Page 35 of No Good Fight

His gaze moves over me, the open car door, the photograph clutched in my hand. When he reaches me, he doesn’t touch me, though his hand flexes like he wants to.

“What happened?”

I hold out the photo with trembling fingers.

Ryder takes it carefully.

The change in him is silent. His jaw tightens, and the warmth leaves his face so completely I feel the absence of it. He looks at the picture, then past me to the building, the stairwells, the shadowed gaps between cars.

I’ve seen Ryder worried, and irritated, and even scared once when we were kids and their family cat took off down the road in a rainstorm.

This is none of those things.

This is Ryder looking for somewhere to put the violence in him. The violence everyone in his life has pretended never existed.

But I’ve seen it.

A smart part of me knows I should be alarmed by that. Unfortunately, the terrified part is too busy feeling safer because he has shifted in front of me, blocking the open lot with his body like he can make himself into a wall that nothing and no one can get through.

“Did you touch anything besides the door and the photo?”

I look at my car like it might answer for me. “No. I don’t think so.”

Ryder nods once, then crouches beside the driver’s side. He checks under the car first, which makes my stomach twist because that had not occurred to me, and now it will be something I check every day for the rest of my life. He looks inside without moving anything, studies the floorboard, the console, the back seat, then stands with rain sliding from the brim of his cap.

“Has he ever shown up at places you didn’t tell him you’d be?”

I fold my arms, tucking my shaking hands beneath my sleeves. “Yes.” I don’t want to tell him the rest. I don’t want to give those shattered pieces of my soul to him, but I can feel the shift.

Ryder’s attention sharpens, but he doesn’t interrupt.

That somehow makes talking easier and worse at the same time.

“He used to, at least. After fights. He’d show up at the grocery store, outside work, once at the library when I told him I needed space to finish an article.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel, which is nice. Fraudulent, but nice. “He always had a reason. He was in the area. He wanted to surprise me. He thought we should talk before things got worse.”

Ryder looks toward the road, and I see the muscle in his jaw move.

“He made me feel like I was crazy, like everything was a coincidence and I was making a huge problem out of nothing,” The confession slips out before I can make it smaller.

His eyes come back to mine.

I swallow hard. “He always knew things I never told him.”

Rain falls between us. The parking lot smells like wet pavement and old leaves, and somewhere behind Ryder, a stairwell light flickers hard enough to make the shadows jump.

Something passes across his face too quickly for me to understand.

Recognition, maybe.

Guilt.

That one makes less sense, but it’s the word that sticks.

“How did you know where I was?” I ask.

Ryder glances down at the photograph in his hand. “You mentioned the assignment.”

“I mentioned a redevelopment piece. Not Mason Ridge.”