The Maverick (Dominion Hall #17)

Chapter 1

REBECCA

The couple at table seven had been nursing their she-crab soup for forty minutes.

I knew because I'd been watching the clock the way I always did on slow shifts. The way you learn to when every hour has a dollar value and the math matters.

The Carolinian hummed around me, low and warm, candlelight catching the rims of wine glasses and the white tablecloths that always made me think of something fancy I couldn't quite name.

Outside the tall windows, Charleston moved in that slow way it had, like the whole city had agreed to take its time.

I refilled their water without being asked. Smiled. Moved on.

That was the job. Keep moving. Keep smiling. Make them feel like the only people in the room.

I was good at it. I'd always been good at it.

Back home in Caton's Chapel, you learned early that the whole point of a smile was making someone else comfortable, and I had been making people comfortable since I was old enough to reach a counter.

I grew up watching my mama do it—smoothing over hard moments with sweet words and a soft laugh, stretching thin things into enough.

It was a skill, really. Nobody ever called it that, but it was.

The hostess seated a new table in my section, and I clocked them before I crossed the floor.

Four people. Two couples, probably. Nice clothes—not flashy, but the kind of effortless that cost money.

The women had the kind of hair that didn't frizz in Charleston humidity, which I'd come to understand was either genetics or a very expensive product. Probably both.

I introduced myself, rattled off the specials, poured water.

They were kind enough. Distracted by each other in the way people were when they weren't really out to eat—they were out to be somewhere nice, to mark an ordinary day as an occasion.

I understood that impulse, even if I'd never been able to afford it.

When I turned back toward the server station, my phone buzzed against my hip.

I didn't reach for it. I already knew. My Venmo notifications had been going off all week in that particular way—not because money was coming in, but because it was going out.

The app had a way of summarizing the damage in cold, cheerful numbers, and I didn't need to see them right now.

I knew the damage. I'd done the math in my head three times before my shift started.

Rent was due in nine days.

I was four hundred and twelve dollars short.

The number lived in my chest like a stone, and I'd gotten good at working around it, the way you learn to breathe around a bruised rib. Carefully. It was always there.

I'd picked up the extra lunch shifts. I'd taken the sections the other servers didn't want—the four-tops near the kitchen, where the noise made it hard to hear orders clearly—and I'd smiled my way through every single one of them.

I'd skipped the good shampoo when the drugstore brand worked fine.

I'd eaten before my shifts so I didn't spend money on a meal.

I'd done everything I knew how to do, and the number was still four hundred and twelve dollars.

At the end of the bar, two of my coworkers were laughing about something, their voices low and easy. One of them—a girl named Priya who had a finance degree from Clemson and was waiting tables while she figured out her next move—was talking about a wine trip to France she was planning for spring.

I refilled the bread basket for table three and didn't let myself listen.

France. I'd never been out of the country.

I'd barely been out of Tennessee until I started following the seasons.

Key West last winter—that had felt like the edge of the world.

The water down there was a color I hadn't known existed outside of photographs, and I'd stood on the beach my first evening and cried a little, quiet and private, because it was so beautiful and because I hadn't expected to feel so small.

Charleston was different. Charleston was old in a way that Gatlinburg wasn't—not the fake-old of tourist shops selling heritage they'd polished for sale, but genuinely layered, heavy with history I didn't entirely understand.

I'd been here three weeks and I still felt like I was walking through a place that had an inside joke I hadn't been let in on.

I liked it, anyway.

Maybe I'd meet someone. The thought drifted through my mind the way it sometimes did on slow nights—a quiet wondering.

I was twenty-three. I hadn't had a real boyfriend since high school, and that had been less a relationship and more two people being bored in the same county at the same time.

Since then, it had mostly been me and the guitar and the next city on the map.

But sometimes, I let myself think about it.

I wondered what dating as an adult even looked like when you had no money. I'd done the mental inventory before—catalogued it like a sensible woman, because wanting things didn't mean ignoring reality.

Charleston had the waterfront. That was free.

The Battery, I'd heard, was just a seawall you could walk along and look at the harbor, and that cost nothing.

There were parks. There were free concerts sometimes—I'd seen a flyer stapled to a telephone pole on my walk in.

There was the kind of date that was really just walking somewhere pretty and talking, and I thought I could do that.

