At this Darius’s snort turned into a little chuckle.
Winnie’s smile faded a bit. It probably didn’t help that Eve must have looked offended.
“Close in distance but never in spirit,” she clarified. “My time spent in this house was out of sight and mind of those two.”
Winnie’s eyebrow rose as Theo started to hand out plates of food. Mitchell joined him. He looked as perplexed as they did.
“But you like this table because his mother loved it?” Theo repeated. “Doesn’t that imply that you feel a fondness for her since she felt a fondness for it?”
Darius let out a bite of laughter again but decided to help out.
He tapped the table’s top.
“Put on your phone’s flashlight and look underneath.”
Winnie, Theo and Mitchell did just that.
Mitchell was the one to read the words that had been scratched into the wood in little-kid handwriting.
“Eve Myers owns this table. Jon D. can bite tires.”
Three faces emerged with varying expressions of delight and confusion.
Eve thought it was telling of their personalities who asked the following questions.
“You wrote this?” Mitchell asked. “How old were you?”
Eve didn’t have to think long.
“I was a persistent eight-year-old, who thankfully got a little better with my handwriting.”
Winnie was next.
“You claimed the table as yours because youdidn’tlike his mother,” she said. “Did she ever see this?”
Darius answered that with a resoundingno.
“For almost two years she sat at this table never knowing that little Eve the terror had defamed one of her favorite pieces of furniture.”
Theo only seemed concerned about the last part.
“Who’s Jon D. and why can hebite tires?” he asked.
At this Darius’s mouth shut and thinned into a line.
In all honesty, Eve had forgotten she had added in a mention of Jon D. Even before what he’d done when they were ten, she had already greatly disliked the boy. She sobered a little for her answer, trying to be as discreet as possible. She might not have been around for the last twenty years or so, but she had a feeling that Darius hadn’t been chatty about the origin of the scar on his back.
The scar on her own hand felt oddly heavy as she answered.
“He was a boy who lived down the street and who only came during the summer breaks to stay with his grandparents,” she explained. “He decided to make it his personal mission every summer to make our lives miserable. Around the time I scratched that in, he was at a level seven out of ten on the annoyance scale. If you’d given me a few years I’d have written in a lot worse.”
Darius didn’t add anything to that.
The rest of the table seemed to take the hint. They fell into a communal silence as each ate their food. It wasn’t until a few contented sighs and the sight of empty plates later that the silence was broken.
Eve was the one to do it.
“So how do we prove that Scott has been destroying small towns before he saves them? What did you find that we didn’t?”
