Chapter Eleven
Katy
I dropped the keys on the counter and left them there. My purse went on the chair beside the table, and I kicked off my shoes near the back door.
The chamomile tea box was still open on the table from last night, three bags missing from the row. Dread’s mug sat rinsed in the sink where I’d left it after he went to the clinic. I looked around for something else that needed doing, found nothing, and poured myself another cup of coffee.
Ellie was at school. The house held the quiet of a place missing its smallest body -- wider doorways, emptier corners, the refrigerator humming a little louder without her voice to compete with it.
I folded the reusable bags by the back door, stacking them in the order I used them -- produce first, then bread, then canned goods because how you carried them mattered when you were crossing a parking lot.
The routine was deliberate. Calm. The kind of normal that had started feeling possible about three weeks ago and hadn’t stopped feeling like a gift.
The SUV was parked in the gravel drive where Dread had left it after having the entire vehicle checked over again once they knew someone had been through it. I backed it out slowly, gravel crunching under the tires, and the compound gate came into view at the end of the lane.
Cotton stood beside it. His blondish-red beard caught the light, the coarse texture visible even from twenty yards, and his green gaze tracked my approach with the focus of a man who read vehicles as easily as other people read faces.
He didn’t move to open the gate. Didn’t need to.
His hand found the chain without looking, pulled it back with a smooth motion that suggested he’d done this ten thousand times, and when I passed through, he gave me a two-finger wave from the hip.
Not a salute. Something smaller. The acknowledgment of a man who had decided I belonged here without being asked.
Route 61 ran straight through Missouri farmland, cornfields broken by the occasional grain silo and cluster of trees. Heat rippled above the asphalt, blurring the road in the distance. I kept to the speed limit and checked the rearview mirror again.
Same sedan. Same pickup. Neither had been behind me long enough to matter. I checked anyway.
The Harmon’s Foods parking lot was half-empty.
Wide, cracked asphalt ringed by the same flat farmland that had flanked the highway, the building squat and brick-faced with windows that reflected too much sky.
I parked near the entrance. Not the closest space -- those were for people with more groceries or less caution -- but close enough that the walk to the door was short and the sight lines were clean.
Old habits. The kind that lived in muscle long after the brain had decided they might not be necessary.
Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed. That frequency, high and constant, the sound of electricity converted into something harsh enough to read nutrition labels by.
The air conditioning hit my bare arms and raised goose bumps.
Sixty-eight degrees in a building where the parking lot was pushing ninety.
The kind of temperature differential that made your skin tighten and your shoulders hunch.
I grabbed a cart from the corral and pushed it toward produce without pausing to adjust.
My list was on my phone. I didn’t look at it.
Didn’t need to. The order was baked in -- produce first, then bread, then dairy, then the specific brand of apple juice Ellie liked, the one with the yellow label that Dread kept stocked even though she only drank half a box before leaving the rest in the refrigerator door.
I selected apples by feel and checked the expiration date on the bread before dropping it into the cart.
Milk. Cereal. Juice boxes for Ellie. Coffee because Dread went through it at a rate that should probably concern a medical professional.
Then I saw him.
Through the plate glass storefront windows at the far end of the cereal aisle.
Across the lane of traffic that separated the parking lot from the store entrance.
A figure in a gray hoodie, the hood pulled low despite the heat, hands in his pockets, face angled toward the entrance with the stillness of someone who had been standing there long enough to forget he was standing.
My fingers locked around the cart handle.
The plastic ridges bit into my palms, and the sensation traveled up my arms and into my chest and lodged there like something cold and solid.
My knees went soft. The cartilage behind them liquefied in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue and everything to do with the running I’d done from the man in the gray hoodie, and for three full seconds I did not move.
The cereal boxes blurred. Colors smearing at the edges, the cartoon mascots grinning with a brightness that felt obscene given what was happening behind my retinas.
My breath came in shallow pulls. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the pattern automatic because my body had rehearsed this moment in a hundred different parking lots and never gotten it right.
