Page 37 of Dread

Chin up. Eyes moving. I crossed the parking lot, opened the rear hatch, and loaded the groceries. Bread crumbs. Olive oil. Granola bars. Things I’d come here to buy, things I’d refused to leave behind because he’d shown up.

Then I got behind the wheel. The keys stayed in my hand.

I stared through the windshield at the rows of parked cars and knew I wasn’t ready to pull onto Route 61. My concentration was shot. Every gray vehicle caught my attention. Every man crossing the lot made me look twice.

So I stayed put. A few minutes later, my phone buzzed.

Dread: Stay there. I’m coming.

I sent back: I’m okay. Just taking a minute.

Ellie was at school. Cotton was on the gate. The man in the gray hoodie had disappeared from the parking lot, and I had no idea where he’d gone.

But I hadn’t abandoned my cart. I hadn’t left the groceries sitting in an aisle. I hadn’t let him chase me out the nearest door. I’d bought the damn granola bars. For today, I was calling that a win.

* * *

The compound gate clicked behind me same as it always did -- metal on metal, a sound that had started meaning something different about three weeks ago. Not just closed. Secured. The finality of a boundary that someone else was maintaining, and I drove the gravel lane with both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the rearview longer than they needed to be.

Dread was on the front porch steps. Still in his clinic clothes -- dark slacks, the button-down with the sleeves rolled to just below the elbows, the collar darkened at the edges with what might have been sweat from the drive home. His phone was in his hand. Screen lit, thumb resting on the glass, and when my headlights swept across the gravel drive, he looked up with an expression I couldn’t read from twenty yards and didn’t try to.

Hours had passed by the time I trusted myself to drive. He’d gotten my text. Between patients, probably. Left early. A man who received message about a threat and responded by putting his keys in his pocket and walking out of a building where people were waiting for him, and the cost of that decision -- the toll of it, the things he’d left undone because my text had arrived -- sat in my chest beside the fear and didn’t make either one smaller.

I killed the engine and sat behind the wheel for another moment. Dread came down the steps and stopped beside the SUV, giving me time to open the door on my own. He waited while I grabbed my purse and climbed out, then rested a hand lightly at my back as we started toward the house. The touch was familiar now, something he offered without thinking and I accepted just as easily. His palm remained there as we crossed the gravel toward the porch.

“The bags are in the back,” I said.

He nodded and went to the rear hatch. He gathered the reusable bags -- produce, bread, the specific brand of apple juice -- and carried them toward the house as if unloading groceries was the most ordinary thing we could be doing right now. I followed him inside, grateful that he treated it that way.

The kitchen smelled like chamomile before we crossed the threshold. He’d put the kettle on earlier. The box sat on the counter, cellophane torn farther than I’d left it, and two mugs waited on the table. I took the chair across from him and wrapped my hands around mine, but neither of us drank.

“He was across the parking lot,” I said. My voice wavered on the first few words, but I kept going. “Gray hoodie. Pulled up despite the heat. Hands in his pockets. Standing there watching the entrance. Like he knew eventually I’d have to come through that door.”

Dread listened with his forearms resting on the table, his attention fixed on me. I told him everything I could remember, and he let me get through it without interrupting or trying to fill in the gaps. Even when I stumbled over a detail and had to backtrack, he waited until I was finished.

When I ran out of things to say, Dread reached for his mug and took a drink. He set it down again and considered me for a moment.

“You did exactly right.”

I stared at him.

There was no but attached. No question about why I’d stayed in the store or whether I should have noticed the man sooner. I’d spent the entire trip back picking apart every choice I’d made, and Dread dismissed all of that with four words.

“I’ll call Fox. Cotton and Hornet’s rotation will be adjusted. We’ll have eyes on the store, the highways, the approaches to town. The brothers know what to look for.”

He could have been discussing any problem that required a solution, except I knew him well enough now to catch what his calm delivery didn’t show. He was worried. Maybe angry too. Whatever he felt about the man showing up at the grocery store, he kept it out of his voice while he told me what would happen next.

I wrapped both hands around my mug. The tea was still too hot to drink, so I held it and concentrated on Dread instead. On what he’d said. On what he hadn’t.

You did exactly right.

I wanted to believe him.

“I almost left the cart,” I said. The confession cost more than it should have. Smaller than the sighting, rawer, the shame of a near-failure that only I had witnessed. “In the cereal aisle. When I saw him. My hand was on the cart handle and my feet were already turning toward the exit and I --” I stopped. Swallowed. The tea steamed between my palms, herbal and faint, and the smell of it filled my sinuses in a way that made my throat tight.

“But you didn’t,” Dread said.

He gave the words no emphasis, offered no explanation to make them easier to accept. But you didn’t. He treated the choice I’d made as settled, something that didn’t need defending or picking apart after the fact.