I thought I'd be good at that, actually.

I'd grown up making something out of nothing, and making something out of nothing was another word for creativity.

I just had to meet someone first.

The thought made me snort quietly to myself as I pushed through the kitchen door. As if that were the easy part.

The table that humbled me came in at eight-fifteen.

I didn't see it coming. That was the thing about the moments that got you—they never announced themselves.

They were a group of six, young, my age or close to it, and they had the loose, easy confidence of people who'd grown up knowing their place in a room was secure.

I took their drink orders, smiled, did everything right.

And then one of them—a man with wire-rimmed glasses and the precise diction of someone educated somewhere with a name people recognized—looked up from the menu and asked me, conversationally, the way people asked things when they didn't think the answer would be interesting:

"Where'd you go to school?"

I felt it move through me like cold water.

I had a prepared answer. I'd developed it over years of moments exactly like this one, refined it the way you refined anything you had to use often.

"Oh, I didn't end up going," I said, light and easy, like it was a choice I'd made rather than a door that had never quite opened for me.

"Went straight into working. Figured I'd learn on the job. " I smiled. I delivered it perfectly.

He nodded and went back to his menu. The moment passed.

I carried it with me for the rest of the shift.

It wasn't his fault. He hadn't meant anything by it. People asked, the way they asked where you were from or what you did—reflex questions, filler, the conversational equivalent of treading water. He hadn't looked at me differently after. He'd just looked back at the menu.

But I'd heard it the way I always heard it, layered and private: Where'd you go to school? Which meant Who are you? Which meant What are you worth?

And I knew what the honest answer was. I was a girl from a mountain holler in East Tennessee who probably could have gone to University of Tennessee on a music scholarship if anyone had told her that was a thing she could apply for.

I was a girl whose parents were kind and simple and hadn't known the questions to ask.

I was a girl who'd learned "Rocky Top" on guitar at nine years old and sang it at every school talent show and had more natural ability in her left hand than most people developed in a decade, and none of it had mattered—because ability without access was just a room with a locked door.

I'd grown up with a lot of locked doors.

I counted my tips in the parking lot behind The Carolinian, in the cold, under a lamp that buzzed faintly overhead. I sorted the bills the way my daddy had taught me—ones on the outside, larger bills folded inside. When I was done, the number was better than I'd hoped and still not enough.

Four hundred and twelve dollars.

Now, three hundred and seventy-nine.

I stood there a moment in the January air, and I looked up at the sky.

You couldn't see many stars here. Too much light.

I missed the sky over Caton's Chapel, where the dark was real and the stars were stacked three deep.

There, you could almost convince yourself that a life could be enormous, if you wanted it badly enough.

I tucked the money into the inner zip pocket of my bag and started the walk back to the apartment I shared with three strangers I'd found on a Facebook group for short-term roommates.

It wasn't bad. It reminded me of home, actually—the noise, the overlap of other people's lives, the way the refrigerator was always organized according to someone else's logic.

There was a girl named Tasha who left her dry shampoo on the bathroom shelf and didn't seem to mind when I used it.

There were two guys—Devon, who worked restaurant hours like mine and understood the exhaustion of a double shift without needing it explained, and Geoff, who was from New York City and worked in something finance-related that I didn't entirely understand, and who quoted books in conversation like someone who'd grown up in a house full of them.

Geoff made me self-conscious. Not because he was unkind—he wasn't—but because he was so thoroughly from a world I'd only ever glimpsed at the edges, and I was aware around him of every gap in my education the way you were aware of a missing tooth.

I found myself choosing my words more carefully when he was in the room.

Laughing a half-second after everyone else while I worked out the reference.

I turned onto my street and my guitar case waited in my mind like a promise. Tomorrow was my day off. I'd emailed two coffee shops and a wine bar about playing for tips, and one of them had written back.

Thirty dollars guaranteed, plus whatever I made from the tip jar.

I'd take it.

I always took it.

Because somewhere underneath the stone in my chest and the three hundred and seventy-nine dollars was a voice that still believed in something, even when it was inconvenient, even when it was impractical, even when no one around me could explain how that belief was supposed to get me anywhere.

The voice sounded a little like my idol, Dolly Parton.

I smiled in the dark, to no one, and kept walking.