Page 45 of The Woman with the Handcuffs

“The walkability, honestly. And I think, maybe a bit naively, that I thought I would have lots of friends and would be going out to clubs and events and such all the time.”

“Kind of like someone who lies awake at night, making all kinds of plans for the next day to meal prep and work out, like they’re suddenly going to wake up a different person from they went to bed.”

“Yeah. Something like that. But also, I didn’t have a lot of experience with my peers. I was on the road with my father. Around his adult friends. Trying to make friends with people my own age was a whole different thing.”

“I don’t have any friends,” he told me, shrugging.

“Who was the big guy then?”

“The big guy,” Gavino repeated with a chuckle. “That was Leo, one of my brothers. I have a lot of family.”

“Are you all close?”

“Not as close as they all want to be with me.”

“Why not?”

“They call me a hermit. Or antisocial. I just… like being on my own. Family get-togethers are a little overwhelming.”

“I can understand that. But it must be nice to have so many people vying to spend time with you. They love you enough to keep trying. You’re lucky.”

I just had my dad.

And, now, no one.

As if sensing my thoughts, Gavino glanced over. “We’re going to figure out what happened with your father.”

I didn’t know if that was comforting.

Or terrifying.

But I wanted to know.

And as crazy as this was to admit, even just to myself, I felt better about finding out with Gavino at my side.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gavino

She shopped for a road trip like a kid given fifty bucks and told to grab whatever they wanted.

“Can you hold this?” she asked, shoving an extra-large coffee at me. If you could even call it coffee. The coffee itself was caramel. Then she’d added sugar, cream, and syrup before topping it with whipped cream.

I took it in the hand that wasn’t holding my same-sized coffee, black, watching as she readjusted her hold of her two cooler drinks—a diet soda and one of those bottled coffee drinks—so she could grab two candy bars to go along with her chips, snack cakes, and licorice.

“Don’t judge,” she demanded, even though I was reasonably sure my face was blank. “I used to love all this stuff on the road with my dad. It’s been years since I’ve had it. Well, aside from the soda and coffees, obviously. You’re not getting anything?”

“I’m getting food,” I said, gesturing toward the case with the sandwiches and wraps.

“Well, duh. But no snacks?”

“I’m not really a snacker. What?” I asked when her face screwed up at that.

“That’s like saying you don’t like dessert. Or snow. Or… puppies.”

“I can give or take dessert. Snow is pretty for about an hour before it turns into a slushy, muddy mess. And puppies bite.”

Her eyes did a big roll at that. “You’re such a grump,” she told me, shaking her head as she grabbed those fake-cheese-stuffed pretzel things I hadn’t seen a human being eat since I was a kid. “Luckily, you’ve been kind of nice to me, so I’m choosing to find it charming.”