Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Sutton
The bell above the door had barely stopped ringing before Sutton’s knees quit on her.
She grabbed the edge of the counter and held on, fingers digging into the laminate until her knuckles ached. Her breath was coming too fast—shallow little gulps that weren’t getting oxygen to the places that needed it.
She’d had enough panic attacks in the year after Penn died to recognize the opening act.
Not here. Not now. You’re at work.
She forced her hands to feel the solid surface under her palms and counted to ten the way her campus counselor had taught her, back when her problems were finals, financial aid, and whether she’d finish her sequential art thesis on time. Back when the name Crenshaw just meant her.
Her gasps echoed in the room. She needed air.
The stoop behind Iron Rose overlooked the alley with a dumpster and the back wall of the check-cashing place.
Someone had tagged it with a spray-painted rooster of genuinely questionable artistic merit.
Not exactly a meditation garden. But the air was cold and smelled of October rather than ink and cleaning solution.
When she sat down on the concrete step and put her head between her knees, nobody was watching.
Sebastian Whitaker had been standing in her shop.
Sebastian Whitaker. With his sharp blue eyes, his pressed jacket, and his hands that had held the gun that killed her brother—he’d walked into Iron Rose on the anniversary of the worst day of her life and said I’m sorry.
AS if those two words could bridge the distance between his life and hers—between the book deals, magazine covers, congressional handshakes, and her cramped studio above the laundromat where the pipes rattled and the heat cut out in February.
I didn’t take a book deal. Or the medal. I didn’t want any of it.
She shoved his voice out of her head. She didn’t care what he wanted or didn’t want.
She didn’t care that he’d looked at her like she was a wound he didn’t know how to stop bleeding.
She didn’t care that when she’d mentioned her brother got a body bag, something behind his eyes had cracked open for half a second before he’d sealed it shut again.
She didn’t care about any of it. She was going to sit on this stoop until she could draw a solid breath, and then she was going to go back inside and finish her shift. Use the ink, the art, to wipe it all away. Afterward, she’d go home and drink some wine and sketch dragons until the day was over.
A manageable plan.
The back door opened, and Dom leaned out, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t push. That was the thing about Dom.
He’d given her a job when her portfolio was thin and her references were nonexistent.
She’d shown up to the interview with dark circles under her eyes and a chip on her shoulder the size of Montana.
He’d looked at her work, looked at her, and said, “Tuesday through Friday, noon to close, we’ll see how it goes. “
He’d never asked about her past. Never googled her, as far as she could tell. In a town this small, that was either remarkable restraint or genuine indifference, and she’d never been sure which. Either way, it was the reason she’d stayed.
“That guy who just left,” Dom said, adjusting the toothpick. “The one who walked out of here like the building was on fire. That the fella I referred to you? From the security outfit?”
Sutton’s stomach dropped. “You sent him?”
“Yeah, Whitaker. Good kid. Quiet. Rents the old Hadley farmhouse out on Miller Road.” Dom said it matter-of-factly, no subtext. Because to Dom, that’s all Sebastian Whitaker was—a new guy in town who worked at the security compound and needed ink.
Dom didn’t watch cable news or follow politics. He probably couldn’t pick the Vice President out of a lineup, let alone the Secret Service agent who’d made headlines for saving the former VP’s daughter.
And apparently, he didn’t know that the artist he’d hired for his shop was the sister of the man that good kid had killed.
“He didn’t like my portfolio,” Sutton said. Her voice came out flat enough to pass for normal.
Dom grunted. “His loss. You need anything?”
“Nope. All good.”
The door closed behind him with a click. Sutton sat on the stoop and sucked in cold air. Once she could breathe again, she tried to reassemble herself into something that could function for four more hours.
When she went back in, the lynx sketch was still on the counter.
She picked it up. The drawing was rough but confident—clean lines, good instinct for negative space.
The lynx was in profile, geometric shapes woven through the body like architecture.
It was the kind of sketch an artist would make, not a client.
She’d have loved it if it had come from anyone else.
She crumpled it in her hand and pitched it at the wastebasket. It hit the rim and ended up on the floor. With one of her boots, she stomped on it like it was a roach.
