Page 87 of Snake

But they were right there with him anyway.

Dear god, how she’d underestimated this ‘biker gang.’ And its town. This whole place was a family.

Cox didn’t feel the great circle of family around him, but he’d felt her. She understood what the stunned riot in his eyes early that morning had been: he hadn’t been able to hold her at arm’s length. She’d reached him the way he’d reached her.

Autumn wanted to go back into the house, go back to him, make sure he knew she was with him, but between her and him was that great wall of family.

And she didn’t belong here.

Or did she?

Oh, she was so confused! Full of grief for a woman she’d never met and the son she’d only barely reached, standing ignored and unnecessary in the middle of a crisis in a family she wasn’t part of, she was torn exactly in two. She didn’t know what to do, where to go, anything.

She took out her phone and called her Pops. As it rang, she looked around and headed to a large, decorative stone beside the mailbox. She sat on it and leaned back against the mailbox post.

“Hello, lass.”

“Hi, Pops.”

“What’s wrong?” Pops asked at once. “You don’t sound right.”

Tears welled at the back of her throat. “I ...” They spilled, and she couldn’t talk for a minute.

Her father filled in the space with worry. “Autumn. Talk to me. What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Did someone hurt you? Are you in trouble?”

“No, Pops,” she managed to say before he went full Caped Daughter Defender. “It’s not me.”

“What, lass? Tell your Pops. Let me help.”

“I don’t know how you can!” she wailed. “I don’t even know how I can!”

“Step by step, Autumn. That’s how we do everything, remember? Step by step.”

That had always been Pops’ wisdom, to take life’s challenges one at a time, but Autumn struggled to retain the lesson. Once she had her goal in sight, her tendency was to focus on nothing else. But Pops’ steady calm was contagious in the moment, as always, and Autumn gathered herself and told him the story. She told it backward, starting with Cox’s mom and ending with Chase’s boorish behavior in the clubhouse last night. As was his way, Pops let her get the whole story out with hardly a word, only interjecting when he didn’t understand her meaning.

When she finished, she was crying again, and Pops stayed quiet for a long time. Long enough that Autumn checked her phone twice to make sure the called hadn’t dropped.

Beginning to worry about a new thing, she asked, “Are you mad?”

“No, lass. Of course not. What could I be mad about? I’m thinking, that’s all. What you’ve said is a lot.”

She knew. She felt the weight of it all settling on her back. “I know, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. But ... you met this man two days ago?”

That was so beside the point right now. “No, Pops. We got close on this trip, but I’ve known him almost a year. He’s part of the motorcycle club I’m working with on this project.”

“The bikers who made you Public Enemy Number One there.”

Relitigating her frustrations with the Night Horde MC over the past year was very last thing she wanted to do. “That’s in the past, Pops. Now we’re working together. And Cox and I ... I don’t know what that means. But right now, I don’t know what to do for him.”

Pops was quiet again for a while before he huffed a very paternal sigh. “Okay. Let’s focus there, then.”

Autumn didn’t reply; she didn’t want to say anything that might detour Pops from giving her advice she desperately needed.

“Losing a parent is a particular kind of pain, lass. I hope you don’t experience it for years and years, but you know I lost my mom when I was twenty. I’m thinking about what I needed then. I don’t know if this man, this ... Cox needs the same thing, but here’s my advice: I was young, but I was grown. I hadn’t needed my mommy for years. On that day, though, when I could never have her again, I needed her like a little kid. That was the loudest thing in my head, that I wanted my mom. What I needed was someone to know what had to be done, and also to ask what I wanted to be done, and what I needed for myself. If only one person had just let me say out loud how mad I was at her for leaving me, I would have handled it all better. My mom died of cancer, she didn’t take her own life, but I was still so mad that she wasn’t there anymore. Anger in grief isn’t always just mad at the world. But nobody lets you say that.”

Again, he let a lengthy pause sit between them before he continued, “I think when something like this happens, everybody wants to jump into action, to do as much as they can for the people left behind, to take as much burden as they can. They want to fix things, and they don’t know how to just be with the grieving person and let them experience their grief, however they need to experience it. I needed help knowing what to do, but they all seemed to lose sight of me, too. If they stayed busy and ‘did for me,’ they thought they were helping. I ended up lost in the eye of a hurricane, and I was so angry—angry she died, angry at how she suffered through chemo and radiation for nothing, angry she left me, angry at all the people around me, talking, sometimes laughing, being productive.”

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