Grabbing her hairbrush from the drawer, she pulled the elastic from the tail of her braid and ran the spines through her hair. She always used a ton of hairspray to make sure it didn’t fall out during the day, and if she didn’t wash it out each night, the result in the morning was more than painful.
Tomorrow would be another long day. She’d called the neighbor kid and asked him to pick up the destroyed plants and trash them for some extra cash, but she’d need to do something to fix the flower beds themselves so they didn’t look like someone had been digging up land mines.
Then there was the dance. Another night of being hypervigilant, this time in the darkness of the high school gym, keeping kids from spiking the drinks, stopping them from making out in secluded hallway corners, and watching for threats in every face.
Hoping to wash away the events of the last few weeks down the drain, she stepped under the warm water, eyes closed, face turned up into the spray. Her hands swiped down from forehead to jaw to the base of her neck, her fingers once again coming into contact with the bump. Like a timeline in motion, events from the last several years moved toward her, speeding up as each got closer.
The betrayals.
The divorce.
The aftermath at the station.
The move to New Mexico.
The job offer at Tejeda Springs.
The move back to San Antonio.
The leak in her roof.
The broken air-conditioning.
The raid on the high school.
The unexpected fire alarm.
The break-in at the greenhouse.
The flooding in the girls’ locker room.
The dug-up flower beds.
The phone calls.
The kiss.
The active shooter threat.
The cut internet.
The sight of Jess with Lucas.
The appearance of her father at the game tonight.
For the first time since she started the new job, she allowed herself to groan aloud. It seemed like tonight was some sort of macabre cherry on top of a shit sundae.
Allowing herself another thirty seconds of her pity party—table for one—she rinsed off and stepped out of the shower. She’d no more than wrapped a towel around her wet hair when her phone pinged.
If she was going to start getting texts from one of those internet numbers, she would scream. It was the middle of the night, for fuck’s sake. She wrapped a towel around her torso, then looked at her screen.
Lucas.
For a brief moment, she considered letting the text go unanswered. Let him stew, the rat bastard. That would teach him to bestow THE KISS, invite her to a sacred Sunday outing with him and his son, and then let his ex-girlfriend paw him at the very public homecoming game.
She sighed. Her exhaustion was making her irrational. He was not Knox, she reminded herself again. He wasn’t cheatingon her. She knew Jess wasn’t his girlfriend. She also knew that they both agreed not to be public about… whatever this was… in front of people from school, so it wasn’t like he was going to create a fuss tonight and violate that agreement, claiming her like some over-the-top knight in shining armor.
Standing there in her bathroom, practically naked, she debated what to do. Did she read and answer the text? Did she read it and let him suffer, waiting for the bouncing dots and a reply? Did she ignore it? Delete it without reading it? Why was this so difficult to deal with right now?
