5. Everly
Five
Everly
Blake’s Café is exactly how I remember it—and for once, that’s a good thing. Tucked into a corner near the food court, it smells like every good Saturday I ever had.
Mismatched mugs on wooden shelves. Seasonal drinks etched onto a chalkboard menu. Wobbly stools at a counter worn smooth by decades of elbows. Norah Jones crooning over the sound of coffee grinding.
And just like old times, I instantly recognize Helen. She was already rocking a little gray when last I saw her. Now she’s full silver, reading glasses on a beaded chain hanging around her neck.
“Hot chocolate,” I say, sliding onto a stool. “Extra whipped cream. Please.”
She looks up. Her face softens, blooming slowly into recognition. “Everly Hart.” Her gaze trails over my hair and face. “Oh, honey. Look at you.”
I can’t help but smile. “Hi, Helen.”
“Your father said you might come today. I told him I’d believe it when I saw it.” She’s already reaching for the cocoa. “How lon g has it been?”
I pretend to think on it. “Hmm…seventeen years? Give or take.”
Helen clicks her tongue. “Well, that’s just too long. You need to promise me you won’t stay away so long next time. I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I’ve been loving your books.”
Something flutters in my chest. “You read my books?”
Helen’s brows shoot up. “I might be a little bit of a fan.” She points to a shelf on the back wall. It’s lined with E.J. Hartley novels. “I never miss a release.”
I don’t know why that warms me down to my bones.
She sets the mug in front of me—hand-thrown ceramic, blue glaze, chipped at the rim. The whipped cream is Everest. “Your dad was in yesterday, setting up for the farewell.”
A knot cinches behind my ribs. “Oh?”
Helen leans against the back counter. Takes a sip of her own coffee. “You know, he talks about you like you hung the moon, Everly. Always has. Even when you two weren’t speaking.”
Through the café window, I catch a sliver of the rink through the open double doors—gray ice, banners, the flicker of the scoreboard.
And for a half second, I see the ghost version: Dad on the ice in his coaching pullover, hands held out.
And me, maybe seven, in a puffy pink coat and white figure skates two sizes too big, wobbling toward him with my arms out like a tightrope walker who has gravely miscalculated her qualifications.
Come on, Evie. I’ve got you. I’m right here.
He always caught me. Until the day he didn’t. Until the day he was coaching Beckett Benson instead, and Mom was crying in the parking lot, and nobody caught either of us.
I blink. The ghost dissolves.
I offer a polite smile, trying my best not to look like she just scraped away a very sensitive scab. “That’s sweet of you to say.”
Something beeps on the counter behind her, and Helen pulls away.
I take a sip of the cocoa, my gaze trailing over the old café, catching on the door leading to the kitchen. “Helen. Do you know if the old service corridors are still accessible? Behind the stores?”
She gives me a look over her reading glasses. “I think so. Why? You planning a mall heist?”
“Funny. But yes, I am writing a heist scene set in a mall. I need the back-of-house—loading docks, security cameras.”
Helen purses her lips. “Well, there’s an employees-only door by the food court.
You take a left at the T-junction for loading docks.
Security office is the room on the right—though it’s unmanned on weekends.
I think management has been low-staffed on security for a few months now.
” She refills my whipped cream without being asked. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”
“You’re an accessory to fictional crime now, Helen.”
“Honey, I’ve been an accessory to your father’s bad coaching jokes for thirty years. This is a lateral move.”
I finish the hot chocolate. Set a ten on the counter. Helen pushes it back. I push it forward. We do this three times, and Helen levels me with a mother’s look. “Save it for when you come back, Everly. Don’t wait another seventeen years.”
I give in, tuck it back into my pocket. “I won’t.”
“Maybe bring your dad some Tuesday morning. Like old times.”
The sentence hits somewhere unprotected, drawing out a side of me I buried a long time ago.
“Maybe,” I say.
Now it’s time to make something out of this day.
Slipping my worn notebook from my bag, I tuck a pen behind my ear and head toward Blue Line Books.
I’ve always loved this old bookstore, with its long, narrow aisles stuffed to the brim with books.
A rolling ladder on a brass track lines the outer walls, and I have to resist the urge, once again, to pull out my Provincial Belle impersonation, swooping across the store with a basket of books, singing.
In the romance section between Penny Larke and Kennedy Ryan—two copies of Breakaway by Sutton Blake.
