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 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Eight Fifty

The camera archive shows Hoyt handing Boone the back door key; Jesse comes for his tools and tells her to show it to no one yet.

I did not sleep that night either, so I went back through the archive.

The back-lot camera keeps thirty days of footage, and I scrolled to Saturday, the night of the opening.

I had only ever watched that camera for trouble, and never on a party night.

At 8:41 the lot was empty, and the party noise leaked out of the building in thumps.

At 8:47 a pickup rolled in with its lights off.

It was Hoyt's.

He climbed out alone, and he stood at the rear door with a ring of keys in his fist.

I leaned closer to the screen.

That door had a deadbolt only I could throw from outside.

Hoyt stood with his key in the lock and turned it.

It opened for him as easily as my own front door.

I had cut that key blank myself, three of them, and given them to Boone, to Hoyt and to the club's office safe.

I had told the whole club the back door stayed shut on party nights.

Hoyt propped it open with a brick and went to the shadows by the dumpster.

At 8:52 two figures came across the lot, close together.

One was Boone, with his hand low on a woman's back.

The other was Lacey.

Hoyt stepped out of the shadows and handed Boone a small brass key.

Boone looked at it, and then at him.

Hoyt said something short, and then he nodded at the stairs.

The key was a lookout key.

It was the key I had told everyone did not exist.

I stopped the clip and sat very still.

I had cut one copy of that key, one, and kept it on the ring in my pocket.

I got up and checked.

It was still there on my key ring, and it was the only lookout key I had ever cut.

So there was a second copy, and somebody had made it behind my back.

Someone knocked on the roll-up door at seven in the morning.

I had a hammer in my hand before I reached it.

It was Jesse Mercer, in a work jacket with no cut, standing on the gravel.

"You left your level and two clamps at the clubhouse on Friday," he said. "I brought them."

He held out a canvas bag.

"I've never seen you without a patch," I said.

"I don't wear it on Mondays."

I let him in, because I needed to see the face of someone who hadn't lied to me yet.

He walked the shop slowly, running a thumb along my father's bench.

His left thumb had a white scar across the base, from a table saw he had never told me about.

"Where's Boone?" I asked.

"At the clubhouse, sleeping in the office." He looked at me. "Hoyt gave him the couch."

"Of course he did."

I put my phone on the bench between us with the clip frozen on the brass key.

"Look at it."

He looked, and his jaw moved once.

"You knew," I said.

"I knew he looked at the clock," Jesse said. "That's all I knew on Saturday night."

"And now?"

"Now I know he held the door."

He did not touch the phone.

I watched him decide something.

"Don't show that to anyone," he said, very low. "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because Hoyt held a meeting Friday night, and I wasn't told about it." He turned his big hands over and looked at them. "I don't like that. I'd like to know what it was about before somebody finds out you've got this."

My own hand had a long cut across the knuckles from the hammer, where I had gripped it too hard at the door.

I hadn't felt it.

Jesse saw it and crossed the shop in two strides.

"You're bleeding on your father's bench."

"It's fine."

"It's not."

He took a clean rag from his back pocket and wrapped it around my hand.

His fingers were warm and rough, and he held my wrist and took his time.

I watched his thumb, the scar, pressing against my pulse.

He was close enough that I could smell sawdust and coffee on him.

My pulse jumped, and he felt it, and he did not look up.

"Tighter," I said, because I had to say something.

He tightened it, and then he let go.

"I'm sorry about Saturday," he said. "I'm sorry I stood there."

"You walked me to my truck."

"I should've walked up the stairs."

I looked down at the rag, with my blood coming through it.

"Then come to Sunday dinner with me," I said. "Sit across from Hoyt when I play it."

He set the canvas bag on the bench and held my gaze.

"Give me till then," he said. "I'll find out what's in that box."

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