CHAPTER 3
Parking Lot
°°°
Wren slept badly that night, which she'd expected, though she didn't cry, which surprised her a little, because eighteen months ago a night like that would have ended in the bathroom with the shower running so Eli wouldn't hear.
She picked him up from her sister's at six, the two of them meeting on Dana's porch in the gray, unfinished light of not-quite-morning, Eli asleep on Dana's shoulder in the oversized way three-year-olds slept, boneless and total, like his whole small body had signed a contract with unconsciousness and intended to honor it fully.
"Rough one?" Dana asked, handing him over, the transfer practiced and gentle enough that Eli didn't stir.
"Dean's out."
Dana's face did the thing it always did when Dean's name came up — a kind of controlled flattening, the face of a woman holding back several sentences she'd promised Wren she'd stop saying out loud. "Since when?"
"Since apparently a few weeks. I found out from a stranger's text last night and then he actually showed up at my job like the text was just a courtesy heads-up."
"Wren."
"I'm fine. Somebody stepped in before it went anywhere." She didn't elaborate on who, mostly because she didn't entirely know how to explain a man who'd said maybe forty words to her total and had somehow left a bigger impression than eighteen months of Dean's actual sentences.
Dana studied her the way older sisters do when they're deciding whether to push.
She decided not to, which Wren was grateful for, because she didn't have a version of the story ready that wouldn't require explaining the odd, unhelpful way her chest had gone warm and unsettled around a stranger she hadn't even given her name to.
She got Eli home, got him fed, got him down for his morning nap with the exact ritual he required — two books, the hallway light left on a crack, the stuffed rabbit positioned so its ear touched his cheek, not his hand, cheek — and then she sat at her kitchen table with her laptop and the storefront lease paperwork and tried to make the numbers mean something other than what they meant, which was that she was still eleven hundred dollars short of the deposit and now, apparently, also fighting a legal battle she'd thought was over.
She pulled up the restraining order file, the one she kept in a folder labeled Recipes so nobody who ever borrowed her laptop would think twice about opening it, and read through the violation-reporting process for the fourth time in eighteen months, hoping the words might rearrange themselves into something more useful than they had the first three times.
A text came in. Number she didn't recognize.
He's not going to stop just because a stranger stood there. You know that, right?
Same phone. Same unnervingly close interest in her life.
She typed, finally, the question she should have asked the first night: Who are you and what do you want.
The reply took eleven minutes, long enough that she'd nearly given up expecting one.
Someone who watched what he did to you the first time. Not going to watch it happen again. That's all you need to know for now.
It wasn't reassuring. It also wasn't threatening, not exactly, which put it in a category of communication Wren didn't have a folder for.
She locked her phone and set it face-down on the table, the way she used to set down a drink she'd decided not to finish, and went back to numbers that refused to add up any better than they had ten minutes ago.
By afternoon, dressed for her shift, hair still damp, she found herself standing at her own front door doing something she hadn't done in longer than she wanted to admit: checking the street twice before she stepped outside.
Not because she expected Dean to be sitting there.
Because eighteen months ago she'd learned that not checking was the mistake that got you caught off guard, and some lessons didn't uninstall themselves just because the danger they were built for went quiet for a while.
The street was empty. She got in her car and drove to work with the radio off, the better to hear anything that didn't sound right, though she couldn't have said what that would sound like if it came.
The Roadhouse was quieter on a Wednesday, which usually meant an easier shift and tonight meant more time alone with her own thoughts than she especially wanted.
She restocked the well, cut fruit, ran through the same rhythm she ran through every night, and told herself she wasn't watching the door for one leather cut and one unhurried walk in particular.
She was watching the door for one leather cut and one unhurried walk in particular.
He came in a little after nine. Same table.
Back to the wall. He didn't make a production of finding her eyes across the room, didn't do the lingering-look thing men did when they wanted credit for restraint they weren't actually showing — he just nodded, once, the same economical nod from the parking lot, like he was checking a box on a list only he could see: still standing, still fine, good.
