First Person POV
BAS
The sign is heavy, but it needs to be sturdy, built to last.
I spent two weeks putting it together with hand tools, sandpaper, and varnish after finding a fallen tree on a ride one Friday after church. I was proud of the sign, the letters deep and clean, the eagle that Jake’s artistic skills managed to make look like an actual eagle, carved into the top corner like it had always lived there. Eagles Point. Two words that used to just mean a stretch of ridge above the valley. Now they mean something else. It’s where we got married a month ago, the happiest day of my life.
I’ve got one end of the sign. Declan’s got the other. Neither of us is saying much, which is fine. Declan and I don’t need to fill the silence. Never have.
From up here you can see the whole valley laid out below — the town, the river cutting silver through the tree line, the road that winds up from downtown. I’ve stood on this ridge a hundred times. A thousand, maybe. But today it looks different.
I know why.
Lex, standing by the truck I borrowed from Jake, with her arms folded and her head tipped back, watching us not drop the sign. She’s got coffee in a thermos she hasn’t opened yet because she’s too busy supervising. Declan’s wife Lisa is next to her. The two of them have been pointing and directing us to make sure it’s straight.
Lex, looking amazing in a V-neck t-shirt, her old man’s leather jacket she goes nowhere without, and jeans that are doing absolutely nothing to help me concentrate on this sign. We almost didn’t make it out of the apartment this morning, but we’d been late a lot lately. Declan was giving me shit about being newlyweds like we were still kids or something. Asshole.
A month ago, I married her.
I keep coming back to that, random times of the day, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, and sometimes I even smile. The guys have started thinking they can give me shit. Fuck it, they weren’t wrong. I’m so gone for her. I can’t imagine my life without her now. I spent a long time being someone who didn’t get to keep things. The club, yes. But the rest of it — the soft parts, the parts that could be taken — I’d learned not to reach for those.
Then Lex walked into my life like she hadn’t read that memo.
“You going to hold your end or just stare at your wife all day?” Declan says.
“Both,” I smirk at him. He laughs, low and easy. We lift the sign into the bracket together, and it sits exactly right, and for a second neither of us moves.
Eagles Point.
I look down at Lex. She’s looking up at me. Even from here I can read her face — the small smile she saves for moments she doesn’t want to make a big deal of. The ones that are.
A month. And every morning I wake up next to her wanting to pinch myself.
* * *
LEX
Lisa thinks the sign is slightly crooked. It might be, but it’s perfect to me, much like the man looking at me like he wished we had stayed in bed all day. Coming here was one of the first steps I made to a new life, my first proper date with Bas, and it was a happy memory, one of the first I’d made in Redemption Falls.
She tilts her head. We both look up at it for a long moment.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“Mm,” she says, which is Lisa for: I’m choosing this battle later.
I love her for it. I love most things today, which is a strange feeling for someone who spent the better part of six years convinced that the capacity for that kind of softness had been knocked clean out of me.
It hadn’t. And it was Bas who had helped me come back.
Once the tools are packed up, Bas and Declan are doing the thing men do when they’ve just accomplished something physical — standing there, not talking, looking at what they built. Bas has one hand resting on the post. He’s looking over at me.
My husband.
I’ve been turning that word over for a month. It’s not the first time I’ve had a husband, but it’s the first time I’ve felt like a real wife. I never knew it could be like this. Part of me, the part that’s still healing, keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. The other part of me couldn’t be happier. It feels right. He’s a part of my soul and I never expected anything like this existed.
When I first came to Redemption Falls, I wasn’t looking for any of this. I was looking for an escape — a fresh start with enough distance between me and what I’d left behind that I could eventually stop checking over my shoulder. I found the town. I found Ellie, who decided we were friends before I even knew who I was. I found a life that was smaller and quieter and more mine than anything I’d had in a long time.
And then I found Bas when I wasn’t even looking. I ran from him, from everyone, to protect them all, but Bas grounds me. I’ll never run again.
It wasn’t easy and I won’t pretend it was. We had a rough start, a few disconnects, but I’ve stopped wishing we’d come to each other without them.
He walks towards me, easy and unhurried, the way Bas moves through everything. Declan slaps the post twice like it’s a done deal — it is — and heads down toward Lisa, who immediately points at the sign and says something that makes him squint upward.
“Crooked?” Bas says, stopping beside me.
“Slightly,” I admit.
He looks up at it. Then at me. “Is it going to bother you?”
“No,” I say. And I mean it. “It looks like ours.”
Something shifts in his face — that look he has, not quite a smile, more like a door opening. He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and I lean into it without thinking, the way I lean into him now without thinking, because somewhere in the last twelve months my body learned that this is where I’m safe.
Eagles Point.
