Chapter 13
Levi
Iwas back home, midway through aLord of the Ringsbinge, still in yesterday’s T-shirt, doing nothing in particular with my day off, and doing it badly. Jude had left for his shift. The townhouse was quiet, the kind that usually didn’t bother me and was bothering me today for reasons I wasn’t examining too closely.
I was also watching my phone, which I wasn’t admitting to myself. The text that came through was short, as Matt Hartford’s texts always were.
Matt: Holloway’s. Whenever you can.
I turned the TV off, grabbed my jacket, and didn’t let myself think too hard about why my pulse had done something at the sight of his name on my screen.
The rain had let up by the time I parked on Main, leaving the street gleaming and grey-skied, the kind of Sweetbriar afternoon that smelled like pine and wet pavement and the cold sweetness that came down off the mountain when the clouds sat low.
I pushed through the heavy door into the warmth of the pub.
Savannah looked up from behind the bar when I came in, her expression doing the small lift it did when she recognized somebody she liked.
“Levi,” she said. “Day off?”
“Apparently,” I said, stopping at the bar. “Have you seen Matt?”
“Back corner.” She tilted her head in that direction. “Been here about twenty minutes. Ordered coffee, hasn’t touched it,” she said it evenly. She’d known Matt as long as any of us. She set two mugs on the bar and reached for the coffee pot without being asked. “Take him a fresh one. That one’s probably cold.”
“Thanks, Savannah.”
“Mm.” She was already moving down the bar, the kind of efficiency that came from years of reading rooms. I picked up both mugs and headed toward the back.
The corner booth was the one people used when they wanted to talk without being heard, set back from the main floor, with a high wooden partition on one side and a wall on the other. Matt was in it with his jacket still on, both hands around a mug he wasn’t drinking from, staring at the middle distance with the look of a man running the same thoughts in circles and not getting anywhere new.
He registered me when I was two steps out, and something in his face rearranged itself into the version he showed the world—composed, present, in control of the situation. It was a good effort. It didn’t quite work.
“Hey.” He started to stand.
“Sit down,” I said, and slid into the booth across from him, pushing the fresh mug toward him and wrapping my hands around my own. “Savannah says that one’s cold.”
He looked at the new mug. Something moved through his expression that might have been gratitude, or might have been exhaustion, and was probably both. He pulled it toward him.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
“Of course.” I settled back, looked at him, and waited, because he was two years older and a hundred years more private, and he’d get to it when he got to it.
He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days and was pretending otherwise.
“She won’t come stay with me,” he said. “I’ve asked. Multiple times. She says she’s fine.”
“She would say that.”
“Yeah. Becca being Becca.” He set the mug down. “That’s why I’m not sleeping.”
I waited.
“Travis has been around,” he said. “Not doing anything. Not technically. Just—around. Driving past. Showing up in places he didn’t used to frequent.” His jaw tightened. “He followed her to the grocery store last week, said he was out of milk. That prick is lactose intolerant?—”
“Did he speak to her?”
“He spoke to her.” The way Matt said it told me everything about what kind of conversation it had been. “Becca said he was polite about it. The smiling kind of polite that’s actually something else entirely.”
I knew the kind. I’d seen him operate enough times to have a clear picture of what that looked like.