She brought his whiskey over without being asked to bring anything, which she told herself was just good service and knew, even as she thought it, wasn't entirely true.
"You didn't have to come back tonight," she said, setting the glass down. "After last night."
"Wasn't planning on skipping my own bar over a guy who couldn't hold his ground for five seconds." A small, dry note in it — not quite a joke, but adjacent to one, offered carefully, like he was testing whether she had room for it tonight.
She found, a little to her own surprise, that she did. "Five seconds felt longer from where I was standing."
"Most things do, from where you're standing.
" He said it simply, no weight thrown behind it, but something in the way he said it — like he understood the difference between a threat lasting five seconds and a threat lasting five seconds while your whole nervous system relived every threat that came before it — landed somewhere she hadn't expected to be touched tonight.
"You know my name," she said. Not a question.
She'd worked it out sometime around three that morning, staring at the ceiling: Dana knew everyone at the Roadhouse by reputation if not by face, and the club came in often enough that word traveled both directions.
He'd have heard it by now, from someone, even if she hadn't given it to him herself.
Something crossed his face — not surprise exactly. More like the small, private satisfaction of a man watching someone else do the same kind of careful math he did. "Wren."
Hearing her actual name in his voice, after the deliberate nothing she'd offered him the night before, did something complicated to her chest. It felt like a door she'd closed on purpose being opened from the other side, gently, by someone who'd clearly noticed it was locked and chosen to knock instead of forcing it.
"You could've asked around and gotten it faster than you did," she said. "You waited."
"You didn't want to give it to me." He said it like the simplest fact in the world, no accusation in it, no wounded-ego undertone the way it would've come out of half the men she'd known. "Didn't seem like my business to go get it some other way just because I could."
She didn't have a ready response for that. Most men either pushed until she gave them something or sulked when she didn't; she didn't have practiced armor for a man who simply respected the door and waited to be let through it properly.
"Silas," she said, testing the shape of his name out loud for the first time, the way he'd tested hers. "That's a church name."
"Grew up with a mother who had opinions about that. Didn't stick, obviously." A ghost of something almost like humor around his eyes. "Everybody just calls me Preacher now anyway. Long story."
"I've got time." She didn't, really — table six was flagging her down, and the well needed restocking, and in nine minutes she had four more orders lined up in her head the way she always did — but she said it anyway, and meant it more than she expected to.
"Another night," he said, which wasn't a no, and they both seemed to understand that.
She went to handle table six. When she came back twenty minutes later to check on him, he'd left cash under the empty glass — enough to cover the whiskey and more besides, folded so it wouldn't blow off the table if the door opened — and he was gone.
She stood there a second longer than the moment required, the bill in her hand, something warm and unfamiliar sitting low in her chest that she didn't have an immediate name for, mostly because she hadn't let herself feel it in so long she'd half forgotten what it was called.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket during her next break. Not the stranger this time.
Unknown number, different one.
You looked comfortable talking to that biker tonight. Careful who you let get close to that kid of yours. Men like that don't stay soft forever.
Her stomach dropped, cold and sudden, the warmth from a moment ago curdling into something else entirely.
She looked up automatically, scanning the bar, the door, the dark windows facing the lot, though she already knew — with the sinking certainty of a woman who'd learned to recognize the shape of being watched — that whoever had sent it wasn't going to be standing somewhere obvious.
She put the phone away with hands that weren't quite steady and finished her shift on autopilot, the good feeling from twenty minutes ago packed away somewhere she couldn't currently reach, replaced by the older, more familiar sensation of being observed by someone who wanted her to know it.
Someone out there was watching her closely enough to know who she talked to.
And she had absolutely no idea if that someone was Dean, or someone working for Dean, or the same anonymous voice that kept warning her about him — which meant, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, she wasn't sure anymore which direction the danger was actually coming from.