“I…”
“Do you have a car?” Mom asks suddenly.
“Mom!”
“What? He brought you here, didn’t he?”
“That’s not the point!”
“Hi,” Nick says, staring up at Elijah through strands of my hair.
“Hey, kiddo.” Elijah smiles. “And yes, I have a car. Do you need a lift home?”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that,” I cut in hurriedly. “You’ve already done so much.”
“It’s no trouble.” Elijah smiles. “It’s getting late, it’s cold, and you look like you have your hands full.” He locks eyes with me and gives me the same smile that melted my heart all those years ago. “I’m happy to help.”
“Excellent,” Mom says, pushing past me and shoving the cart toward Elijah. “These too.”
I’m going to die from embarrassment. “Thank you,” I say softly over the top of Nick’s head. “You really don’t have to.”
Elijah holds my gaze until warmth seeps into my cheeks. “I want to,” he says, and my heart skips a beat.
9
ELIJAH
What am I doing?
Inserting myself into Calliope’s life like this is hardly fair. One wrong move and I’ll end up being the creepy guy she doesn’t remember, and the moment she does remember, I’ll look even weirder for sticking around.
But I can’t stop myself.
She looked like she was holding herself together at the seams when she came out of the grocery store with a child in her arms and an elderly woman at her side. Whatever the emergency was, thankfully, it didn’t involve any injuries that I could see.
Calliope’s mother, Betty, sits next to me in the passenger seat while I drive while Calliope and her son Nick take up the back seat. She introduced me quickly, then focused on calming Nick’s tears and promising him all sorts of things to soothe him once they got home.
She has a kid.
Did she have a kid when we met? He doesn’t look much older than four at a guess, so it must have been after. Does that mean there’s a father in the picture? If there were, surely, she would call him during a time like this?
It’s not my place to ask so I keep my curiosity to myself while following the GPS to Calliope’s home, but my attention lingers on her. I sneak various glances at her in the rearview mirror under the guise of being extra vigilant on the road with a child in the back seat.
“So, who are you?” Betty asks suddenly, her piercing eyes locked onto me.
“Mom, this is Elijah. I already said,” Calliope hisses from the back seat while attempting to keep the seatbelt out of Nick’s mouth.
“So? I’m just making conversation,” Betty replies.
“As she said, I’m Elijah.”
“How do you two know each other?”
Calliope meets my gaze in the rearview mirror for half a second. “We’re working together,” I explain. “Calliope was giving me a tour of a warehouse when she got that call.”
“And you just offered to drive her?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
