Chapter 16: Torn in Half

He found me on his office floor with the page in my lap.

He stopped in the doorway, and I watched him read his own typed plan upside down.

"Stephanie."

"It's typed," I said. "Dated five weeks back. My name at the top."

"I wrote it the night after Spokane."

"Four steps. Put her under a better roof. Let her paint where the club can see her. Let Dutch come to her."

I held it up.

"Norman sees what Dutch is. That's the last line, Rafe. Norman sees. I'm just the lamp you switch on."

"It was a plan for a woman I had never met."

"It's a plan for me."

"It was." He came in and didn't try to take it from me. "The night I wrote it, I'd never heard you laugh or seen you hold a needle."

"And since?"

"Since, I haven't opened that folder. I didn't know it was still on the desk."

"The folder was on the desk."

"Under the lamp." His voice roughened. "I'd have burned it, if I'd remembered."

I stood up. My knees ached.

"That's what hurts," I said. "That I believe you and I don't know why. Everyone who ever used me was sweet about it."

"Then don't believe me."

"What?"

"Don't take my word. Watch what I do."

He took the page out of my hand, and I let him.

He held it in front of me and tore it down the middle, and again, and again, until the pieces were small enough to blow off his palm.

"I'm not using you to get Dutch," he said. "Not at the Run, not in church, not anywhere."

"Norman wants you in that room."

"Norman can have me alone. I'll walk in and say what I know, and if they throw me out again, they throw me out."

"Rafe."

"You don't have to paint that bike. You don't have to stand up in front of forty men. You can stay in this bay, and I'll finish it without you."

"You'd do that?"

"I'd do it before I let anyone use you. Including me."

I looked at the little white pieces on the floor between his boots.

For five weeks I had read every kind thing he did as an angle, because every kind thing in my whole life had been one.

I couldn't find the angle in this.

There wasn't one. He'd torn up the only thing he had.

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