Trapper findsme in the garage with grease up to my elbows. Joker and Duke went to get my bike, where I left it, and brought it back here. I should have it fixed within a day or two.
“Got those details you asked for,” he says. “Joker pulled the information. I’m just the messenger.”
I don’t look up from the bike. “Go.”
“Her name is Eden Kincaid. Twenty-two. Lives with her folks off Terrace Road.” He reads it off his phone. “Her dad is a preacher. Half the town shows up to hear him at the congregation out past the highway.”
So she wasn’t lying about that.
“Nursing student, like she said,” he continues. “Community college. Tuesday and Thursday classes, mornings into the afternoon. Clinical hours at the county hospital.” He scrolls. “No boyfriend that anybody knows of. Doesn’t drink. Goes to class, goes to the hospital, goes home. That’s her routine.”
I wipe my hands and take the phone off him long enough to read a few additional notes. Then I hand it back.
“Thanks,” I tell him.
He nods, and then he’s gone before I can say anything else. Good guy.
I stand in the garage with the schedule already memorized and tell myself I’m not going to use it.
But by Tuesday morning, I’m leaning on my bike in the community college lot.
Her car is easy to spot when it pulls into the parking lot. The same little sedan I bled all over days ago. I park one row over and wait, and when she steps out of her car with a bag over her shoulder, she stops.
Then she smiles. “Are you following me?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyebrows shoot up, surprised by my answer. She figured I’d lie.
“Okay,” she says. “Honest. I like honesty.” She hikes the bag higher on her shoulder. “Why?”
Because I can’t stop thinking about her, but I don’t say that.
“To walk you to class,” I say.
She looks at me a beat too long. “All right.”
She talks the whole way across the lot. About a test that she’s nervous about. About a man at the hospital who calls every nurse by his dead wife’s name, and how it got to her a little. About her father reading the text messages on her phone at the table while her mother says nothing.
Her dad sounds like an asshole, and her mother sounds spineless.
I don’t say much. I don’t have to. She fills every silence, and I let her.
I could listen to her talk until the sun gave out.
“This is my class.” She stops at a door.
“I’ll be here when you’re done.”
“Why?”
She knows why, but she wants to hear it. I’m not ready to give her that. “I’ll see you when you’re done.”
“Okay.” She ducks her head and goes in.
Just like I promised, I’m there when she comes out.
I’m there on Thursday too, and every Tuesday and Thursday for the next month.
