Just to prove he’s real. That I was real. That the restaurant actually happened and I didn’t hallucinate the moment someone finally looked at me and stayed.
Then I’ll come back.
I’ll be Beth Taylor again.
I’ll enter my codes and drink my good coffee and water my succulent and be fine.
But first, I need to see him.
Even if it’s Thursday.
Even if he’s not there.
Even if this is the worst decision I’ve made since I smiled at him across a restaurant and he smiled back.
The sun comes up somewhere around hour two. I don’t really notice. I’m too busy having a mental breakdown in my rearview mirror.
“This is fine,” I tell my reflection. “This is a perfectly normal thing to do. People drive four and a half hours to deliver cookies to mobsters all the time. It’s a hobby. Like scrapbooking. Or murder.”
My reflection doesn’t look convinced.
She looks like someone who’s about to make a series of choices that will definitely require explaining to a federal marshal with kind eyes and excellent forearms.
“I’ll be back before Saul checks in,” I tell her. “He won’t even know. It’s fine.”
It’s not fine. Nothing about this is fine. But I keep driving.
Mile marker after mile marker. Town after town. Each one taking me further from Beth Taylor and closer to whoever I was before.
I’m almost there when I realize I don’t have a plan.
Like, at all.
I’m just going to... what? Walk into the restaurant? Leave cookies on his table? Wait in the parking lot like a deranged Girl Scout?
“I’ll figure it out. I’m very good at impulsive decisions with no backup plan. It’s my signature move,” I whisper.
I pull off the highway.
Ten more minutes to the restaurant.
I’m sweating in places that don’t even have names in medical textbooks.
I’m really doing this.
I’m really about to stalk a mobster in broad daylight, wearing a disguise that wouldn’t fool a parking meter.
Saul is going to kill me.
Or relocate me.
Or both.
But Dario is somewhere in this city.
And I’m about to find him.
Chapter Eleven
