Doc didn’t watch me like that. I couldn’t explain how I knew the difference, only that I felt it. His eyes found me in the room wherever I was. There was something about the way he looked at me that hit me somewhere hard and made me want more.
My footing shifted, something under my ribs I didn’t have words for yet.
I worked until close. Last call, lights up, the slow drain of bodies toward the door. Bree handled the till, which was better for everyone. I wiped tables, swept the floor, stacked chairs. My feet ached. My back ached. My hands smelled like beer and bleach and honest work, which was a combination I was learning to associate with survival.
“Good shift,” Bree said, pulling her jacket on. She looked at me. That same careful look from earlier, the one that saw too much. “You need a ride?”
“No, I’m good. I’ve got my car.”
She hesitated. Nodded. “See you tomorrow, Evie.”
“See you tomorrow.”
She left. The bar emptied. I finished the last of the closing, turned off the lights, locked the front door with the keys Bree had given me on my second night because she said she trusted me and I’d almost cried in the storage room afterward.
The parking lot was dark. My car was where I’d left it, tucked around the back where the staff parked, angled so the passenger side faced the wall. I’d learned to park like that. Privacy from one direction, at least.
I got in. Locked the doors. Pulled the blanket from the backseat and my bag from the footwell. The seat didn’t recline far enough for real sleep, so I’d been folding myself into a position that was part sitting, part lying, entirely uncomfortable, and waking up every two hours with a stiff neck and the disorientation of not knowing where I was for the first three seconds.
The car was cold. It was always cold at night in Montana, even now, even this time of year. I pulled the blanket tighter and stared at the ceiling and thought about the bathroom floor in my parents’ house. Italian marble. Heated. A rainfall shower and thick towels and a woman in the mirror who’d finally realized that none of it was hers.
This was mine. The cold car, the thin blanket, the aching feet. The broken glasses, the wrong orders, the tips I counted twice because every dollar was the difference between eating and not eating.
My mother would die if she could see me.
That thought made me smile. Small and private, aimed at the ceiling of a cold car in a parking lot behind a biker bar in the middle of nowhere.
I was terrible at this. All of it. The waitressing, the surviving, the pretending I had any idea what I was doing. I was making it up as I went, stumbling through every day on caffeine, stubbornness, and the quiet mercy of strangers who didn’t ask questions.
But I was here. I was here because I chose it, because I walked out of a life that priced me like livestock. And every cold night in this car, every broken glass, every shift where I barely held it together was still better than sitting in that dining room with my ankles crossed, waiting to be sold.
Good girls don’t run.
But I did anyway.
I pulled the blanket over my shoulders, closed my eyes, and let exhaustion take me under.
TWO
DOC
Five days.
Five days of watching her drop things, mix up orders, smile at everyone in the room like they deserved it, and try so goddamn hard at something she was so obviously terrible at that it made my chest do things I hadn’t signed up for.
I didn’t know her story. Didn’t need to. I’d spent twelve years reading people under pressure, in field hospitals and forward operating bases where the difference between a lie and the truth was whether someone made it to morning. You learned to see what people weren’t saying.
Evie was carrying plenty.
She wasn’t eating. I’d watched her work four shifts this week and she hadn’t eaten during any of them. Bree left food out for her, casual, like it was just there, and Evie found reasons to be busy until it went cold. She moved well for the first two hours of a shift, then started flagging, her coordination dropping, her reflexes slowing. That was blood sugar. That was a body running on caffeine and willpower and not much else.
She didn’t look like she was sleeping well either. Her reactions were a half-beat slow, the lag of someone operating on too little sleep.
She didn’t seem to have a phone. No one called her, she never checked a screen, never stepped out to take a call. In a world where everyone’s face was lit blue half the time, she had nothing. That was either deliberate or forced, and neither option was good.
She was running. From what, I didn’t know. But every piece of her told the same story if you knew how to read it, and I couldn’t stop reading.
That was the problem. The whole fucking problem, laid out clean.
