I built a lookout room so I could watch my husband come home. On opening night, I found him screwing with another woman in it. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Opening Night
Dani finds her husband and the bartender in the lookout she built, tells ninety people, and the president only looks at the clock.
I cut the ribbon on the clubhouse I built in front of ninety people, and every one of them clapped.
The Sawtooth Sons had waited fourteen months for that door to open.
I had poured the slab myself, with my father's old crew and a rented mixer in January.
Boone had stood at my elbow in the cold and said, "Look at my wife, building a kingdom."
Tonight he stood at my elbow again, in a clean cut, and kissed my temple for the cameras.
"Go check the road," he said. "Hoyt wants us all here when he gives his speech."
He meant the lookout.
It was the room on the third floor, with one big window facing the highway and a steel door that took a key.
I had built it so I could watch his headlights come up out of the dark.
It was the only room in the whole building with a lock only I carried.
I took the back stairs two at a time, with the party loud under my feet.
Lacey was at the bar in her black tank top, pouring the first round of whiskey.
She had started three weeks ago, and she had been a gift.
She had hung my string lights with me at midnight and told me, "You should be so proud, Dani, I mean it."
She waved a bottle at me as I passed, grinning.
I waved back.
At the second landing I stopped to fix a crooked fire sign, because that is the kind of woman I am.
Then I climbed the last flight.
The lookout door was shut.
Behind it, someone laughed softly.
It was low and pleased, and it was a woman.
Then Boone's voice, close to the wood. "Lace. Quiet."
I stood there with my key in my hand.
My throat closed, and then it opened again, because I needed it to.
I slid the key in and pushed.
The lamp was on, the one I had picked out of a flea market in Boise.
A woman's bare back was in my chair, with blonde hair down it.
Under her, shirt open and belt undone, was my husband.
She screamed and snatched his cut off the floor to cover herself.
It was Lacey.
Her face was turned to me now, pink and furious, with her mouth still wet.
"Dani," Boone said, and his face went gray.
I walked past them to my window.
I had cut that glass myself, to the quarter inch, to see his headlights from a mile out.
Down below, the back lot was dark, and his bike sat parked by the rear door, where nobody would think to look.
He had come in the back, with her, through the rear door that was supposed to stay locked all night.
"Dani, please," Boone said, coming closer, one hand out. "Just let me explain."
"Explain what?" I said, still looking at the glass. "The belt?"
He stopped.
I turned around.
Lacey had the cut clutched to her chest, and she was already crying.
"He said you two were over," she said. "I swear to God, Dani, he said it was done."
"We got married in March," I said. "At the courthouse, on the Tuesday Hoyt picked. Was that the over?"
Neither of them said anything.
I took off my wedding ring and set it on the arm of my chair.
Then I went down the stairs, with the key in my fist.
The jukebox was playing the last bars of a country song when I came out onto the floor.
Ninety people were still clapping at nothing, with drinks in their hands.
I walked straight to the middle of the room and unplugged the jukebox.
The room went quiet, one table at a time.
Hoyt Dagget, the club president, sat at the head table in his gray ponytail with his glass halfway to his mouth.
He had been the one to hand me the first check for this building.
I said it loud enough for the back wall.
"Your road captain is upstairs in my lookout with your bartender. If anyone wants to see it, the door's open."
Nobody moved.
Somebody's chair scraped.
Then Hoyt set down his glass, slowly, and looked at the clock over the bar.
"Dani's had a long day," he said. "Somebody take her home."
And the room went back to its music and its drinking.
Nobody went up the stairs.
Not one person.
I was still standing there when Jesse Mercer came out of the shadows by the door, with his hat in his hand.
He had laid every board of that third-floor landing next to me.
"Come on," he said quietly. "I'll walk you out."
In the lot, he stopped by my truck and kept his voice low.
"Hoyt looked at the clock before you were done talking," he said.
I turned.
"Why would he do that?"
Jesse looked back at the building and didn't answer.
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