Off-Limits: Iron Wolves MC

Marie’s POV

I found out who my mother was marrying yesterday, at 6:47 p.m., over a plate of chicken parmesan she'd been keeping warm in the oven for two hours.

"Frank," she said. "Frank Harrison."

I remember my fork stopping halfway to my mouth. I remember thinking, stupidly, that's a nice name, before my brain caught up to the rest of the sentence — the one where she said Millhaven, and moving back, and I know it's a lot, honey, but I want you to be happy for me.

I was happy for her. I am happy for her. Let the record show that.

I was just not prepared for the part where the man who'd apparently been sliding a diamond onto my mother's finger for the last six months turned out to be a name I hadn't let myself think about in a decade.

"You okay over there?" my Mom asks now, glancing at me in the rearview mirror of the U-Haul like I'm a kid in a car seat instead of a twenty-six-year-old woman folded into the passenger side of a truck she insisted on driving herself, chemo-thin wrists and all.

"Peachy," I say.

"You've been quiet since we got to Ohio ."

"I'm always quiet in Ohio. It's a state that inspires quiet."

She laughs — that real laugh, the one that used to disappear lately and that I would trade almost anything to keep hearing — and reaches over to pat my knee without taking her eyes off the road. Her rings catch the light. Both of them. The thin gold band she never took off even after Dad died, and now this new one, sitting right next to it like they're old friends.

I look out the window instead. Welcome to Millhaven.

Population: my entire unresolved childhood.

Here is what I know about Frank Harrison, as of yesterday at 6:47 p.m.: he owns a garage. He's a widower. He's sweet, according to my mother, in the specific way men only get described as sweet by women who've already decided to marry them. And he has a son.

Here is what I know about Frank Harrison's son, as of ten years and change ago: everything. Absolutely everything. What he takes in his coffee. The exact rasp his voice got right before it finished dropping. The fact that he used to walk two blocks out of his way to cut through my street on the way to school for no reason either of us ever said out loud.

Here is what I know about Frank Harrison's son now: nothing. Just a name that used to mean safe and now sits in my chest like a stone I swallowed and never coughed back up.

Dean.

I hadn't said it in years. I'd gotten good at not saying it. And then my mother said Harrison over chicken parmesan and the whole thing came roaring back at once — the day right after the funeral, the two of us alone on those steps, and Dean, sixteen and hollow-eyed, staring at his hands and muttering: It's my fault. It's all my fault.

He didn't tell me what he meant. No matter how hard I screamed and cried and demanded. All he gave me that day was silence. So I let the silence become an answer, and I let the answer become a reason to hate him, because hating him was so much easier.

We left a week after the funeral. Different city, different school, a version of me that got very good at DJing other people's weddings and never having to slow dance in her own life. I built something. I liked what I built.

And now I'm sitting in a U-Haul watching a Welcome to Millhaven sign go by, because my mother fell in love with the one man on earth whose last name I never wanted to hear again, and because I never really left after she first got sick — she needed someone, and I was that someone, through every round of treatment and every relapse for the last ten years. Some habits, it turns out, follow you across state lines whether you want them to or not.

"You're doing the thing," Mom says.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you go somewhere else behind your eyes." She takes the exit, blinker ticking loud in the quiet truck. "Talk to me."

"I'm fine, Mom."

"Marie."

"I said I'm fine." It comes out sharper than I mean it to. She flinches, and I immediately hate myself a little. I soften my voice. "I promise. I'm just tired. It's a long drive."

She lets it go.

I haven't told her the real reason my stomach's been in knots since yesterday, and I'm not sure I ever will — because the real reason isn't really about her. It's about a version of me that used to exist in this town, and a boy who once looked me dead in the eye and told me my father's death was his fault, and never once tried to take it back.

"We're almost there," she says, and there's something so unguarded and hopeful in her voice that I swallow whatever I was thinking about.

She deserves this. Whatever I feel about it — she deserves this.

***

Frank Harrison's house is bigger than I remembered. White with black shutters, a wraparound porch, a garage around back that's clearly not for cars, based on the row of motorcycles gleaming under the carport lights like they're posing for a magazine. There's a dog barking somewhere I can't see. There's my mother, practically vibrating with nerves, checking her lipstick in the truck's side mirror for the fourth time.

"How do I look?" she asks.

"Like a woman who's about to make a man very lucky," I say, and mean it, and she squeezes my hand so hard it almost hurts.

"Thank you for doing this," she says. "I know it's — I know Millhaven isn't easy for you."

"It's a town, Mom. Towns aren't hard. People are hard."

She gives me a look like she knows exactly what I mean and isn't going to push it right now, which is its own kind of mercy, and then she's out of the truck, smoothing her dress, walking up a driveway toward a life I wasn't part of choosing.

I sit there a second longer than I need to.

Jesus, Marie. Snap out of it.

I get out of the truck.

The porch light throws everything gold and soft, and for one dumb second I let myself believe this could just be simple — a nice man, a happy mother, a fresh start in a town I used to love before I hated it.

Then the front door opens.

And it's not Frank.

It's him.

Taller than I remember. Broader. Black t-shirt, ink climbing one forearm, leather cuff on his wrist, boots.

Dark hair a little too long, like he forgot the last three haircuts existed. A jaw I used to know the exact angle of when he laughed, set now in something careful and unreadable.

For one second, my whole body forgets it's supposed to hate him.

Then it remembers. All at once.

Dean Harrison goes still in his father's doorway, and I watch his throat move like he's swallowing something down before it can get out.

"Hi, Ree-Ree," he says.

The same way he used to say it then.

Hi, Dean. I missed you so fucking much. I want to say. And continue with: How dare you say my name like that after everything.

Two sentences fighting for the same breath. Neither of them wins.

Instead, I nod and follow my Mom into the house.