The cover features a model way too attractive and with way too many teeth to be a real hockey player, holding a hockey stick in a way that suggests that he not only has no idea what he’s doing but might also just be a collection of abs hot-glued together and stuffed into a jersey.
Handsome, strong, and…the complete opposite of every hockey player I know.
There’s also a copy of book two in the hockey series, Slap Shot.
Three shelves over in thrillers, I find Thriller on Ice by E.J. Hartley.
Two identities. Two shelves. Same store. Same woman. It worked until last Saturday, and now my life is a sitcom, written by someone with a grudge.
I face out both Sutton Blake copies—guerrilla retail self-promotion is not beneath me—and slip out before anyone asks any awkward questions.
And now the real work begins.
The mall unfurls as I explore, and my thriller brain starts cataloging.
Sutton Sweets has a blind spot, no cameras, service-hall access.
The back door of the hockey shop, the Penalty Box, exits to a parallel corridor.
Glow & Grain is an aggressively cozy candle shop—tiny, two people would be sharing oxygen.
I photograph the layout and refuse—refuse—to think about another teensy tiny space I was trapped in lately…
with a handsome, strong, terrible man. Hearthstone Home & Living displays couches you could vanish into, beds with actual pillows.
If I needed to survive overnight in this mall, that’s where I’d start.
Iron & Oak Hardware stocks duct tape, rope, flashlights, paint cans.
Ever wonder what can be done with sixty feet of rope and a bag of marbles?
No? That’s fair…but the answer is: more than you’d think.
The service corridors are the real prize.
I manage to slip in near the food court when nobody’s looking.
Loading docks with manual roll-up doors.
Electrical panels clearly labeled. The security office (unmanned, just like Helen said) with monitors showing feeds throughout the mall, several screens dark.
I count six blind spots. Six places a person could move through this building like a ghost. I mark them down.
This mall’s security is a thriller writer’s dream and a liability insurer’s nightmare.
On my way back, I pass the Staff Only door near the old rink offices—cracked open earlier, shut and locked now. I note it.
Was open during the event. Why?
I have what I need for the thriller. But I don’t have what I need for the other book.
Ice Cold Heart is on life support. Margot’s notes echo in my head.
Where’s the man underneath? Where’s the thing that makes him ache? Find that, and you have your book.
I don’t know, okay? I don’t know that man!
Except maybe I do, right? Or could…if I didn’t let the guy I also know, the jerk, get in the way.
And honestly, if I let myself remember the way he looked at me, I could admit to a smidgen of a nervous flutter when his gaze snagged on my unruly red hair.
Except, the way he said it…probably it wasn’t meant to be hurtful.
Right? I mean, you were there. What do you think?
Aw, now I’m hearing him. I’m just trying to be friendly—
Maybe I should stop thinking of him as a cruel fourteen-year-old and start thinking of him as B.B.
Naw, that doesn’t help either.
But I don’t have any better ideas.
Shoot.
I head toward Sutton Arena.
After slipping through the side entrance, I sink into the seats and try my best to fade into the scattered crowd.
Beckett is center ice, on one knee, adjusting a kid’s stance, showing him just the right way to make the shot.
My heart hitches.
He’s doing Coach’s thing. The patient nudge. The quiet correction. My father’s gentleness, learned on this ice, passed forward to another gap-toothed kid on the same scarred surface. The inheritance of warmth from a man who could teach it to strangers but couldn’t figure out how to bring it home.
The kid fires a pass, Beckett pretends to miss it, and the kid’s face detonates with joy so pure it should be classified as a controlled substance. Beckett laughs, and the sound carries through the stands, hits me like a puck to the heart.
This is definitely a bad idea.
I watch longer than I should. Cataloging every moment, every laugh and smile, every time he kneels down to get on eye level with the tiny humans who want to be just like him.
Finally, I tear my eyes away and climb the bleachers to the left side, third row from the top.
Our spot. Dad’s and mine.
The bleacher is scarred and splintered, the wood gone soft with age. I run my hand along the seat, feeling for it—and there it is, under my fingertips, carved into the grain with a pocketknife by a man who was better with a whiteboard marker than a blade:
Hart was here
He carved it the winter I was ten. Tuesday morning, early, before anyone arrived.
What are you doing, Dad?
Leaving proof.
Proof of what?
That we were here. You and me. So if you ever forget, you can come back and check.