I pressed the button to end the agony. I’d seen enough. But why was the woman following them around? From what I understood, Erin’s babies had passed away in two different houses. One was her mother’s, and one was the house she and her husband lived in before buying the one they had now. They’d moved out of each one following the heart-wrenching deaths.
I simply couldn’t imagine what she’d gone through. How she’d survived.
The room began to spin with the thought. The senseless loss of life sparked a familiar feeling for the second time in as many days, and before I could stop it, panic slammed into me. Stole my breath. Ripped at my throat.
I looked down at my hands. At my arms. They were empty. They shouldn’t have been. I could feel the weight of that emptiness like a boulder in my stomach. It pulled me farther down below the surface. It suffocated. I had something once, but I forgot where I put it.
I forgot. I forgot. I forgot.
It was so small. So fragile. Yet it held such power, this tiny thing that I’d promised to protect. It was like a single atom that would someday split and spark a nuclear reaction. It would set the world on fire. It would free the mentally ill. It would ignite the fires of revolution like nothing the human race had ever seen. And I’d misplaced it. I’d lost it.
I scratched at the linoleum floor. It had to be here somewhere. It couldn’t have gone far.
No. Wait. It was a dream. I was simply dreaming again. I blinked. Tried to focus on the present. Tried to get a firm grip on my sense of time and place.
When I finally kicked my way back to the surface, I shook uncontrollably. Nausea took hold, and bile scalded the back of my throat. I tried to swallow it down but choked on it instead, doubling over as it racked my body.
“Janey?”
I shook out my agony at the sound of Cookie’s voice.
“Crap,” I said as she rushed in and knelt beside me.
“What happened?” she asked, frantic.
“Nothing. I dropped a bottle of mustard.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” She wrapped her arms around me, and I remembered that she was psychic. She probably saw me coming from a mile away. Luckily, she didn’t run in the opposite direction.
“I’m okay. Thanks.”
When we walked out, Francie was sitting across from Reyes in the booth he’d taken. She was doing her darnedest to flirt, but he seemed preoccupied. His head down. His mouth a firm line. Until I walked past.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice harsh.
His question surprised me, but his tone surprised me more. “Nothing. Why?”
Francie looked back and forth between us, trying to gather as much intel as possible, to assess if I was a real threat or not.
“So, anyway,” she said, apparently coming to a conclusion, “he calls me Red. Right? Like he had the right to call me Red. It’s natural, by the way.”
He hadn’t taken his eyes off me, and I wanted to melt into him.
“Don’t you think?” Francie asked, but I had no idea what direction she’d taken in her thrilling tales of Francie in Wonderland. Then I realized she wasn’t talking to me. Sadly, the one she was talking to completely ignored her.
She bit her bottom lip and stood up. “I better get back to work.”
I felt bad for her. Or I did before she tried to turn me into a pillar of salt with her caustic glare. Holy crap and damn. Now they both hated me.
At least Cookie still liked me.
“I hate you,” Cookie said as she checked her phone. “Just so you know.”
For fuck’s sake. “What’d I do?” I asked, tearing my gaze off Reyes and following her to the front register.
“This.” She held out a hundred. “Someone left a hundred-dollar tip on your table.”
“No way.” I brightened, snatched it out of her hands, then held it up to the light to make sure it was legit. Because it would be my luck… “I’m rich. I can get a phone.”
“You can take me to a movie,” she countered.
“Deal.”
“Or that mansion you want to see.”
“Oooo,” I said, grinning from ear to ear. “The Rockefeller Mansion. I’ve been dying to see it.”
“We should go today. Right after our pedicures.”
“We’re getting pedicures?”
“We are now.”
I laughed as we changed out our tips, the metal kind, for real money, the paper kind. Cookie finished before I did. Mostly because I couldn’t keep my recalcitrant gaze from wandering in Reyes’s direction every few seconds.
“You should invite him,” Cookie said.
“To get a pedicure with us?”
She giggled. “Men like that stuff, too, right?”
“Then why don’t you invite Bobert?”
“Point taken. I have to get my jacket.”
And I had to get Reyes’s, but first I had to finish counting my tips. I was so bad at counting.
I was standing there wondering if I’d counted ten quarters or only nine when a guy walked into the café, strode straight up to me, and jammed a gun into my side.
Oh, for the love of crab cakes. I forgot we were doing this today.
“Open it. Now.” He rammed the gun into my ribs again a little too aggressively.
I glared over my shoulder. We said to make it look real. Not feel real. I leaned close and whispered to him. “Chill. We have to wait for Lewis to get up here.”
I looked over the sea of tables to where Lewis stood bussing a table nearby. Then I looked around for Francie. She was just walking out of the storeroom and toward us. I gave Lewis a secret thumbs-up, which was basically a thumbs-up with enthusiastic eyebrow arching thrown in.
This was it. Lewis’s big day. But he shook his head at me.
Was he backing out? Now?
“I won’t say it again, bitch. Open the fucking drawer.”
Lewis looked shocked. And confused. And more than a little concerned. Holy crap, he was good.
He tried to mouth something to me. “He’s not… I didn’t…”
I had no idea what he was saying, but I did know that he needed to give up on his dream of becoming a rock star and become an actor, because he was totally convincing.
Maybe a little too convincing.
When Lewis stayed frozen to the spot and his cousin shoved me a little harder than was necessary into the register, I realized something had gone horridly awry. Either the man holding a gun at my back wasn’t Lewis’s cousin or Lewis’s cousin was a scene-stealing asshole. I was leaning toward the former. And wondering how I let myself get talked into these things. Though I couldn’t remember any particular circumstance in which I got suckered into a ridiculous situation, the scenario did seem oddly familiar to me. Like an old sweater or a favorite pair of sweats.
I began to panic. As adrenaline took a huge dump in my nervous system, a calmness came over Lewis’s face. A determination. A disregard for his life. And my life, for that matter.
He stood up, set his jaw to extra firm, and headed straight for us, his movements sure. Steady. Calculating. And I realized he’d sautéed his marbles and had eaten them with a nice Chianti.
“Stay back!” the guy yelled when he noticed Lewis. He pointed his gun at him.
Francie screamed when she realized what was happening. Shayla covered her mouth in shock. But Lewis kept walking, even with the gun pointed right at him. Right at his heart.