Good.Good.He had come to his senses and gone back to whatever hotel he’d checked into, and tomorrow I would openDog-Eared and Mr. Kamau would come in for his flat white and Luna would sleep in her sunny spot by the fiction section and everything would be exactly as it had been before seven this morning.
I let the curtain fall.
I was thinking about what to make for dinner — something simple, pasta maybe, when I heard the soft crunch of tires on the pebbled driveway at the side of the house.
I went to the kitchen window.
The truck was enormous and ancient and spectacularly ugly — a pink pickup from some previous decade. It looked like something that had survived several natural disasters.
And Jason was climbing out of it. His frame filled the driver’s side door, and he began unloading the back with systematic focus.
Box after box. The tent. The camping stove. An assortment of equipment I couldn’t fully identify from the kitchen window but which appeared to include a significant number of things that beeped or had antennae.
He carried it all through the side gate and disappeared around the back of the house.
I ran towards the kitchen window, and opened the sliding door to the deck. I stepped out, with rage filling every atom of my body.
“Jason.” I screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”
He looked up from where he was crouching over the tent components, laying them out on the grass. Then he looked pastme, up at the sky, where the clouds had been building all evening into something dark and purposeful.
“Trying to get this up before the storm hits,” he said flatly, and went back to doing whatever the hell he was doing.
“Leave. How many times do I need to say it? I don’t want you here. I don’t want to see your stupid face in my garden.”
He stopped and looked up at me properly.
I was standing on the deck in my bralette and tights with my hair down and my lipstick on, and the expression on his face when he looked at me was the one I recognized and didn’t want to. He looked at me the way he’d always looked at me — like I was the only thing in his field of vision — and I hated that it still registered. I hated that I clocked it at all.
“I cannot leave you, Camila.” He said it simply. “I don’t want anything from you. Not forgiveness, not even acknowledgment that I’m here. You live your life exactly as you have been. I’ll just be your shadow.”
I felt like marching across my garden and punching him in his balls, but I stopped myself.
“You being my shadow and following me around like a stalker is the last thing I want.” The anger in my voice was clean and loud. “I’d rather have your cartel girlfriend visit. Maybe she can bring more videos of you both dirty- fucking. I can hook her phone up to my TV, watch the whole thing in high definition.”
He went very still. He stood up, crossed his arms, and looked like someone had actually punched him in the balls.
“She was never my girlfriend,” he said quietly. “She was never anything. I was blackmailed, Camila. But I know I should havetold you the first day it started. I know there’s nothing I can say to make you believe it.”
“Then don’t say it. I don’t want your sob story. I don’t want anything from you.”
Thunder moved through the sky to the east — distant, low, a warning.
“I’m staying,” Jason said.
I looked at him for a long moment, this man in my garden in the gathering dark with his ridiculous camping equipment and his impossible determination.
“I’m going to make your life very difficult,” I said. “If you insist on being here, I will make absolutely sure it’s not comfortable for you.”
Something changed in his expression, not quite a smile, more the shadow of one. “I’ll take whatever you give me.”
He went back to the tent.
The first drop of rain hit the deck railing beside me with a sharp, definitive sound.
I went inside.
CHAPTER 19
