Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Lucy
The morning was chilly, the kind of October cold that wasn’t quite committed to the cold yet.
I scanned the parking lot before I stepped off the curb.
Left, right, between the cars. All clear.
Just my car, the dumpster, and Mr. Petersen’s Buick, which hadn’t moved since August and was slowly becoming a planter.
Warrick was sitting in an SUV in the shelter lot when I pulled in. I waved at him, and he nodded to me. Dani was behind the desk when I walked in. She looked at me, and a flash of relief crossed her face.
Fucking Andrew. On top of everything else, he now had my BFF worried.
“I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
“I’m sure it is, Luce, what with the hot as hell PI outside.” She handed me coffee. “You sleep?”
“Enough.” Which was generous, but Dani didn’t need to know I’d spent half the night staring at the ceiling while Felony used my bladder as a pillow. “Anything happen this morning?”
“Brian happened. That’s all I’m going to say.”
I took the coffee and went to start morning meds.
Sugar-Free Steff was on the counter, yelling.
Not her conversational yelling or her demanding yelling—her “someone has committed an atrocity against my breakfast” yelling, which turned out to be justified because Brian had given her the tuna instead of the chicken.
I worked through the morning the way I’d worked through yesterday—head down, hands busy, the box in my mind staying shut.
Cleopatra’s antibiotics went smoother today; she was starting to accept the chin-scratch trick, or at least she’d downgraded her resistance from active warfare to sullen compliance.
The kittens were thriving. Dolly the terrier, whose owner had died in a car accident, had eaten her breakfast and let me sit with her in the kennel for ten minutes while she figured out whether I was trustworthy. She decided I was.
I was locking up the med cabinet when my phone rang. Unknown number. Illinois area code.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Not a dead line, and it wasn’t a butt-dial; I could hear breathing. Slow, measured. Someone was there.
“Hello?” I said again and hated that my voice had gotten smaller.
The breathing continued. Even. Patient.
I hung up.
My hand was shaking. Not a lot, but enough that I noticed, and the noticing made it worse, because the noticing came with an avalanche of every other time my hands had shaken like this.
Standing in Andrew’s kitchen after he’d gone through my phone.
Trying to clean the blood from my split lip after he punched me.
Sitting in my car outside his apartment the night I’d decided to leave.
Filling out the lease for my apartment on Birch Street, signing my name three times because my hands wouldn’t stay steady.
And here I was again. Same hands. Same stupid trembling.
Same instinct to fold myself up small, to not mention it, to not make a fuss, to swallow it and carry on and deal with it alone because that’s what I did.
That’s what I’d always done. Making myself smaller was muscle memory by now, and Andrew knew it.
He was counting on it. That was the whole point of the call: not to say anything, just to remind me that he could reach me anytime he wanted.
I looked at my shaking hands. I looked at the phone. I thought about Dani at the front desk and Warrick’s card in my back pocket.
No. Not this time. You don’t get to make me quiet anymore.
I walked straight to the front desk.
“Andrew just called me,” I said.
Dani put down her coffee.
“He didn’t say anything. Just breathed. But I know it was him.”
I said it clearly. I said it at full volume. I said it in the middle of the lobby, where anyone could hear, because the whole point of Andrew’s power over me had always been silence—mine, specifically—and I was done giving it to him.
Dani stood up. “Okay. Okay. Did you save the number?”
“He’s not stupid; he would have used a burner phone and dumped it as soon as he hung up.”
“Luce, Andrew’s a fucking psycho who calls women and breathes at them. That’s peak intelligence right there. Mensa would be proud.” She came around the desk and stood in front of me. “You’re shaking.”
“I know.”
“You told me.”
“I know.”
“No, you told me, Luce. Straight away. You didn’t go home and sit on it and pretend it didn’t happen and text me about it at midnight.” Her eyes were bright. “That’s new.”
It was new. It felt new. It felt like pressing on a bruise and finding that it still hurt, but that I could stand the hurting.
“I’m going to tell Warrick,” I said.
“Good.”
“And then I’m going to finish Bernard’s evening meds, because he’s due at five and he holds a grudge if I’m late, and I refuse to let Andrew interfere with my relationship with a dog.”
Dani smiled. Not the diplomatic front-desk smile. The real one. The one that reached every part of her face and made her look exactly like the girl who’d sat down at my lunch table in fourth grade, took one look at what my mom had packed me to eat, and told me I deserved better.
“That’s my girl,” she said.
Warrick’s window came down before I knocked. He’d seen me coming.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said, which was a terrible way to start a sentence, and I knew it even as the words came out. “I got a call ten minutes ago. No one spoke; it was just silence.”
