ASISTARED OUTthe window at the alley where the love of my life and destroyer of my heart waited for me, it occurred to me that I had three options:
Ignore him.
Wave back so that heknowsI’m ignoring him.
Sneak away from Liam to rendezvous with Ryan in the back alley and risk having my heart broken again.
As Liam lifted Mom’s sapphire necklace into the air to show off its sparkle, I thought a little extra heartbreak sounded a lot less painful than sitting here listening to them haggle over Mom’s treasures. I interrupted, “Where’s the bathroom?”
“In the back,” Maximus said. “Use the air freshener. And if you touch anything outside the bathroom, I’ll chop your hands off.” He smiled pleasantly, and I tucked my hands behind my back to show my obedience as I scooted out of the showroom.
You’d expect the back room of an upscale Aspen jewelry shop and/or a secret wizard store to be classier than the back room of a generic truck stop, but no. Junk cluttered metal shelves, paint cans and paper towel rolls wedged between stacks of velvet jewelry boxes. Sweat-soaked gym clothes were piled on top of a safe, and a half-eaten lunch lay on a table. The only nice thing was a framed photo of a woman with platinum-blond hair and a movie-star smile that matched Maximus’s—presumably his late wife. I hurried through with zero desire to touch anything and found the back door, marked “Emergency Only.” After checking it for an alarm, I pushed it open and slipped outside into a narrow alley between Maximus’s shop and an art gallery.
The alley was cleaner than the back room, with a neat row of bins that split the trash into paper, plastic, glass, aluminum, organic, and so on. Next to the bin for plastic was Ryan.
“Sky!” He rushed forward, then stopped when he saw my expression.
Knocking a rock into the door so it wouldn’t close behind me, I walked toward him. I was not going to show weakness. He’d humiliated me as well as broken my heart. “You wanted to talk to me?”
He flinched at my tone. “Yeah.”
“Okay. Talk.”
He swallowed once, twice. “How have you been?” He winced. “I mean…I know…Well, I don’t know. Are youokay?”
I crossed my arms. “No.”
He looked down. Scuffed his shoe.
“Are you okay?” The question left my lips before I thought about whether that was an appropriate question for me, the wronged party, to be asking. I wasn’t supposed to care what he felt anymore. He’d hurt me; he’d lost the right to my feelings. “Never mind. Don’t care.”
“I’m fine.”
“Good.” He didn’t seem fine. He was pacing, back and forth, in the alley. I watched him, wondering what words were going to burst out. I knew what words I wanted to hear.
“I was watching some surveillance tapes…”
Okay, those werenotthe words. “For fun?”
“For you.”
Oh. “Really? Of me?” Could he miss me? Was that what he was trying to say? Heshouldmiss me. We’d been inseparable for years. “Is that supposed to be romantic? Because it borders on creepy—”
He cut me off. “Of your mother. On the night she disappeared. She shows up on our surveillance tapes, breaking into our house.”
I felt my jaw drop. Approximately six billion questions crowded into my head all at once, but the loudest wasWhy, why, why?
