Page 4 of Where Roads Lead

Pieces of me belonged to everyone. Pieces of me that I had no say in giving away. There was a sense of obligation. The need to take care of everyone. It’s what my dad would want. It’s what my brother had done.

And now? Well, I didn’t really have anyone else to take care of, so why not the whole damn town?

It kept me busy, that was for sure. Gave my days meaning. Direction. Purpose. A man needed that. I had no right to object. It was the life that had been handed down to me. I’d never even considered finding something else for myself.

I was…content. For better or worse. I wasn’t much of a dreamer to ask for anything more than that.

But I wasn’t above wishing every once in a while for a damned hour of peace and quiet.

On cue, my phone rang. If it were up to me, I’d leave the thing at home. I mean, really, what was the harm in disconnecting every once in a while? Saving the conversation for whenever you saw someone next.

Not for the first time, I regretted missing out on the generation of landlines instead of the modern technology which forced me to be available at all times.

“Hello?” I answered, wondering which fire I was being sent to put out now.

“Will, honey?” Mrs. Shelley’s voice chirped. “It’s me, Deb.”

“Hi, Mrs. Shelley,” I answered, finding it too weird to call my former babysitter by her given name. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, nothing, dear. I was just calling to tell you we have a new friend in town. Out at old Mr. Briggs’s house.”

I fought the urge to snort and ask why this warranted a phone call.

Even though I was twenty-eight, I believed in respecting my elders. Especially ones who used to tuck me into bed at night when my parents worked late.

“Yeah,” I said, mustering up a fair deal of patience. “I saw the rental sign got taken down and put the pieces together.”

“Such a smart boy,” she cooed, without a trace of sarcasm.

I rolled my eyes at that, on account of her not being able to see it. Then again, I was out in the town square, and God knows word travels fast here.

“Well, anyway, I sent the girl over to—”

I didn’t hear the rest of whatever she was trying to say, pulling the phone away from my ear to focus on what was happening in front of me.

It was the hair I noticed first. No one in town had hair like that. A shock of red that glittered almost gold in the sunlight. And she was pacing in front of my café. Peering through the windows as if she were scoping out the place to rob it.

“Hey, I’ll call you back, okay?” I ended the call, already moving toward the girl who was circling the front of the shop like the notion of a front door was a brand new invention to her.

Call it a hunch, but I figured this was probably the newcomer Deb had called to tell me about. Maybe the call hadn’t been a simple exchange of gossip after all; maybe it had been a warning, since clearly there was something off about the girl lurking outside my café as if she’d never been in public before.

I took a step to approach her, pausing when I saw her take out a phone, a slip of paper, and start dialing a number.

Almost immediately upon her pressing the phone to her ear, my own rang.

“Hello?” I said into the phone, wondering if it was a bizarre coincidence or if this was really happening to me.

“Hi.” I watched the girl’s mouth move from several feet away at the same time words filled my ear. “Is this Will?”

How the hell did she get my phone number? And why on earth would she use it?

“Who’s this?” I said back, taking advantage of the fact that she hadn’t seen me yet.

“No one,” she chirped. “Wrong number. Bye.”

And then I watched her hang up the phone.

Un-fucking-believable. She really was bizarre. And against my better judgment to just leave her be, I had the strangest urge to go confront her about why she thought calling up strangers and hanging up on them was a normal thing to do.