She swallowed down the lump in her throat. “I need to borrow your truck.”
“Oh.” He scrubbed his face with his hand. “I mean, of course. Shit, Davis. You scared me for a second there.” Relief radiated off him in waves.
“What did you think I did?”
He reached into his front pocket and pulled out his key fob. “I thought you killed someone.” His tone was flat and matter-of-fact.
She blinked fast. “What?”
His back straightened. He’d finally caught his breath. “Accidentally, of course. But I was mentally indexing where to dump a body.”
She suppressed a laugh. “You can stop planning your cover-up,” she responded, unsure whether she deserved an Elliot, but so endlessly grateful for one all the same.
“Good.” He lifted his hands to rub the sides of her arms.“Because one of us would do terribly in prison, and that one of us is me.”
She smiled down at him and considered spilling everything. Surely he’d understand how much pain she’d been in. How she hadn’t been thinking clearly. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was true.
Golden sunshine slanted through the windows and shone onto the sharp lines of his face. Elliot was so easy to look at. Her eyes caught on his freshly showered hair that fell onto his forehead in smooth curls. His glasses were a tiny bit crooked from falling asleep on the couch with her one too many times. It wasn’t very noticeable. No one else would see it but her, and something about that turned inside her chest like a key in a lock. When she stared into his eyes, she belonged to a place—to a person—and when he stared back, she could almost believe that he’d never let her go.
“I’ll be twenty minutes,” she promised, fear closing her throat like a door.
It would all be okay. She’d find Larry and make it like it never happened. She’d erase it. It would be as though she’d never betrayed Elliot’s trust at all.
Lainey knew only one place where she could find a guy like Larry at this hour on a Saturday.
The alley behind the pharmacy was suspiciously active for a small strip of oil-stained pavement. Cars were parked strategically between open dumpsters and abandoned shopping carts, including a van with Superior Bluffs Community Living emblazoned on the side.
She banged her open palm on the metal security door overand over, the scents of ammonia and vodka-drenched garbage doing nothing to dampen her resolve. “Ernie!” she called out. “Let me in, or I swear to god I’ll be back with your wife!”
The door swung open so fast she had to jump back. Ernie appeared, blocking the doorway as a scowling vision in a white pharmacy coat. “Barb would never get in your car,” Ernie hissed.
“Oh, I can be very persuasive.” She shoved her way in through the small opening under his arm. “I’m looking for Larry.”
His head swung between her and the door to the room in which he was clearly harboring the man in question. “Why would you assume anyone’s here?”
“I don’t think my grandmother boosted a sprinter van just to hang out withyou.”
The interior door crept open until behind it appeared her grandmother’s head in a green dealer visor.
“Ernie, you are much too terrible a liar to fool my girl. It’s even more painful than your poker game. Let her in. I can’t bear to listen to you flounder like this any longer.”
A rod of tension released from Lainey’s spine. Her grandmother winked and opened the back door wide. Lainey took stock of the room. There was Gran, Larry, Mark—still in his full arm cast—a younger woman with box-dyed black hair and a nose ring who Lainey guessed was a new hire at the retreat, and a man on the end pulling his hair at the root and wearing too fancy of a watch to be local.
“Minneapolis?” she asked the desperate-eyed man her grandmother was currently fleecing.
He shook his head. “Chicago. Winnetka, technically. My wife and I are staying at this resort called the Groff. Oh my god, mywife. How am I going to tell my wife I lost my wedding ringin a poker game in the back of a podunk pharmacy?” He swallowed thickly, a man tasting pennies.
Her grandmother tutted. “I said I’d take the watch.”
“It’s a vintage Rolex,” he coughed out in utter disbelief. “The ring’s only worth a grand, if that.”
Any desire to help him escape the clutches of her grandmother evaporated into smoke.
She turned her attention to the man in the back corner wearing aSeussical the Musicalsweatshirt. “I changed my mind, Larry. We’re not doing the camping thing. Elliot doesn’t want to risk losing our permit, and I should’ve respected that.”
He snickered at her from behind his cards. “Uh, it’s a little late for that.”
Her heart stuttered in her chest. “What? How? I talked to you yesterday.”
