“Thanks,” I murmur. “I don’t need a ride home.” I glance down at the scarf that’s still wrapped around my hand. “I need to get to Sedona.”
They both look at me. Wyatt with understanding. Finn with a note of disbelief, maybe even sympathy. He steps closer to my bed. Then he does something I don’t expect. He reaches over and grips my shoulder. Brief. Firm. The contact of a man who doesn’t do sentiment but is doing it anyway.
“Go get her, Beckett,” he says. And walks out.
Wyatt lingers a moment. Puts his hand on the doorframe. “Call if you need anything.”
Then he’s gone too.
I spent three weeks engineering the perfect context for a confession. The restaurant, the brownstone, the neighborhood walk. Every variable accounted for except the one that mattered: Ella.
I tried to control the delivery of every important truth in this relationship, and every attempt to control it made the explosion worse.
No more. No plan. No strategy. No engineered context. Just me and the words I need her to hear and whatever comes after.
I pick up my phone. Scroll to my private pilot’s contact record and tap his number.
“Ray. It’s Alec.” My voice is rough. I clear it. “What’s the status on the jet’s refurb?”
“Wrapped up five days ago, sir.”
“Good. How fast can you get me to Sedona, Arizona?”
A pause. The sound of a man recalculating his morning. “I can have the jet prepped and ready for you in ninety minutes, Mr. Beckett. Flight time is about four and a half hours.”
“Do it. I’ll be there.”
CHAPTER 30
ELLA
Hal Mosley orders the same thing every week. Two eggs over medium, rye toast, coffee with one cream. He’s been doing it since before I started at the Red Rock, and the day he orders something different is the day I call the authorities.
“Looking good today, Hal.” I set his plate down and top off his mug without asking. “How’s the knee?”
“Still attached.” He shakes hot sauce onto his eggs like he has stock in antacids. “You look tired, sweetheart.”
“Long week.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
I laugh, or something close to it, and move on. Hal goes back to his eggs. I go on being the version of myself that works best here: capable, warm enough, present enough to pass. The version that earns as many smiles as tips, remembers the regulars’ orders, and doesn’t fall apart between the coffee station and the dessert case.
I don’t need to be here. I have more money in a savings account than the Red Rock grosses in a year. Maybe several years. But two million dollars can’t pour Hal his coffee orremember that the woman at table six is allergic to sesame or argue with Tony about whether the jukebox needs new songs.
Money doesn’t make good company. The diner is loud and alive and full of people who need things from me that I know how to give, and right now, being needed for something I’m good at is the only thing keeping me upright.
Lisa catches my eye from the register and tilts her head in an unspoken question.You okay?
I nod. She doesn’t believe me, but she lets it go.
The afternoon is thinning out. Four tables occupied, the lunch rush long gone, the light through the front windows turning amber. I’m restocking the napkin dispensers when the hurt I’ve been medicating with busy work finds me again.
It’s not a thought so much as a physical sensation. A hollowness behind my ribs where his voice used to sit, where the low sound of him saying my name used to land and stay warm for hours. My body keeps reaching for him the way a tongue finds the gap where a tooth used to be. Involuntary. Stupid. As if the nerve endings haven’t gotten the memo.
I locked the door on my heartache myself. Every hour I don’t unlock it, the lock gets harder to undo, because undoing it means I was wrong to turn it in the first place, and being wrong means the last two days of holding myself together were for nothing, and I cannot have that conversation with myself while the napkin dispensers are only half full and Lisa is watching me like I’m a flight risk.
So, I fill the dispensers. I wipe down the counter. I do the next thing, and the next.
