Page 36 of Fate, Interrupted

I don’t know exactly when she came out of the cleaners, whether she saw the beginning or caught the middle, but she saw the end; saw the wolf in my eyes. She saw the strength that was wrong for a man and the three men on the ground. And now she is looking at me from across the street with an expression I can’t name. It sits in my chest with a weight the fight didn’t put there.

It recoils.

That’s the only way to describe it. A rapid withdrawal, pulling back from her gaze.

She saw me. Really saw me. The one underneath the composed surface. The one that puts a man into the sides of delivery vans and leaves them on the pavement.

She saw that. And she is standing very still across the street. And I have no idea what to do with this.

I look at her and she stares back at me.

Her expression doesn’t change, but her eyes do. Whatever is moving through them I don’t have the right to cross the street and ask about. Not right now. Not with blood on my mouth and three men on the pavement and it’s still close enough to the surface that I can feel it at the edges of everything.

I get in my pickup and close the door behind me. The engine turns over, steady and mechanical. I pull away from the curb without checking the mirror. Because she knows what I did, what I am, and looking at her again isn’t going to change the accounting.

Two weeks of the patient work of being someone she might trust. Then I go and put it on a sidewalk in front of her and her friend.

The truck moves through the intersection, and the cleaners disappears behind me. The restlessness that drove me there this morning is gone, replaced by the weight of what I just did. I can’t undo it.

She saw the wolf. Enough to be frightened.

And I drive away before I know what she thinks about that. This is either the most composed decision I’ve made today or the worst one.

I genuinely cannot tell which.

Chapter eleven

Norah

Penny always adds cinnamon to the coffee grounds.

She’s been doing it since she was twelve years old and decided that the coffee our father made was unnecessarily grim, and she’s never once wavered on this position despite decades of evidence that most people consider it eccentric. The coffee smells warm and slightly sweet, like cinnamon rolls without the frosting, and on most mornings I love it.

Recently divorced, Penny lives in a two-bedroom walk-up apartment adjacent to her old neighborhood, only three blocks from the expansive single-family home where she and her husband used to live. Now, he’s in Richmond with his secretary, living his best cliché of a life, and Penny is skimping every dime she has to keep her kids going to the same tony private high school. I love her, but I want something better for her and my nieces.

I don’t know how to help them get it.

This morning I’m sitting at her kitchen table with her across from me. I drink the cinnamon coffee anyway. It isn’t helping.

The morning light comes in thin and sideways through the gap in the curtains, catching the steam rising from our mugs and turning it briefly golden before it dissolves. Outside, a delivery truck rolls past, slowly enough that I hear the tires against the pavement. A dog begins howling two floors below, and someone starts a car on the street.

I haven’t slept well in days.

I’m not telling Penny that. She is three years older than me and has always known when I’m bothered before I’m ready to admit it.

Right now, I’m on the inconvenient side of that.

“Someone saw you the other night,” she says.

Her voice is matter-of-fact. She gives me the information and waits to see what I do with it.

I blow across the top of my coffee. “What?”

“Hannigan’s,” she says. “Someone who knows someone. You know how it goes.”

I do know how it goes. Larkin may be a city, but gossip still travels like it belongs to a town with one stoplight.

“It was trivia night,” I say. “Half the neighborhood was there.”