Especially when she couldn’t get pregnant, when her body wouldn’t do the one thing she thought could fix her miserable marriage.
Slowly, over the months and years, she helped dissolve my depression. So I was painfully aware of it when she started to show signs of it herself. I poured myself into trying to boost her up, trying to give her even a hint of the soft and sweet she’d selflessly offered me for years.
Then I got the letter.
As it would turn out, the last letter.
Her husband was divorcing her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her fucking parents were on his side about it.
The letter I’d sent back had been four pages, front and back, full of everything I could think to tell her at that low point in her life.
I sent it.
Then I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
But nothing ever came.
I won’t lie. I’d been hurt. Probably more than was healthy seeing as she’d been writing to me out of the goodness of her heart, not because we had any actual connection.
It was always going to end.
I guess a part of me just hadn’t wanted to think that.
Fuck, if I were being completely honest, I’d even fantasized at times about getting out one day, tracking her down, and getting her out of that unhappy life of hers.
Was that insane? Almost certifiably.
But it was something I thought of more than was healthy, something a part of me genuinely wanted to happen.
Until, of course, she’d snatched that fantasy away from me.
Or so I’d thought at the time.
Eventually, you know, life went on. She stopped being a dominant thought in my head. Especially after I got out, and had to get my life back on track.
She was always there, though. She’d sneak in at quiet moments, like when I was falling asleep, or when someone was asking me about my time inside.
Over time, it was less and less frequent. I had a new life, after all. I had new brothers. I had a new family to get to know. I had actual women I could reach for.
Then there she was.
Telling me that she’d never chosen to cut off all communication with me, that she’d had no choice, that she’d been locked in her own kind of prison. Without someone to reach out to, like she’d been to me. And enduring a lot more torment than I’d ever been made to endure. With no end in sight.
I couldn’t imagine how much grit and determination and bravery it must have taken for her to finally get herself free.
No, technically, I didn’t owe her.
But at the same time, I absolutely did.
I was going to do whatever I could to make sure she never had to go through anything like that ever again.
The thing was, it wasn’t like I was just some Average Joe who could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
If I was, the woman would be in my place for as long as she wanted, guarded by me, and wanting for nothing as she healed and built a new life.
But I wasn’t.
I was a biker.
That meant that every decision I made outside of small personal choices had to be run by my president and signed off on.
So that was what I had to do.
Find Fallon and see what he would be okay with me doing.
He could be a hard guy to track down at times. He was all over the place. At his house, at the bar his woman owned, at meetings, with his parents, or doing work meet-ups. But given the time of day, I was placing my bets on him being at the diner that he owned with one of our other brothers, Malc.
Sure enough, his bike was in the lot. I pulled up next to it before making my way inside, getting a smile from one of the waitresses as she put a filter in the coffee pot.
“He in the office?” I asked.
She gave me a nod even as I heard a slam from the back.
“He in a mood?” I asked her, getting a smirk from her that confirmed I’d chosen a bad time to talk to him.
It was too late to turn back now, though.
I took a deep breath and moved into the office, finding Fallon walking from a filing cabinet toward his desk.
Seeing me, his shoulders fell, anticipating a problem.
“What is it? And if it is about Dezi and fucking Voss growling at each other again, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Nah, it’s not that. Well, it is always that. But this is different.”
“Okay,” he said, exhaling hard. “Shoot.”
“I’ve got a problem. There’s this woman—“
“Of fucking course there is,” he grumbled, shaking his head as he moved behind his desk. “You know, I kind of always thought my old man was being dramatic when he said ninety percent of the club’s problems came on the heels of a beautiful woman. Un-fucking-fortuantely, though, that seems to be a multiple-generation curse we got going on. Who’s the woman?”