Page 37 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

“Okay.”

“I’m glad you were right down the hall the whole time. That mattered. That’s why I could say the things I said.”

His arms tighten.

He drives me back to the motel. Our hands are laced on the seat between us. The argument about Lacey is still in the air, unresolved and alive, but it’s coexisting now with everything else. The anger and the love and the fear and the hope and the self-blame and the truth I said out loud in a beige room.

All of it held together. All of it carried.

19

Zoe

Going back to the diner feels like visiting a grave.

Not the building’s. Mine. The version of me who wiped counters and poured refills and measured her life in tips and shifts is gone. The woman walking through the door of the Timber Creek Diner this morning is wearing the same face, but everything underneath has changed.

Ryker’s with me. So is Brock.

Brock is the fifth member of the team I’ve met and the first one who looks like he might actually enjoy something. He’s built like Ryker but carries himself lighter, with an easy energy. When Ryker introduced us he smiled full wattage and said, “So you’re the one who got this man to fall.” Which means Ryker’s been talking about me to his team in ways that include big things.

The diner hasn’t changed. Red vinyl booths still sticky in the heat. Chalkboard menu still listing the Tuesday cherry pie special in Greta’s careful block letters. The bell over the door still jingles bright and cheerful when we walk in.

Greta comes through the pass-through before the bell stops ringing.

She’s exactly how I remember. Broad-shouldered, auburn-haired, same red apron she’s worn for years. She looks up from the plate she’s carrying, sees me, and almost drops it.

“Zoe.” She says my name the way people say the names of the dead when they see them alive. “Oh my God. Zoe.”

She crosses the diner in four strides, setting the plate down on a nearby table and wraps me in a hug that smells like flour and fryer oil. She’s crying. I’m crying. The two customers at the back booth pretend not to watch.

“I thought you were dead,” she says into my hair. “The sheriff said voluntary abandonment. I told them you wouldn’t just leave without telling me, but they said young women move on all the time and I believed them because what else could I believe?”

“You couldn’t have known, Greta. Nobody knew. That’s how he designed it.”

She holds me at arm’s length and studies me. The weight I’ve lost. The shadows under my eyes. How my eyes move to the door every time it opens.

“You’re different,” she says.

“I’m different,” I agree.

Ryker hangs back at the counter with a coffee he doesn’t drink, facing the door. Brock takes a booth near the back with a clear view of the parking lot. They’re not here for pie.

Greta brings me coffee without being asked. The right mug. The one with the cat on it from my collection that she kept behind the register. Too weak, too sweet. Exactly how I used to make it here. I take a sip and have to set it down and press my fingers against my eyes.

“The man who used to come in,” she says, sitting across from me. “Tyler. The marshals asked me about him.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I barely saw him. He came during my prep hours when I was in the back. I saw him once through the window. Handsome. Clean-cut. The kind of man you’d want your daughter to bring home.” She pauses. “I should’ve paid more attention.”

“If you’d been out front he would’ve come at a different time. He studied this place. He knew your schedule. You being in the kitchen wasn’t negligence. It was his strategy.”

She reaches across the booth and takes my hand. We sit in the morning light holding hands over a table where I used to eat lunch and do crossword puzzles and believe the world was small and safe.

“I kept your mugs,” she says. “The ones you had brought in. The hippo, the fox, the hyena. I washed them even though nobody was using them. It just seemed wrong to put them away.”

The bell over the door jingles.