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“So,” she says, breaking the silence with a small grin, “are you going to tell me why you’ve been staring at my nose this whole time?”
I chuckle, unable to hold back. “You’ve got whipped butter on your nose.”
Her eyes widen in surprise before she bursts into laughter.
“Oh crap, thanks for telling me now!”
“I didn’t want to ruin the magic,” I reply with a shrug and a grin of my own.
She grabs a napkin and wipes her nose, blushing slightly but still smiling. For a moment, her face disappears behind the paper, but when she takes the napkin away, her eyes center on something behind me, and her smile disappears for one frozen moment.
“Emily? Is there something wrong?”
My voice is bitter, my blood ice; in one moment, every ounce of warmth within me disappears, replaced by the brutal readiness to kill and the frustration with myself that I’d get so fucking relaxed that I’d take a booth that doesn’t give me a clear view of the diner’s door. How the fuck can I forget such a basic rule as always keeping my eyes on the exits?
“Nothing… it’s nothing. I just thought I saw something, but it’s nothing.”
I swivel in my seat to see the back of a man’s head. In that quick second, I gauge that he’s tall, that he’s got a heavy, muscular frame, and he put a fright into the woman I care about. If we ever meet face-to-face, he’s a dead man.
“Are you sure? What did he look like?” I say.
My thoughts go to those men I saw running from my brother’s home, the glances I caught of them before I turned my attention to my dead brother, his dead wife, and getting my nephew out of there before the flames took my last surviving family member from me. Did any of them look at all like the man who just left the diner?
Has Victor Moretti found me already?
My hand drifts below the table, reaching for the gun that I always keep on me.
“Emily? What is it?”
She shakes her head, hair tousling in a way that, if I weren’t on alert to kill, I’d find cute. Instead, I find it unnervingly distracting.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says, standing. Her breakfast sits only half-eaten on the table in front of her. Her voice shakes like a leaf in a hurricane. “I just remembered that I need to go.”
“Go? Why?” I say. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong, Hunter. How many times do I have to say it? I just remembered that I have to work today, and it’s going to take me a long time to get ready. I have to shower, get clean clothes, do a bunch of chores around my place because I spent the night at your place doing babysitting duty, which means I didn’t have time to do any of the things I normally do at my home. That’s all.”
There’s a cold, hard edge to her voice that’s so out of place with the fear I see in her eyes.
She leaves the booth and starts toward the door, and I reach out, taking hold of her by the wrist.
“Talk to me, Emily. I can help.”
“Oh, so are you volunteering to do my laundry?”
“You and I both know you wouldn’t like the outcome if it came down to it,” I say. “But I can help.”
“I don’t need you to do my clothes, Hunter. I just need you to let go of my arm.”
I do.
She leaves.
Head down, shoulders hunched, wrapping her arms around herself like it’s suddenly twenty-degrees colder. When the door shuts behind her, I shovel a bite of food into my mouth and look at Charlie. He looks just as confused as I feel. Of course, that is not saying much, considering he finds wonderment every time he discovers he has toes. “What the heck just happened, little man?”
He gurgles. A snot bubble forms and bursts in his left nostril. It’s about as logical a summation as I’m going to get about what Emily just did.
Two hours, a plate of hash browns, bacon, sausage, eggs, a diaper change, and a few errands later, I pull up in front of Ironwood Falls Meds & More. Five minutes pass while I just stare in at the place. Emily’s already at work. I can see her behind the pharmacist’s counter, her head down, buried in her paper.
