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Shaking my head with a grin, I put out the hot sauce, syrup, butter, and juice. Then we both tucked into our food. Like normal, Joy had little to say when she was eating. I liked how she took her food seriously. I grinned around a bite of potatoes. Was there anything I didn’t like about this woman?

When Joy pushed her plate back, I figured I could ask the question that had been bothering me half the night and all morning.

“Spit it out.”

“Huh?”

“There’s something on your mind, Graham. So just say what you want to say.”

I was more than a little shocked. The only person I could think of who could guess that I was out of sorts was Simon Clark, and I figured that was because we had both led Navy SEAL teams, that meant it was part of his job description.

But Joy?

That didn’t make any sense.

“Graham, you still haven’t told me what’s bothering you.”

We were sitting side by side. I swiveled my stool so it was pointing at her, caught her knees, and turned her so that she was facing me.

“This is serious, huh?” she asked softly.

I nodded.

She cupped the side of my face. “Just tell me, it’s going to be all right.”

I swallowed. “How did you get that scar on your ribcage?”

Joy looked down, which was all the answer I needed.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” I fought everything within me to keep my tone calm.

She nodded.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

She dropped her hand from my cheek to grip my wrists with both hands. Tight. Like she was hanging on to the only life raft in the ocean. Her nails dug into my skin, but I didn’t care.

“The Smythe family didn’t take what I told them very seriously,” she whispered. I hated it when her bottom lip trembled.

“The Smythe family?”

“I worked for them while I was in London. They were rich, they lived in this posh townhome, but it’s not like our townhomes. It was a mansion. I was an au pair to their two children.”

I nodded. “Okay. But what do you mean, at first? What happened before you got stabbed?” I tried to keep the frustration and anger out of my voice, but I did a shit job.

She didn’t look at me. She was lost in the past.

I tucked my finger under her chin and pushed it up, so she was forced to look at me. It killed me seeing her hesitant expression. I couldn’t tell if she was reluctant because of my outburst or because of her memories. I forced myself to dial it back. “Tell me,” I softly coaxed.

“It started out so harmless. It was flowers. Same as yesterday, only innocent and sweet. Somebody put a May Day posy of daisies on the doorknob of the Smythe’s townhome addressed to me. Everybody thought it was cute. We all thought it was one of the children from the park where I took Lionel and Susie.”

“What’s a posy?”

“It’s just a little cone of construction paper with ribbon taped to it, so you can hang it on a doorknob, then you put flowers in it. Sometimes there are dandelions in it. I got daisies. It said, ‘For Miss Magill.’ It was written in red crayon.”

Her voice trailed off, so I nodded, and she started up again.

“We all laughed. The children asked everyone at the park the next day who gave it to me. Nobody confessed to it. But then, two weeks later, there was a ballet slipper shoved through the mail drop slot. There was a ring wrapped in tissue paper shoved into the toe of the shoe, along with a note. It said, Will You Marry Me, Miss Magill? It was written in crayon again, like a little kid wrote it.”