I look up at the sign — the letters, the carved eagle, the timber that will weather and grey and still be standing in twenty years — and I think about the woman who drove into this valley not sure she was staying. I think about everything it cost to get here. Every hard conversation, every wrong turn, every morning I had to decide to stay.
Worth it.
All of it.
“Come on,” Bas says, low, just for me. “Lisa’s going to make Declan straighten it if we stand here long enough.”
I laugh — real, unguarded, the kind I didn’t use to let out in front of people — and take his hand, as we all jump in the truck to head down to Murphy’s.
* * *
BAS
We head to Murphy’s for dinner. Jake is at a corner table with Casey when we walk in. She’s got a textbook open next to her empty glass, highlighter in hand, doing that teenage thing of studying anywhere there is a flat surface. Jake catches my eye and lifts his chin. That’s it. That’s his hello.
“Hey Jake, thanks for the loan of the truck,” I say as I toss the keys to him. Our motorcycles are already in the parking lot. “You guys joining us for dinner?” I ask, nodding toward where Ellie and Luke are.
“Nope, just waiting on takeout. Casey has an exam tomorrow.”
Just as he speaks, Murphy raises a couple of takeout containers toward Jake, signalling their order is ready. Jake heads over to get the food, and Casey shoves her books in her bag. Throwing it over her shoulder she says, “Bye, don’t stay out too late, you’re all ancient.” Jake rolls his eyes following her out.
We sit with Ellie and Luke, who start telling us about the trip up to Bozeman to meet Luke’s parents. The women get all their questions in. It sounded like an interesting trip the way Ellie was talking about it.
Declan’s phone rings, surprise on his face. He steps outside to take a call. After a few minutes I excuse myself and head out to check in with him.
He’s just hanging up when I get outside.
“Everything good man?”
He pauses, looking at his phone like he’s just had a shock.
“What do you need?” I say, ready to have his back.
He shakes his head. “I just heard from Marco in Louisiana. I haven’t talked to him since he helped with that runaway problem we had a few years back.”
“Oh yeah, Lily right? I’m glad he was able to find her. I heard she’s doing good these days, at college somewhere out east. Is that why he called?”
“No. He’s got a guy that needs a new home, asked if we could take him in.”
“Trouble?”
“Marco vouched for him, solid, had some issues though.”
“Anything I need to know?”
“No, if he wants people to know it’s up to him.” Declan looks at me. No further questions needed. It’s what we do — support the broken, help build lives. We’re not an outlaw organisation. We’re part of the community, and Declan and I both know it without having to say so.
“When will he be here?”
“Next week. He’s coming from Texas.”
“I’ll get the club bunkroom ready for him on Monday.” It’s not much — a bunk and a working bathroom — but it’ll be enough for now. I used it when working late before I moved in next door.
“Thanks brother. You good?” Declan says hesitantly.
“Yeah, why?”
He pauses, a confused look on his face, rubbing his hand over his jaw.
“It’s been four years, Bas.”
The air goes out of me. I actually step back. Four years since my sister died. I knew it was coming, knew it was soon, but I hadn’t realised. Dammit. It explains why she’s been on my mind all day. She and I used to hang at Eagles Point.
“Four years.” I repeat his words back at him.
“Brother,” Declan says, gripping my shoulder, shaking it, making me look into his face. “You’re happy. It’s okay to be happy. Today was as much for her as it was for you and Lex. She is part of you. She would want you to be happy.”
I shake my head. The days are so fucking good with Lex. She heals me in a way I never knew she could. I wish Emily had met her.
“Yeah, I know, and I am happy. Brother, this therapy shit works a little too well.” I chuckle. Lex and I had some shit to deal with after Marcus threatened her, almost killed her. My sister died at the hands of a man just like him. Same type. Same damage. When I found out what Marcus had done to Lex before I knew her, I had more rage in me than I knew what to do with. Turns out I’d been storing it for years. Therapy was something I had to get my head around, literally. But it was important to Lex, and honestly, it was fucking hard. If it weren’t for her, I’d be in a really dark place right now. She saved my life. The least I could do was try to help myself too.
“That and the whole wedded bliss shit too, huh.” He punches me gently on the arm, then pauses. “I’m glad, brother. Let’s go take our women home.”
We walk back into Murphy’s and say our goodbyes.
Walking back to our bikes, I have my arm around Lex’s shoulders. I pull her in and kiss her on the temple. “Thank you for today. I love you.”
“I know, big man. Time to show me,” she winks.
“Talk like that is going to get you thoroughly fucked tonight if you play your cards right.”
“Winner gets to go on top.” Lex grins as she puts on her helmet and zips up her jacket. “Race you.” She swings her leg over her bike and starts the engine, peeling out of the parking lot just as I get my key in the ignition.
“Fuck, I love that woman,” I say to myself as I gun it after her.
TJ Lewis 