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“Nah.” He took his time over my face. “Usually you look busy. Today you look tired.” His gaze moved higher. “And you’ve got flour in your hair.”

I’d pinned it up at four. Half of it had given up since, red curls stuck to my skin from the ovens. I swiped at the side of my head and missed by a mile.

His hand came off the counter. For one second I thought he was going to reach across and fix it himself, and my whole body went tight waiting for it.

He curled his fingers back against the glass instead.

“Other side,” he said, and his voice had dropped half a register.

I found it. Heat crawled up my neck, and I turned to the coffee machine to hide it.

When I turned back he was smiling again, just slightly, and I hated how much I liked it.

“See you Friday, Chelsea.”

“I’ll be here.”

The bell rang as he left, and then the bike rumbled away from the bakery. Then the quiet, and me standing in the middle of it with a cloth in my hand, his prints on my glass and my skin warm everywhere his eyes had been.

I’d grown up in this town. I knew exactly what men like Deacon were. The Unholy Few had been part of Salvation longer than I’d been alive, and people talked about them the way they talked about the weather. You complained about it and planned around it. Good girls who owned the only bakery in town and catered the church fundraiser kept their minds away from men with patches on their backs. They left men like Deacon alone, and they definitely left alone the question of what a man like that sounded like with the small talk stripped out. Or what those hands would feel like somewhere other than my counter.

My father owned about a third of Salvation, and he’d paid almost nothing for it.

When the mine went under I was a kid, and everybody panicked at once. Harry Laine walked into the middle of all that with cash and a good eye and bought whatever people were desperate to be rid of. Warehouses, lots, a strip of storefronts on Main, three hundred acres of scrub out past the rail spur. He sat on it all and waited for a comeback that never arrived. He rented what he could, let the rest sit, and ran it all from an office above the hardware store with nicotine stains on the ceiling tiles.

My father was fair, in a cold sort of way. When I told him I was taking over Dolores’s bakery he said, “Well, everybody needs a hobby.” I’d stopped fighting that one years ago. We had dinner once a month. He asked about my accounts and I asked about his back, and we both pretended to care about the answers.

It worked because I asked him for little and he offered less.

I did want one thing from him, though.

The old ice house out on Route 10 had stood empty for as long as I could remember. Cinderblock, thick walls, cool even in August, exactly what I needed for flour storage. I’d asked Dad about renting it in the spring.

“It’s staying empty,” he’d said. “I’ve got plans for it.” And offered no other explanation.

He’d had plans for it for twenty years. I figured if I showed up with a tape measure and a rent offer in writing, he’d at least have to look at it. So after I closed on Wednesday, I drove out there.

The ice house sat back from the road behind a chain-link fence with a gate that used to sag. Now it hung straight and new, with a fresh chain and a padlock the size of my fist.

I slowed down.

Three trucks were parked beside the building. A white box van was backed up to the loading door. The ice house windows, long since smashed, had been covered from the inside with black plastic.

A man stood by the van smoking. Another came around the corner of the building, said a few words to him, and they both turned toward my car.

I’d been planning to pull in. I kept rolling instead, my foot light on the gas, one more nobody on her way to somewhere else. The second man strolled toward the fence. He lifted his hand in a wave, easy and friendly, and kept his eyes on my plates the whole way.

My stomach turned over.

It was a building with some trucks at it. That was all I’d seen. But I’d lived in Salvation my whole life, and covered windows meant somebody was hiding what went on inside. I knew when something looked wrong, and that was it.

I drove another mile before I turned around and took the long way home.

Dad’s office light was still on. It usually was. He was a workaholic if nothing else.

He was at his desk with his reading glasses pushed up on his head and a legal pad covered in numbers. Sixty-one, most of his hair still his own, pressed shirt for an empty office. He looked up, almost as if he’d been expecting me.

“Chelsea. Have you eaten?”