But Doc paid attention.
We were back at the compound by noon. I changed into the flannel and the new jeans, and went through to the bar for my shift feeling like a different woman than the one who’d walked in ten days ago. Still terrible at the job. Still couldn’t pour a beer without losing half of it to foam. But different all the same.
The shift was normal until about four o’clock, when a man in a county polo shirt walked in with a clipboard.
He was small, precise, the kind of man who’d been given a tiny amount of authority and wore it like a crown. He didn’t order a drink. He stood in the middle of the floor and looked around the room the way you’d look at a stain on a carpet.
“Health and safety inspection,” he said. “We’ve had a complaint.”
Bree came out from behind the bar, wiping her hands. “A complaint about what?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the specifics of the complaint. I’m here to conduct an inspection of the premises.”
He spent forty minutes checking things. The kitchen, the storage room, the bathrooms, the fire exits. He wrote notes on his clipboard with a pen he clicked between every entry, and the sound of it, that officious little click, made my skin crawl.
The brothers who were in the bar watched him with the stillness of men deciding how much patience they had. Razor muttered something about where the clipboard could go. Bree handled the man with the bright, professional calm of someone who’d dealt with worse.
He left without finding anything. Said there’d be a follow-up report, clicked his pen one final time, and walked out.
“The hell was that about?” Razor said.
Bree shrugged. “Random inspection. It happens.”
It didn’t feel random. Something about the timing, the specificity, the way he’d looked at the bar like he’d been told what to find before he walked in. But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have the pieces yet, just a feeling in my gut that sat wrong, and feelings in your gut weren’t evidence.
I finished my shift. Closed up with Bree, who talked me through the till reconciliation for the third time with the patience of a saint. Then I went through the staff door, down the corridor, into the lodge.
Doc was in the kitchen.
He was leaning against the counter with a beer, still in the clothes he’d been working in, and grease on his forearms. The kitchen was dim, just the light over the stove, and he looked up when I walked in and his expression shifted. Warmed. Like the room had just become the room he wanted to be in.
“How was the shift?”
“Only broke one glass.” I held up a finger. “One. Personal best.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Good girl.”
Two words. Casual, warm, easy. A reflex, a throwaway, words that cost him nothing. He probably didn’t even register that he’d said it.
I registered it though.
My whole body registered it, a flush that started in my chest and climbed into my face and turned the kitchen into a room I didn’t know how to stand in anymore.Good girl.I’d heard those words a thousand times. From my mother, when I wore the right dress. From my father, when I made the right impression. From teachers, tutors, stylists, every authority figure who’d ever measured me against a standard I hadn’t chosen and found me acceptable.
This was different.
The words landed somewhere deep, somewhere private, and I didn’t know what to do with the way they made me feel. Warm, seen, unsteady.
“You’re staring,” he said. Quiet. His eyes hadn’t left my face.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
The kitchen was too small. It was the same kitchen it always had been and it had been fine, plenty of room, two people could stand in here without their worlds colliding. But something had changed in the last thirty seconds and now the three feet between us felt like nothing at all.
“Evie.” His voice was low, careful, the voice of a man choosing his words because the wrong ones would change something he couldn’t undo. “You should go to bed.”
“I know.”
