Page 44 of No Good Fight

Then the hallway glows again, and I’m done. I grab my laptop, my bag, my keys, and the last shreds of my dignity before I can talk myself out of it and storm outside.

Lucy’s Bar is downtown and the perfect place for me to hide behind a laptop screen and maybe some tacos. It’s warm and full of people who don’t know my apartment has turned into the least relaxing haunted house in Maine. Lucy's smells like fried onions, beer, old wood, and the lemon cleaner someone uses on tables between customers. Basketball plays on two TVs above the bar. A group of men in work boots laughs near the dartboard. Somebody at the counter is arguing with the bartender about whether chili belongs on fries, which feels like the sort of low-stakes debate I need to be around.

Public place.

Visible exits.

Decent lighting.

Bathroom near the back, kitchen door to the left, front door behind the hostess stand. Three servers moving through the room. One bartender built like he could break up a fight if he had to.

Best of all? Parker gave me the password for the wifi last year so I can work for as long as I need to.

I am not spiraling. Not in the slightest. I am making reasonable safety observations while ordering fries and a few tacos.

That’s totally different than spiraling and needing to be in a safe space so I don’t get kidnapped or murdered because my new motion-sensored light is a bit aggressive on the lighting front.

I pick a booth along the wall because it lets me see the front entrance without sitting with my back exposed. My laptop goes on the table, and I’ve got the charger in case I need it. My recorder sits beside it, half-hidden under my notebook.

I spend roughly the next eleven minutes trying to get my blood pressure to go down while I doom scroll on social media.

During those eleven minutes, my server comes by and I order a blackberry ginger beer with extra lime, because I have work to do and possess the survival instincts of a woman in the twenty-first century.

By nine-fifteen, I’ve almost gone through all of my recordings from interviews on the redevelopment project, the fries are cold, and I have enough notes to turn Mason Ridge into a story that will make at least three landlords and one city inspector regret opening their email.

The tacos were gone thirty seconds after they were placed on the table.

For a few minutes, I feel like I’m actually accomplishing something.

The bar hums around me, loud enough to make the worries in my apartment feel far away. My fingers move across the keyboard. I build a lead headline twice, delete it twice, then type something less dramatic than electrical negligence with a body count waiting to happen. My drink sweats beside the laptop. Lime slices press against the glass, bright green and harmless.

A shadow falls across the table.

“I almost didn’t recognize you without cranberry vodka.”

That fucking voice.

Everything is wrong.

I should have paid better attention.

I don’t look up right away. My body is screaming at me to run, and every other part of me tries to leave at once. My heart lunges. My lungs forget to inhale and I almost choke on air. My legs go hollow beneath the booth, useless things tucked under a table while the past slides into the seat across from me.

I’m right back where he wants me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Preston smiles like he has every right to be there.

He looks exactly the same in all the ways that matter to normal people. Clean-shaven. Dark blond hair styled like he didn’t have to work for it. Charcoal coat, blue shirt, expensive watch. The kind of face people trust before he opens his mouth because the world is stupid and men like him know how to dress and hide their monstrous insides.

“Alexandra,” he says.

He doesn’t deserve to call me by my name.

Not like that.

My throat tightens and I practically gasp out a response. “Don’t call me that.”

His smile warms by a degree, and I hate that I know the difference. I hate that some trained, broken part of me still catalogs his moods like weather.