Page 281 of What We Bury

Then I drive back to her.

Because that’s the answer to every question now. Her. Always her.

I’ll be home before she wakes.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

SAGE

“You’re not yourself today.” Jamie’s brow furrows as he lowers the lid of his laptop and studies my face. He’s in a booth today, notes spread out and a half-eaten BLT pushed to the side.

“I’m fine,” I say, topping off his coffee. “Just a rough couple of days.”

“I noticed you weren’t here. Your boss said you were off sick. You feeling well enough to be back?”

I consider lying, but Jamie is the sort of person who can spot a fib at ten paces.

“Yeah, mostly. Just out of it.” Which is close to true.

I’m adrift. The stuff with Eli braided with the home invasion, and then this weird bloated sense of being too loved and not loved enough at the same time. “Are you trying to tell me I look like crap?” I give him a smile, so he knows it’s just a joke. But it lands a little flat.

“You’re too gorgeous to ever look like crap.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “Still, you do seem quiet. And I’d have to be blind not to notice that your guys seem a little more . . .intense today. The big one has been out there since before I got here. He’s sitting in his truck.”

Knox.

Of course Jamie noticed. The man is the size of a small building—he doesn’t exactly blend into the background.

“They’re protective,” I say.

“That’s one word for it.” Jamie smiles, but his eyes stay serious. “You’d tell someone if you were in trouble, right? You wouldn’t just . . . white-knuckle it alone?”

The sincerity in his voice makes my chest ache. I set the coffee pot down and slide into the booth across from him. My section is dead and my boss is in the back, and I need thirty seconds of feeling like a regular person having a regular conversation.

“I haven’t been feeling a hundred percent,” I admit. “Physically and . . . otherwise. I took a couple of days to rest. That’s all.”

“Otherwise?” he repeats. “That’s a word that’s doing a lot of heavy lifting.”

I almost laugh. “You sound like a therapist.”

“I’m a grad student who’s so behind I’m working on my thesis through the summer. I probablyneedtherapy.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Seriously though, you don’t have to tell me anything. But I’m here. If you need someone who isn’t one of the five very large men who follow you around, I’m here.”

“Thank you, Jamie. I mean it.”

He nods and goes back to his laptop. I go back to wiping tables that are already clean, and the normalcy of it—the clatter of dishes, the hum of the fridge, the afternoon light coming through the windows—is both a comfort and a lie. Because nothing about my life is normal right now, and pretending otherwise is getting harder by the day.

It’s been four days since Eli gutted me in Odin’s back room.

Four days since he looked me in the eye and called me easy. Called what we have a phase. Asked if I seriously thought five men could love the same woman and have it mean something.

Those words were like a knife right through my heart, and I still don’t know if I hate him or miss him.

Not knowing is worse than either would be on its own.

When Holden went to him that afternoon, he came home looking like he’d gone twelve rounds with something mean and invisible.

He didn’t tell me much. Just that Eli knew exactly what he’d done and that he was “handling it.”

Which is detective for I have violent thoughts and am exercising restraint so hard it’s giving me an ulcer.