Page 2 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

But she’d already set her glass down next to mine, and she was holding out her hand with one eyebrow up, and the lights were behind her, scrambling my brain as I focused on her pretty face, and I heard myself say, “One.”

“Sure,” she said, in the tone of a woman accepting terms she had no intention of honoring.

Her hand was warm. That was the first thing I learned on that dance floor—that Elizabeth Starling ran warm, like she had a furnace in her somewhere that the rest of us hadn’t been issued. The top of her head came in somewhere south of my chin, and she had to reach to fit her other hand on my shoulder, which she did without ceremony, steering us into the slow current of couples like she’d done it a hundred times. I put my hand at the curve of her waist, careful, the way I did everything, and made a professional decision not to think about how well it fit there.

“See?” she said. “This is called fun. I know it’s your first time. Breathe through it.”

“I’ve had fun before.”

“Name one time.” She was grinning up at me now, certain she had me, and the worst part was the wait while I tried to think of an example.

“There was a barbecue in 2019,” I finally sputtered, completely embarrassed. Why did I say that? Why couldn’t I ever know what to say to her?

She laughed—a big one, head tipped back, the whole thing. A couple of heads turned because Elizabeth’s laugh was a public event—and something happened in my chest that I categorized, filed, and decided never to examine.

We swayed to the music. The pool light wavered. The music was slow and sweet, and over her shoulder, I watched my sister dance with her husband, and for a minute I let the perimeter go unguarded and relaxed into the moment.

“She looks happy,” Elizabeth said. Quieter now. She’d followed my eyes. She did that, I was learning—clocked everything, the way I did, except she’d somehow figured out how to do it while also having a personality people enjoyed.

“She does.”

“You did that, you know.”

“Levi did that.”

“Levi loved her. You got her here.” She said it plainly, no jokes attached, which from her was practically a sworn statement. “The whole town knows it, Matt. The patrol car parked at the campground all those nights you weren’t on shift. You think nobody noticed, because noticing things is supposed to be your job. But this town’s full of people who think you’re amazing.”

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did what I do, which was nothing, carefully.

Elizabeth leaned back enough to look at my face. The lights moved over hers. Up close she had freckles I’d never noticed before—five of them, scattered across her nose as if someone had spilled them—and her eyes were green, properly green, the kind of detail a trained observer should have had on file years ago, and they were doing the register-tape thing again, adding me up.

“So here’s my question,” she said. “And as your self-appointed ambassador to fun tonight, I’m going to need an honest answer.”

“My what?”

“Becca’s settled. Case closed. All those years of big brother guard duty, honorably discharged.” She tilted her head. “So what does Matt Hartford want?”

The song kept going. The string lights kept rippling on the pool. Somewhere behind me, Jude Barrett was loudly losing an argument about cake to Harper, which, knowing both of them, he had probably started on purpose.

And I stood there in the middle of the dance floor, a grown man with a badge and a mortgage, and a little sister who needed him eighty percent less—and I could not answer the question.

Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. I went looking for it the way I’d go through a house at night, room by room, and every door I opened was someone else’s. Becca safe and happy. The town quiet. My neighbor’s cat out of the storm drain. There was a whole floor plan in there, and not a single room with my name on it.

Elizabeth watched me not answer. I expected the joke—she always had one chambered—but it didn’t come. Something else moved across her face instead, something almost like recognition, there and gone before I could read it, like she’d opened a door in her own house once and found the same empty room.

The song ended. The last note faded over the backyard, out past the pool and the fence line into the dark.

She stepped back, and her hand left my shoulder, and the place where it had been registered the loss like a dropped signal.

“Well,” she said, and the brightness came back up like a shop light flicking on, “when you figure it out, Officer Hartford, you know where I am. Six to close, most days. We have excellent burritos, and I’m told the staff is hilarious.”

She meant it as a joke. That was the cover, anyway—the hours, the burritos, the easy grin she gave everybody. But something underneath it snagged on the way past and pulled, and I caught it a half-second slow, the way you catch the sound of your own name in a crowded room after it’s already been said. When you figure it out, you know where I am. Not the store. Her. She was telling me where to find her.

I opened my mouth with a whole sentence loaded and ready—I couldn’t have told you what it was, only that it mattered—and what came out was, “Elizabeth.”

Just that. Her name, landed between us like I’d set something down without deciding to. I’d read the scene right, for once, read the one thing she was actually saying—and then stood there holding it with both hands and no idea where it went.

She was already two steps away, walking backward into the lights, the green dress and the gorgeous red hair and the smile she handed out to everybody, and just before she turned, she pointed at me the way she pointed at regulars who tried to pay with exact change from the bottom of a purse.