Then I turned the cart hard into the next aisle.
Canned goods. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of tomatoes and beans and creamed corn in dented tins, the labels facing outward in neat rows that someone had arranged.
I pressed my back against the stacked cans.
The metal was cool through my shirt, and the sensation was so specific it cut through the white noise in my head -- cold, solid, present in a way that the gray hoodie across the parking lot was not.
I backed into the shelf hard enough to rattle the cans behind me.
One. Two. Three. I counted each breath, forcing myself to stay where I was instead of bolting for the door.
By five, I could get my phone out of my pocket without fumbling it.
I knew who to call.
The screen was bright. Too bright. I dialed the brightness down with a thumb that didn’t feel connected to my wrist, found Dread’s contact, and typed: He’s here. Parking lot. I’m inside. I’m okay.
Sent it. Lowered the phone. I stayed tucked beside the shelves, one hand braced against the canned goods while I tried not to think about the fact that my ex-husband was standing sixty yards away with his hands in his pockets, watching the grocery store entrance like it was the only door that mattered.
I waited. Through a gap at the end of the aisle, between a display of pasta sauce and a stack of paper towels, I could see the automatic doors and everyone passing through them.
A woman pushed a stroller outside. An elderly man followed with a single grocery bag swinging at his side.
A stock boy came down the aisle with a pallet, forcing me to flatten myself closer to the shelves so he could get past. He barely glanced in my direction before continuing toward the back of the store.
None of them knew what was waiting outside.
I did.
Two minutes. Maybe three. The fluorescent lights hummed.
My phone stayed silent in my hand. Dread was with patients.
He would see the text when he saw it, and until then I was alone in a canned goods aisle with a cart full of apples and bread and the specific brand of apple juice that a seven-year-old had decided was the only acceptable variety on the planet.
I edged back toward the window. Slow. Deliberate.
The cereal aisle was empty now. The plate glass showed the same slice of parking lot -- cars, asphalt, the lane of traffic where a county maintenance truck had parked since I’d last looked.
No gray hoodie. No figure with hands in pockets.
Nothing but empty space where a threat had been, and the absence was its own kind of terror because absence meant movement, and movement meant I didn’t know where he was now.
Circling. Retreating. Gone entirely. The options arranged themselves in my head with the clarity of threats that had been living there for years, and I chose not to pick one. Instead, I finished the list.
Bread crumbs. The olive oil Dread used for everything.
A box of the granola bars Ellie liked for school snacks, the kind with chocolate chips that melted if you left them in a backpack too long.
I moved through the store one aisle at a time, keeping my pace normal when every instinct urged me to hurry.
Pick up the item. Put it in the cart. Move to the next aisle.
Anyone watching would have seen a woman finishing her grocery shopping.
They wouldn’t have known how badly I wanted to get out of there.
Self-checkout. The lane closest to the exit. I scanned each item, bagged them in the reusable bags I’d folded that morning, and walked to the SUV without running.
Chin up. Eyes moving. I crossed the parking lot, opened the rear hatch, and loaded the groceries. Bread crumbs. Olive oil. Granola bars. Things I’d come here to buy, things I’d refused to leave behind because he’d shown up.
Then I got behind the wheel. The keys stayed in my hand.
I stared through the windshield at the rows of parked cars and knew I wasn’t ready to pull onto Route 61. My concentration was shot. Every gray vehicle caught my attention. Every man crossing the lot made me look twice.
So I stayed put. A few minutes later, my phone buzzed.
Dread: Stay there. I’m coming.
I sent back: I’m okay. Just taking a minute.
Ellie was at school. Cotton was on the gate. The man in the gray hoodie had disappeared from the parking lot, and I had no idea where he’d gone.
But I hadn’t abandoned my cart. I hadn’t left the groceries sitting in an aisle. I hadn’t let him chase me out the nearest door. I’d bought the damn granola bars. For today, I was calling that a win.
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