Theo made a gun with his hand.
“Bingo. Blake couldn’t think of anything y’all had missed, and now that she’s been back in town for years, she’s more of an expert on this town than me.”
Darius rubbed at his neck. Sighing wasn’t going to do a thing, but he felt the urge again.
So there was a strong possibility that it happened outside of Seven Roads, making an already-difficult search even more so.
“This is one of those few times I wish a victim had been more into social media,” Darius said after a moment. “Mr. Whittaker’s last few days have been hard to pin down. We can’t even confirm yet when he first got into town. He’s not married or in a relationship either, so there’s no one who seems to have had a good itinerary for him leading up to the wedding. Usually social media can help us with things like that.”
For the next few minutes, they went back and forth with questions and answers that Darius had, for the most part, already gone over back at the department. No new insights sprang up, and no missing information shook loose.
Darius’s patience, however, dissolved into a tiredness that he decided not to ignore any longer. He warned Theo not to stay up too late, washed his dishes and only paused in the kitchen doorway as an afterthought.
“You and Winnie never asked about it, but I want to explain.”
Theo turned his way, bowl in one hand, dish soap in the other. His eyebrow rose. Darius, so sure in every word he spoke about work, felt an uncomfortableness ease into an explanation he hadn’t originally intended to give.
“Evelyn Myers used to live in the house next door,” he started, motioning to the house outside to the right. “We were friends as kids until her dad got a job up north and they moved. Today was the first day I’d seen her since then.”
“And she thought you two were still close enough to ask you to stop her wedding?”
It was a fair question for anyone to ask, and Darius couldn’t fault the boy for his bluntness.
In return, he gave a simple answer.
“I’m not sure why she wanted the wedding stopped, but I owed her a favor, so I was going to do it.”
“That’s a big favor to ask,” Theo said. “She must have really done something big for it to hold water all these years.”
Again, Darius stuck to a truth that was as honest as they came.
He nodded.
“She saved my life.”
He didn’t explain further, and Theo didn’t pry past that. Darius moved down the same hallway he’d walked since he had learned how to walk but paused at the door on the right. It was Theo’s room now: years ago it had been his.
Part of Darius was glad to have moved to the main bedroom at the end of the hall—it was bigger, he’d updated it, and there was an attached private bathroom that was nice too—but sometimes when his mind went to the past, he missed the one thing that his new room didn’t have.
The view from its window had been one of a kind.
This time, Darius did sigh.
It came out low and long enough to carry him back to the present.
That night he fell asleep quickly.
In the morning, he was up before his alarm went off at seven.
Despite forgetting to turn the heat on, he was surprisingly warm.
Then that warmth moved.
Someone was next to him in bed.
Darius’s eyes were open in a flash. Adrenaline exploded in his veins, and every muscle he had seemed ready to spring into action. It was only by the grace of God that he recognized who it was pressed against his side before his fight instincts fully kicked in.
The person in question was unbothered by the internal struggle.
