Chapter 20
TWENTY
DAEMON
The therapy hadn't been optional. Flagged for anger, referred, and told to show up. But it helped me understand that being locked away when my mom died wasn't the same as killing her.
Which is why I come here when I need her. Sitting on the bench across from her headstone with my coffee going cold, waiting for her to tell me what she thought of her screw-up of a son. Whether I'd listen wasn't a given.
Margaret Ellen Booth. Beloved Mother.
Five and a half years and I can still hear the corrections officer's voice delivering the news in that flat, bureaucratic tone reserved for informing inmates of things they can't do anything about.
She'd passed overnight. I wouldn't be attending the funeral.
Arrangements were being handled by her sister in Sacramento.
"Hey, Mom."
Before I knew it, I was telling her about Nadia. How she was sharp and didn't let me get away with anything. How she'd built something real from nothing, same as Mom did. How I was in deeper than I intended, and it was scaring me in ways I didn't have good words for.
How I was sitting with the fear that I'd destroy this the way I couldn't save her. That nothing I did would be enough. That I'd fail Nadia, despite wanting it so badly it kept me up at night.
Mom always knew what to say about that, even when I didn't want to hear it. Today she was strangely quiet.
I finished my coffee, said goodbye the way I always did, and left without making promises I wasn't sure I’d keep.
The Peterson Group corporate dinner was one of the biggest events on Nadia's calendar. Two hundred and fifty guests from all over the region, a full awards ceremony, the type of client that could anchor a catering business for years if everything went right.
It was a big enough deal that when Malakai had suggested we install security cameras, Nadia had told him to go for it.
I'd come straight from the cemetery, arrived at the venue, and gotten changed before joining the Lucky Break setup detail. Tables, staging, lighting rigs. By noon the room was looking solid.
Nadia had been on site since six, a full twelve hours before the event was due to kick off. I found her moving through the kitchen with that focused energy she got close to a big event, checking stations, issuing instructions with a calm that made people want to follow her.
She looked up when I came in, asked if everything was set out front, and when I confirmed it was, she nodded and turned back to her checklist.
That was it. That was all I got.
Around three, I came back to grab a crate I'd left near the kitchen entrance and found her alone for the first time all day. Her team had gone for a break. The kitchen was quiet, just the hum of the walk-in chiller and the low warm smell of prep work.
She had her back to me, working down a clipboard, pen moving fast. She didn't hear me come in. I should've said something. Let her know I was there.
I didn't.
I stood there longer than I had any reason to, watching her. The set of her shoulders. The way she shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she worked. The loose strand of hair that had come free of her braid and hung against the back of her neck.
She turned.
For a second, neither of us moved.
Then she crossed the kitchen, tossed her clipboard on a counter, and grabbed the lapels of my jacket the way she had that first night. It was as if she'd been considering it all day and had simply run out of patience.
"I need two minutes," she said. "Before I'm back on."
"You've got two minutes."
She kissed me. Not quick, not polite. A kiss that had nothing of work in it, all pressure and need. As if she’d been holding herself together under enormous strain and found exactly three feet of space where she didn't have to.
Her hands tightened on my jacket. I got one arm around her waist and pulled her in, and she made a sound against my mouth that was half frustration and half relief.
When she pulled back, her face was close. Her eyes were steady, but her breathing wasn't.
"That was my two minutes," she said.
"You've got more if you want them."
The corner of her mouth twitched. "I've got a kitchen to run."
She stepped back. Straightened her jumpsuit. Picked up her clipboard from where she'd set it and was already reading down the next item before I'd made it to the door.
I grabbed my crate. Walked out to the floor with my jaw tight and my head considerably less empty than it had been going in.
I told myself she was in the zone. That this event mattered, that we could talk later. I kept telling myself that while the afternoon sped by.
Guests arrived at six. The room was humming by six-fifteen, everything running on schedule. Then one of Nadia's crew found me near the entrance and pulled me aside, keeping her voice low.
The walk-in refrigerator was nowhere near as cold as it was supposed to be, still whirring away. Everything had been sitting and warming for at least an hour, maybe longer.
By the time the woman had moved into a combination of panic and hand-wringing, I was already on my way to the kitchen. I found Nadia beside the open door of the fridge, peering at the controls, her face tight.
She looked at me. "It's nowhere near cold enough," she said, reaching in through the open door. "Damn it, it's probably warmer in there than out here, and yet there's still power."
That sent my gaze to the panel beside her. The labels above the row of switches were faded with age. The setup was archaic enough that it took me a second to notice it: all but one switch was flipped downward.
I reached out and flipped it to match the others. For a second, nothing happened. Then the compressor roared to life. It wasn't the only thing that did, with Nadia cussing under her breath as she slammed first the fridge door, then the panel cover.
That second action told me the fridge hadn't been accidentally switched off.
Nadia was already pivoting. "Get Malakai on the phone. I want to know if anyone was in this kitchen between three and five this afternoon. Footage, witnesses, anything."
I pulled out my phone and called him while she turned to her team and started making calls I didn't have the knowledge to make. I caught fragments while Malakai picked up. Cold appetizers compromised. Main courses fine, they'd gone in hot. Ninety minutes until service.
Malakai answered on the second ring.
"I need security footage from the venue kitchen," I said. "Between three and five today. Someone flipped a switch and shut the walk-in down. This wasn't a fault."
"On it." He was already moving. I could hear it. "I'll get back to you."
