Page 69 of The Best Shot

He stepped up beside me, shoulder near mine, and the balance of the room changed.

He gave Shaun an easy nod.

Shaun looked between us, and I watched him do the math.

“This is why you’re still in town?” He laughed. “I always knew you had low standards. But Hale Henry? The town slut?”

“Do not talk about him that way,” I snapped, the words out before I could measure them. I could take whatever he threw at me. I’d done that my whole life. But fuck him if he thought Hale was fair game.

Shaun’s brow lifted, then he smiled. It wasn’t pleasant.

Hale’s jaw flexed once. That was all. Then he took the twenty from my hand and set it on the counter. “Keep the change.”

He gathered the snacks with one hand, took mine with the other, and walked us out.

The door swung shut behind us.

I didn’t look back.

20

“YOU DIDN’T DESERVE IT.”

YASMINE

We drove.

The radio was low, Beyoncé singing about carriages while the treeline slid past my window and Hale kept one hand easy on the wheel.

After a while, he pulled off onto an overlook most people only found if they got lost on purpose. Beyond the guardrail, the ridgeline sat blue-gray in the distance, the sky soft and wide above it.

I folded my hands in my lap. A few minutes passed before I realized I was pressing my thumb into my palm hard enough to leave a mark.

Then I started talking.

I told him about CeeCee. He knew pieces. That she was pregnant, that she’d been staying with me, that Shaun had done enough to make leaving feel safer than staying. But he didn’t know the shape of it.

So I gave him the unedited version. The one that was supposed to stay locked inside family business.

The money. The cheating. My mother seeing what she wanted to see and un-seeing the rest. The way she could make disappointment sound like concern. The way she would never pick my side, because picking mine would mean admitting Shaun was wrong, and she would rather swallow glass than do that.

When I finished, I stared down at my hands. “You’re an only child, right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

I nodded. “You know how parents joke about not having favorites? How they say all their kids are their favorite?”

He nodded again.

“Shaun’s my mother’s favorite.” The words tasted bitter coming out. “She loves me, but he’s the one she chooses.”

First. Always.

He let my confession rest there. Then, almost casually, “He came to me for a job.”

My head came up.

“Applied at the garage a while back,” Hale said. “When I didn’t move fast enough, he went around me to Grant. Dropped your name. Dropped Ava’s. Tried every door he could find.”