He picked up a notebook from his dash, flipped to a blank page, and wrote it down. All of it.
“First time?”
“Yes.”
“He’s letting you know he has your number.” He looked up from the notebook. “I can try and trace it. It’s probably a burner, but it’s worth a shot.”
“And then what? He hasn’t done anything.”
“That’s why you write them down,” he said. “Every one. Time, date, what happened, how it made you feel. It builds a case.”
“How it made me feel isn’t evidence.”
“It is when there’s a pattern. The legal system calls it a course of conduct. Each incident looks small. Together, they tell a story.” He held my eyes. “You’re not imagining this.”
I hadn’t said I was. But he’d heard it anyway; the doubt underneath, the residual programming, the voice in my head that still sounded like Andrew saying, “You’re making something out of nothing.”
“I’ll start a log,” I said.
“Good.”
We looked at each other through his truck window. He was holding the notebook and a pen, and he looked like he’d been awake for about thirty hours.
“There’s a diner on Osborne,” I said. “Mel’s. The breakfast plate is to die for. You should eat something before you turn into a piece of furniture in that truck.”
“I’m fine. I ate yesterday.”
“Yesterday!” I stared at him. “Warrick, I have a feral in the back who goes on a hunger strike each week, and she’s still eating more often than you. Go to Mel’s. Tell her Lucy sent you.”
I turned and walked back to the shelter before he could argue.
Warrick walked in at noon carrying two paper bags. Dani’s eyes narrowed in on the bags immediately. She was like a bloodhound; she could sniff out food from three rooms away. “Oh my God, I smell food!”
Warrick set the bags on the front desk and glanced at me. “Mel’s.”
“I know Mel’s. I love Mel’s.” Dani was already opening a bag. “Lucy told you about Mel’s?”
“She told me to eat. I followed instructions.”
“He follows instructions,” Dani said to me, extracting a container of hash browns. “Luce, do you know how rare that is? You need to introduce him to Brian; he still can’t follow instructions to mop a hallway.”
“I can hear you,” Brian called from somewhere in the back.
“Good! That means your ears work, so we know it’s not a listening problem!”
I opened the second bag. Eggs, bacon, toast, a pancake that was either ambitious or delusional in its diameter, and two coffees still hot. A receipt was taped to the lid. In Mel’s handwriting: Your boyfriend tips good.
I peeled it off before Dani could see it. Too late.
“Boyfriend,” she said, reading upside down with the skill of someone who’d been intercepting passed notes since middle school. “Mel thinks he’s your boyfriend.”
I could feel heat creeping up my neck. I risked a glance at Warrick. He was studying the lost dogs poster with the focus of someone reading a crime scene report.
“So.” Dani turned to Warrick, and I knew what was coming. She had her mama-bear look on. “You caught Andrew doing the drive-by?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve been outside Lucy’s building. At night.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll keep doing it? Every night?”
“Yes.”
He’s going to be outside my apartment every night?
My head shot round to stare at him. He looked completely unapologetic about it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Wasn’t sure if he was there to protect me or catch Andrew. They didn’t need to be mutually exclusive, of course, but I figured I had a right to know if he was using me as bait.
Dani nodded slowly, processing. “Can you lift sixty-pound bags?”
Warrick blinked, and my head spun round to stare at Dani now.
“What?”
“Dog food. Sixty-pound bags. We get deliveries every other week, and Brian throws his back out every single time. Can you lift them?”
“Yes.”
“Can you fix a leaking faucet? The utility sink’s been dripping for a month, and Margaret won’t call a plumber because she says it builds character.”
“I can fix a faucet.”
“Can you handle Brian?”
Warrick glanced toward the hallway, where the distant sound of a mop hitting a bucket in an erratic rhythm confirmed Brian was still alive and still terrible at mopping.
“Define handle.”
Dani grinned. “You’ll do.” Then she turned to me: “He can stick around.”
“He didn’t ask for your approval.”
“He’s getting it anyway.” She picked up her coffee and saluted Warrick with it. “Welcome to the madhouse. Don’t feed Cleopatra, don’t touch Bernard, he gets grumpy with men, and if Sugar-free Steff gives you the sad eyes, she’s lying. She already had breakfast.”
Warrick caught my eye and smiled wide. “Good to know, especially since I plan on being around. A lot.”
Something low in my stomach flipped over.
His grin should be illegal. It turned his face from intimidating to utterly gorgeous—dark, slow, the kind of grin that suggested he knew exactly what he’d just said and was enjoying watching it land.
Combined with the look in his eyes, which were promising something I wasn’t going to think about, I was in serious trouble.