Reaper woke on a Tuesday, the way he did everything in the stories Ava had now heard a hundred times: without warning, without ceremony, and entirely on his own schedule.
She got the call in the library, in the middle of a practice essay, and she remembers very little of the drive except Bull's profile — a man driving at exactly the speed limit with both hands on the wheel and his jaw set like a man carrying something priceless across ice. At the hospital, the floor had changed: the furniture-with-opinions was grinning. Saint was crying without any embarrassment whatsoever. A nurse Ava knew by sight waved them through to the room — a real room now, not the ICU — with the air of a woman escorting royalty.
He looked smaller. That was the shock of it — the man who had filled a ditch and a legend lay in the bed with his leg in its scaffold and his face gaunt and lined, two months of sleep written on him like weather — and then he opened his eyes, grey and lucid and exactly as she remembered them from the snow, and found her at the foot of the bed as if he'd known she'd be standing precisely there.
"Ava," he said. His voice was a ruin of itself, but it was his. "You look like your mother."
"You knew my mother?" It came out before she could stop it, a girl's question, bare as a hand.
"Once. Tacoma. She brought soup to the clubhouse when your dad was testifying — showed up with a pot big enough to baptize a baby and told a roomful of outlaws to wash their hands." The ghost of something crossed his face. "Ellen Wright. She had your spine. And your—" his gaze dropped to her hands, grease-dark under the nails, a mechanic's hands now, "—your hands are your father's. He could hear a sick engine through a wall."
"Mr. Reaper—" she began, and stopped, because a sentence she'd rehearsed all the way from the library had arrived at the moment and disgraced itself by being completely inadequate, and because her eyes were doing something she refused to authorize.
"None of that," he said. "Come here." He lifted the good hand an inch off the blanket, which clearly cost him, and Ava came around the bed and took it, and his fingers closed around hers with a shadow of that shocking ditch-strength. "Bull told me everything. The vote. The boy. The sheriff." His eyes held hers with an intensity that two months of coma had not dimmed by a single degree. "I tried to tell you, in the ditch. Do you remember? I said should've known. I knew that bike was wrong half a mile before the rail — the lever felt dead, and I knew, and I rode on anyway, because I'd had a warning three days before and I'd decided I was too old to be scared of ghosts."
"What warning?" Bull said, from the doorway, sharply.
"A note," Reaper said. "On the bike, at the dealership, when I picked it up from service. Under the seat strap. The ditch remembers Tacoma. I threw it in a burn barrel like a fool — no. Like a proud man, which is a fool with better posture." He closed his eyes briefly. "Evidence, gone, because I wouldn't be handled. Remember that, Ava. Pride is the tax stupidity charges in advance."
He slept then, mid-conversation, the way a lamp goes out. But before the nurses reclaimed the room, he surfaced once more, and his hand tightened on hers, and he said the thing she'd crossed two months and one blizzard to hear, clearly, like a man reading from the only book he owned:
"The package is in the vault at First National, box 214, under my name and Bull's. Your father's, Ava. It was always yours. When you're ready — not when it's useful, not when lawyers say — when you're ready, you open it. The letter first. He made me promise the letter first."
"I'm ready," she whispered.
"Then you're readier than I was," Reaper said, and slept.
She went to the bank the next morning with Bull and Jordan, and the manager — who had known the club for thirty years and asked no questions — brought the long steel box to a small room and left them, and Ava lifted the lid on seventeen years with her own hands.
Inside: envelopes, in order, labeled in a stranger's careful hand. LETTER — FOR AVA, FIRST. A cassette tape in a clear case, labeled in the same hand: M. WRIGHT — MY STATEMENT, FULL, 3/14. And a thick envelope of photographs, sealed, labeled only: COPIES. IN CASE THE ORIGINALS GET LOST.
Ava held the letter for a long moment without opening it, feeling the weight of it — an ounce, maybe less; the heaviest thing she'd ever lifted, heavier than any motorcycle — and then she slid her thumb under the flap, her father's daughter, and read.