“On them. Men were disappearing in towns this carnival passed through. Older men. Pillar-of-the-community types.” She swirls her glass, watching me over the rim, gauging how much I've already guessed. Plenty, my faceprobably says. “So I bought a ticket, and I snooped, and Elias caught me.”
“Caught you how?”
“She fucked him on all the rides while he chased her wearing his performance mask,” Nova supplies.
“I do not recommend fucking in the mirror maze, you see yourself from angles God never intended.” Despite her words, Jules’s grin is gleeful. She enjoyed it. “Anyway, somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped writing the exposé and started wanting the truth, and the truth was that I was in love with a man who carries a garrote, and instead of running, I stayed.”
“He proposed a few months ago,” Nova says.
Jules holds out her left hand, and a sapphire surrounded by rubies catches the light. “We still haven't picked a where or a how. He wants something with the whole carnival lit up. I want to elope on my Harley. Cole has volunteered to officiate, which is a threat, not an offer. Marek says the cards show a tent. Marek can mind his business.”
“You could do it in the Big Top,” I say before I can stop myself. “After a show. When the crowd's gone and it's just yours.”
Both of them stare at me.
“Oh no,” Nova says. “She's a romantic.”
“She'soursnow,” Jules says. “That settles it. You're invited.”
I smile into my glass.
“And I thought fucking him in the Big Top in front of everyone was the main event,” she adds under her breath.
I choke on my drink.
They refill my glass twice. They tell me about the goat—I laugh until I wheeze—and about the time Jonah gotstuck in the mirror maze for an hour because he was too polite to break anything.
The carnival noise outside thins as the night deepens, and I'm shocked to realize my cheeks actually physically ache from smiling, on the same day a man pinned me to my own exam table.
Jules drapes a blanket over me at some point. I don't remember agreeing to lie down, but the couch has me now, and Nova's dimmed the lamp, and the two of them are murmuring in the kitchenette about wedding stuff while obviously keeping watch.
I drift and I wonder what my life is going to look like now.
I can't go back to the practice. Even if Vance never came back, even if tomorrow the clinic was just Paige and the coffee maker and Dixie's follow-up, I'd stand at that exam table and feel the steel edge against my spine every day for the rest of my career.
And Vance is not coming back. Four men are making sure of that right now, somewhere out in the dark, and I gave one of them my okay before he left.
I wait for the guilt.
I dedicated my whole life to keeping things alive. I've done CPR on a kitten. I've sat up three nights running with a colicky foal because losing her wasn't an option I'd accept. And tonight a man is going to die because I saidokay, and I search every corner of myself for the horror I'm supposed to feel, and I find?—
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Because I grew up here. I know exactly how this town works. I was sixteen when Katie Ford told the school counselor what the quarterback did to her at the lake, and I watched what happened next: nothing. Less than nothing.Katie moved schools. The quarterback got a scholarship. The golden boys of small towns don't get punished; they get the benefit of the doubt in bulk, on credit, forever. Howard Vance has a diploma on his wall and a pew at church and half the county calls himDoc, and if I walked into the sheriff's office tomorrow with my torn blouse in a bag, I know—Iknow—which one of us would be on trial by Sunday.
And he'd do it again. I know that too. A man doesn't saygirls like you always want itthe first time he corners someone. He'd heal up, and simmer, and wait, and some other woman would be alone in a building with him. Some tech working late. Some client's teenage daughter.
Paige.
The thought makes my eyes burn. Paige, who brings him coffee and calls him a miserable little man behind his back and stands two feet from him every single day.
No. I don't feel guilty. Maybe that should scare me more than anything else that's happened today—that the woman who does CPR on kittens can lie on a couch surrounded by magic trick paraphernalia and feel nothing but a grim, tired relief.
Maybe I'll feel it tomorrow. But tonight I’m just waiting for Rowe to come back to me.
20
ROWE
