My Biker Chose His First Love novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Dead on Arrival

Rhona's father shuts his door on her and her bank cards are cancelled. At 2 a.m. Pia tells her she is on the local radio: the club held a service.

I drove my old green Ford to my father's house with the memorial card on the dashboard.

It was eleven at night.

His porch light was on when I turned into the drive, and it went off when I got out of the truck.

I knocked anyway.

"Dad, it's me."

He opened the door about the width of his face and left the chain on.

He was in his undershirt, and he didn't look sorry.

"Go back to the motel, Rhona," he said. "They told me you'd be at the motel."

"Who told you?"

"A man called Wednesday."

"What man?"

"He said you wanted a clean break," my father said. "He said it would be easier if the family called it a death and let everybody grieve and be done."

I stared at him through the gap.

"Dad, I'm alive. I'm standing on your porch."

"I know that."

"You said yes to that?"

He rubbed his jaw and looked at the floor.

"The note's paid, Rhona," he said. "All three hundred thousand. The club sent word the debt was cleared, and they sent a little extra for the funeral."

"A little extra."

"It's done," he said. "You did what you were married for. Don't make it harder than it is."

My father had borrowed that money to keep his shop open, and I had married a stranger to pay it back.

I had never once asked him for anything in return.

"I didn't agree to be dead," I said.

"Then take it up with Rhett," my father said, and shut the door.

The porch light stayed off.

I stood there until I heard the deadbolt.

At the gas station on the highway my card was declined.

I tried it twice, then walked inside and tried the ATM by the ice machine.

The screen said the account had been closed by the primary holder.

I had never been the primary holder on anything.

The cashier looked up from her phone.

"Hey," she said. "Weren't you just on Facebook?"

"I get that a lot," I said, and left.

I had eleven dollars in my jacket and a quarter tank of gas.

I drove out past the county line and pulled into a gravel turnout above the river.

I turned the engine off and sat with my hands on the wheel.

Somewhere in the last hour I had stopped crying, and I couldn't have said when.

My phone buzzed against my leg.

Forty-one missed calls, and none of them from my husband.

I scrolled to one name.

Pia Dunn and I had shared a locker in the ninth grade, and she was the only person in the world I had ever called at two in the morning.

It was ten past two.

She picked up on the first ring.

"If you're a ghost, I'm hanging up," Pia said.

"Pia."

"I mean it. I have a baseball bat and I know where your body is."

I started laughing, and then I couldn't stop, and I put my forehead down on the steering wheel.

"Okay," Pia said, softer. "Okay, Nor. Where are you?"

"Above the river on Route 5. I don't have a place to go."

"You have one. I'm sending you the gate code. Don't stop for anything."

"Pia, what do you mean, ghost?"

There was a long pause on the line.

"You haven't seen it," she said. "Listen, I'm on my laptop right now."

"Seen what?"

"The county posted a notice an hour ago. Death certificate filed for Rhona Kincaid, age twenty-seven, cause listed as an accident on Highway 95."

I lifted my head.

"Filed when?"

"That's the part that scares me," Pia said. "The date on it is today. The time stamp is four in the afternoon."

Four o'clock was before the party.

It was before Rhett tapped the bottle on the microphone.

It was before he had said a word to me.

"Somebody had you dead by four," Pia said. "And then he stood up and told you in front of everyone."

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