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I glance at her briefly as I drive slowly down Main Street, the townsfolk going about their Saturday morning business, several sailors striding up the street with their wooly sweaters and knit caps pulled low, a few of them smoking cigarettes as they make their way toward the dock.
“Millie?” Jackie prompts, as I round the corner to the diner.
“Have you seen him?” I snap, way harsher than I intended.
Jackie flinches. “Well, yeah, just around town. Why?”
“Jackie, please,” I say, bringing the car to a stop outside the diner, the red-painted façade faded a little in the blistering sea winds, the windows glistening with snow and moisture.
“Please what?”
I turn to find her staring plaintively at me.
“Are you really going to make me say it?”
She frowns. “What?”
“For God’s sake,” I explode. “Fine—I’m way too unattractive for Markus McCabe, okay. There, that’s the truth.”
“Millie, you don’t really believe that, do you?” Jackie mutters.
“Yes,” I huff. “I do.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” Jackie says fiercely. “You’re an incredibly attractive woman.”
“Can we just drop it?” I ask. “I don’t want to ruin breakfast.”
Jackie opens her mouth as though to press the issue, but then sighs and nods.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go eat.”
My heart pounds in my chest as we climb from the car and head into the diner. I nod to my manager, Maxine, and head to the corner booth, Lava walking obediently behind us. One of the benefits of Stone Harbor being such a small town is that most people know Lava and that he’s well-behaved, so they don’t mind him being in here.
My hands worry at each other as we take our seats.
“I didn’t mean to snap back there,” I say quietly.
Jackie turns to me with a smile. “Don’t be silly,” she says. “You did nothing wrong.”
I find my hand coming to my mouth, intending to bite my nail, but then I realize what I’m doing and forcibly remove it.
When it’s time to order breakfast, a small voice in the back of my head whispers that I should get a fruit cocktail or something. But I worked hard yesterday and my belly is rumbling, and the blunt truth is I don’t want a fruit cocktail.
I order pancakes with syrup, the same as Jackie, and then we sit there sipping our coffee with Lava draped over our knees.
“Thinking about making me another wonderful dinner?” Jackie teases when she sees me looking wistfully out the window, at the town.
Is he out there?
I return her smile. “I have been toying with an English roast dinner,” I tell her. “There’s been about a million posts on the forum about it recently. Who knows, maybe we’ll invite some food critic here and he’ll declare me the best chef in the universe.”
“And hire you immediately to be head chef at his restaurant,” Jackie exclaims. “You know because he’s a food critic and a restaurateur.”
“Then I’ll go and open my own restaurant and it will be the most popular place in the State—”
“Nah, the country.”
“Yeah?” I grin, the banter infusing me with warmth … but it’s nothing compared to the warmth Markus infused me with last night, just by looking at me. “How about the world?”
“The galaxy—”
“The universe—”
We’re interrupted when the diner door suddenly swings open and around thirty people come barreling in, some of them with children, their voices raised in happy chatter.
“Oh, it’s today?” I mutter.
“Yeah, I forgot, too.”
Once a month a nearby archeological society meets and then comes to town afterward for breakfast and to unwind. Somehow Jackie and I are always forgetting the date, constantly surprised when the floodgates open and the place becomes packed. I feel a stab of worry when I realize that Maxine might try to rope me into working.
“Let’s make this quick,” I murmur.
“We can take Lava for a walk afterward?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
We eat and pay up quickly, not giving Maxine time to come over and twist my arm to work an extra shift. A ting of guilt touches me when I think about fleeing the diner, but it’s my freaking day off and I still feel work-weary from yesterday and earlier in the week.
We leave the car parked up outside the diner and walk Lava down Main Street, toward the harbor. The town is called Stone Harbor because of the rock formation that overlooks the boats, jagged and detailed. Sometimes the townsfolk will make up myths about the rock face, that it holds all the faces of the heroes and villains of the town’s history, silly things like that.
We walk along, Lava trotting happily in his extendable leash, his fluorescent jacket hugging him like armor.
“Hey, Lava,” Jackie says when he starts pulling off to the side, heading for a turn. “What is it, boy—”
His tail wagging like crazy, he pulls on the leash, wheezing in his excitement to get wherever it is he wants to go. Jackie and I exchange a perplexed look. Lava is never like this. He’s a very patient walker, always willing to wait for his humans to catch up.
