I’d explained it away when it happened. But now I had my doubts.
“And Valerie was with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she jump in the ditch, too?”
“Uh, no. She… had stopped to pick some wildflowers. She was maybe five feet off the road when this happened.”
“Hm.” Bronson watched me intently. “And then she brought you a poison smoothie?”
I sighed. “It’snotValerie.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
“Valerie brought it home from the juice place I like on the waterfront. They were my breakfast spot.”
“Every day?”
“I like routine when it’s possible. Touring for a living, after a while you get tired of new places and new things.”
“But this time it had strawberries in it?”
“Yeah.” I kept my voice even because I didn’t like the way my chest tightened when I thought about it. “I’m deathly allergic to strawberries. Everyone who works for me knows that.” I looked down at my hands on the railing. “But Valerie didn’t try to kill me. She saved my life.”
“With your EpiPen?”
I nodded. Bronson didn’t need me to tell him anything. He’d already read the file.
“And the festival,” he growled, as another gust of wind splashed with light sea spray.
I sighed as I tried to explain it to him. “I don’t get the chance to be normal. And after leaving my husband, I just wanted a chance to hang out with regular people for once. So I went to the Shrimp and Grits Festival—”
“With Valerie.”
“Yeah. I thought it would be fine because it was so public. There were peopleeverywhere. But then…”
It was after the festival that I knew these “accidents” weren’t an accident.
A man had appeared out of the crowd with a knife in his hand.
I shut my eyes, reliving the terror of the moment. I’d seen him coming, but froze on the spot. The knife had glinted in the crowd, catching my eye, and after that I couldn’t move.
My breath caught in my throat, tears threatening to spill again.
Bronson’s hand closed around my elbow, steady and warm. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me if it’s too hard.”
I leaned in toward him, wanting nothing more than to have this burly stranger pull me into his arms. I had to admit I felt safer with him around.
“The man had a knife. He came out of nowhere.” I started trembling, and Bronson rubbed his hand across my arm, soothing me. “Someone else saw the knife and tackled him to the ground. It was one of the s-security people who work for your boss. He saved my life.”
I could still feel the press of the crowd. It had been a hot day, the scent of cooked shrimp filling the air. And it had gone from a perfect morning on the waterfront to a nightmare in seconds.
“And where was Valerie?”
“Right by my side!”
But even as I said it, I remembered that she’d stopped and looked at a display of shells at one of the tourist shops that lined the edge of the pier right before I saw the man.