At two-fifteen, a woman named Jackie wanted a memorial piece for her mother—a hummingbird on her inner wrist, small and precise. Sutton prepped her skin with the stencil, gloved up, and let the needle take over.
The buzz was a frequency she could disappear into.
That was the mercy of this work. When the needle was moving, the ink was flowing, and every atom of her focus was trained on getting the line right.
There wasn’t room for anything else. No dead brothers.
No blue-eyed strangers with steady voices.
No anniversaries. Just the hum, the line, and the slow emergence of something beautiful on skin.
Jackie teared up when she saw the finished piece. “It’s perfect,” she said, her voice thick. “She would’ve loved it.”
Sutton smiled warmly enough to be genuine, contained enough to keep her own grief behind its wall. “I’m glad.”
After Jackie left, she cleaned her station and checked the schedule. One more client at four, then nothing. Dom had a supply run in Ridgeline and was heading out early, which meant she’d close alone. Good. She’d put on her playlist and turn it up loud to block out the silence.
She ate a granola bar from her bag and called it a late lunch.
The studio apartment above the laundromat didn’t lend itself to meal prep—the stove had two burners, one of which worked on a schedule only it understood, and her refrigerator was the size of a dorm fridge and currently held coffee creamer, a questionable yogurt, and three cans of sparkling water.
She’d gotten good at not eating much. You saved money that way, and money was a language she’d learned to speak fluently since the day her life split into before and after.
Before: art school in D.C., a shared apartment in Adams Morgan, a brother who’d buy her coffee, argue about panel composition, and show up at her crits to heckle from the back row. A future that had direction.
After: this. Loneliness, granola bars, endless days.
She caught herself at the crumpled, smashed lynx sketch and tore her gaze away. She grabbed her sketchbook and roughed in a new design—a woman made of thorns, curled around something small and glowing, protecting it or hiding it, the distinction deliberately unclear.
At four, her last client came in—a trucker named Dale who was slowly building a sleeve of Americana. She added a section of Route 66 signage and didn’t think about Sebastian Whitaker or Penn or the anniversary of his death.
Dale was done and out by five. Dom left at six with a wave and a reminder to lock the cash drawer. “See you Tuesday, kid.”
“Tuesday.”
The door closed behind him. The parlor went quiet. Just Sutton and the hum of the neon sign. She pulled up her playlist and piped it through the speakers. At closing time, she began the familiar routine—locking the door, sanitizing the stations, restocking, running the register tape.
The knock came at seven-fifteen, a full fifteen minutes after she’d flipped the sign to CLOSED.
Sutton was behind the counter, counting the cash drawer, when the sharp rap on the glass made her jump. She looked up and saw a young woman standing on the other side—early twenties, red hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a North Face jacket that cost more than Sutton’s monthly rent.
She had the polished, scrubbed look of someone who’d grown up in a house with a lawn service and a college fund, and she was standing on this block in Blackridge’s industrial district as if she’d accidentally fallen through a portal from a different zip code.
Sutton pointed at the CLOSED sign.
The woman knocked again. Leaned close to the glass. “Please. It’s not about a tattoo. I need to talk to you about Penn.”
Sutton froze, the cash drawer open in front of her, a stack of twenties in her hand. Her pulse racheted up and the floor tilted.
Nobody in Blackridge knew her. That was the entire point of staying here—two thousand miles from D.C. and the cable news cycle. A world away from her parents and the look people got when they connected the dots between her face and her brother’s crime.
She should ignore the woman. Walk out the back and go home.
The woman pressed her face against the glass. “Please, Sutton. I know you’re Penn’s sister. I have information about him. I think he was involved in something bigger than what made the news.”
The desperation in the woman’s voice sent a chill down her spine. Or maybe it was the words themselves. …he was involved in something bigger…
Sutton put down the twenties, heart racing. The universe had apparently decided that today, of all days, every ghost she’d outrun was going to catch up with her at once.
The back door still seemed like a good idea. But the woman had found her here; it wouldn’t take much to locate her apartment down the street. She marched to the door, cracked it open. “Two minutes,” Sutton said. “Then you leave.”