When I hung up, Nadia was on her phone, a staff member beside her with a tablet, both of them working fast. I stood back and stayed out of the way. It was the most useful thing I could do.
Within ten minutes, she was running a different operation entirely. I watched her get her supplier on the phone while simultaneously redirecting her team with hand signals I didn't know but her staff clearly did.
One person broke down the compromised cold station. Two moved to the pass-around setup. A server was re-plating on a rolling table, working fast and clean. The backup delivery arrived in under thirty minutes.
I took it at the rear entrance because I was the one standing there, and it went straight onto the bench and into Nadia's hands without breaking stride. She didn't raise her voice once. She didn't repeat an instruction twice.
The kitchen had the energy of people who trusted their commander, and she moved through it like someone who'd done this under worse conditions than a tampered fridge switch.
Her military background was written in every move. Watching her work, I forgot about the cemetery entirely.
The event came together. Not perfectly, but close enough that the Peterson Group coordinator found me near the end of the night and told me it was one of the best-run corporate dinners they'd held in Coogan's Break. She asked me to pass that along to Nadia.
I told her I would.
By ten-thirty, the guests were gone, and we were breaking down. I helped where I could, shifting tables, loading equipment, and running trash to the dumpsters out back. The physical work usually quieted my head. Tonight it wasn't working.
The cemetery visit had cracked something open in me, and watching Nadia handle a crisis that someone had deliberately created had widened the gap.
I kept seeing the headstone. Kept thinking about how much I wanted to be the type of man who deserved to be in her corner.
Kept circling back to the same question I couldn't answer.
I was in the alley behind the venue, flattening cardboard for the recycling bin, when it hit me.
The way it always hit when I wasn't braced for it. A tightening in my chest that started as tension and kept building. My hands found the alley wall without my permission. The cardboard dropped.
I knew what this was. I'd had these before, in the early months after getting out. Less often lately. Almost never until this week.
Three slow breaths. Four. Focus on what's real. The brick under my palms. The damp, cold smell of the alley. The sounds of cleanup from inside.
I was mostly steadied by the time the back door opened and Nadia stepped out.
She saw through it immediately.
"Daemon."
"I'm fine."
She came toward me slowly, the way you'd approach something you didn't want to startle. "You're not fine."
"Wanted some air."
"How long has this been happening?"
"It's an old habit. Nothing to worry about."
She stopped a few feet away. Not frightened. Not pitying. Watching me with those steady green eyes, fully present in a way that made it harder, not easier, to hold myself together.
"A panic attack isn't nothing," she said.
"I'm okay." I pushed off the wall. "Event's done, venue's happy. You handled it perfectly."
She folded her arms. "Don't redirect. What's happening with you?"
"Nothing's happening."
"Daemon." Her voice was quiet but clear. "Something's been off all week. Talk to me."
I picked up the fallen cardboard. Kept my hands busy.
"Today's a hard day," I said. Which was true. Which was also the least of it.
"Your mom?"
I looked at her.
"You go when things get hard," she said. "Back when you told me everything, that's what you said. I remembered."
She'd held onto that detail all this time. Of course she had. "Yeah," I said. "Needed her today more than most."
"So you went to see her?"
"This morning."
"Before you came to help me set up a two-hundred-and-fifty-person event."
"I was fine by the time I got here."
"And now you're not." She took a step closer. "You don't have to be, you know. You're allowed to have a hard day."
Part of me wanted to reach for her. Wanted to close that distance and let her in the way she was offering. Instead, I told her I'd take the cardboard to the bin and come back for the last of the tables. The silence that followed had weight to it.
When she finally spoke, her voice had shifted. Not cold. Considered.
After I came back inside, she directed her staff through the final breakdown without looking at me directly.
She was composed rather than distant, as if those minutes in the alley hadn't happened.
We worked through the rest of it side by side, loading her equipment into the van, saying goodbye to her crew.
In the parking lot, under the harsh yellow security lights, she turned to face me.
"What's happening?" she said. "Not only tonight. All week. What's going on with you?"
I looked at her. This woman who'd become essential to me without my fully tracking how she'd managed it.
The woman I'd sought advice about that morning, sitting in front of a headstone. I'd come away with nothing but the certainty that I was terrified of failing.
I wanted to tell her everything. That I loved her and it scared me more than anything I'd faced, including watching my mother dying by degrees and three years in county lockup. That I didn't know how to be someone's person without losing them.
Instead, I told her it was late, that she'd had a brutal night and needed rest.
She looked at me long enough that I could feel my face heating.
"Talk to me," she said. Her voice was steady, but something in it ached.
"I'm fine, Nadia."
She nodded once. Slowly. Like she was filing something away.
Then she got in her van and drove away.
I stood in the empty lot and listened to her engine fade before checking my phone. Two missed calls from Malakai. Both during the breakdown, when I'd been too busy carrying tables and avoiding conversations to notice.
I called him back. He picked up on the second ring and spoke before I had a chance.
"I've checked the footage."
"And? What've you got?"
"Someone was in that kitchen. Clear as day on the camera above the service entrance. But the file's too big to send. You and Nadia need to come in and look at it together."
I knew he was still there because I could hear him breathing. "It's not anyone I recognize, but you and Nadia are all over this thing. You'll need to see it for yourselves."
"I'll sort it," I said, then hung up and stood there in the empty lot.
Something to deal with. Something concrete and external and solvable, unlike everything else I was carrying tonight.
I told myself it was too late to call now. And I almost believed it. My mom would've had something to say about that. She probably would've had something to say about a lot of things tonight.