Then I suppose," I say, "that we should figure out what to do about that."
Kael looks up at me from where he sits.
And for the first time since I walked into his bar, something that is not quite caution and not quite calculation moves across his face.
Something that looks almost like relief.
Almost like he has been waiting a very long time for someone to say exactly that.
- Writer
