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“Fine. Let me lock up first,” I added pointedly, and Frankie hung his head in shame, like a whipped dog.
My lone employee—Luisa—was off that day. I grabbed my purse from the backroom, put the Will Return Soon sign up, and joined Frankie Dowd on the sidewalk.
“You want to get a coffee?” I asked. “Something to eat?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “If you want.”
It was obvious he was hungry. Even more obvious he didn’t have any money.
Am I going to buy Frankie fucking Dowd lunch?
It seemed that I was. He looked as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.
“Order what you want,” I told him as we sat down at the Hill Street Café, a little diner I frequented sometimes on my lunch breaks from the shop.
“Thanks,” he said, hardly a whisper, and ordered the soup and sandwich combo of the day.
“Just coffee for me,” I told Lucy, the waitress.
Frankie looked sheepish. “You’re not eating?”
“My stomach is twisted in so many knots right now, I can’t possibly think of food.” I folded my arms and leaned toward him. “Do you know how much I hate that I’m sitting here, desperate to hear what you have to say? Because for three years, I’ve had nothing. No hope.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Shiloh. For so much.”
I braced myself, my heart pounding in my chest. “Well? Let’s hear it.”
Frankie toyed with his napkin, not looking at me. “My dad is dead. Heart attack. A few days ago.”
I sat back, absorbing this. “Forgive me if I have a hard time offering condolences right now.”
“Don’t bother. He wasn’t a good man.”
“Was that what you wanted to tell me?”
That can’t be all. Please…
Frankie’s eye twitched and he pressed the napkin to it. “Sorry, it does that sometimes. My leg doesn’t work so great anymore either. The doctors say it’s brain damage from that night.” He looked at me with one eye, clear and blue. “My dad did this to me. It wasn’t Ronan.”
The café faded away, and all I knew or felt or thought was hope, blooming wild and huge in my chest.
I blinked hard, unwilling to let Frankie Dowd see me cry. “What happened that night?”
Frankie heaved a breath, his eyes on the napkin in his hands as he spoke. “I was at the parking lot behind the Burger Barn, hanging with Mikey and some people from school. Mostly Mikey. No one else liked me much. Everyone left, but I didn’t want to go home.” He hunched deeper into his jacket. “My dad was supposed to do a year, but they put him on house arrest. Then things got real bad. So bad my mom left, and she didn’t take me with her.”
I nodded, his pain was palpable, emanating off of him like the stink of his unwashed clothes.
“Dad was stuck at home with no job. Nothing to do. He loved his job. Not the protecting and serving like it says on the squad cars. It was the power he loved. He was mad all the time. Beating up on people he thought were ‘criminal scum’ made him feel better.”
The waitress came back and dropped off a coffee for me and a three bean soup and ham sandwich for Frankie. He didn’t seem to see the food, his mind somewhere besides this café.
“That night, I was alone in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of my car. Then Ronan walked up, like out of nowhere. His face was…scary. I was sure he was going to kill me. I tried to drive away, but I couldn’t get the keys in the ignition; I was shaking so bad. He tried the door, not saying a word. Which was almost worse, how quiet he was. I’d locked the door, so he smashed his fist into my window, hard enough that it cracked. Then he threw a right and shattered it.”
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“The bruises on his fists…” I said, almost to myself.
Frankie nodded. “That crazy fucker…” He cleared his throat at my sharp glance. “Sorry. But he actually pulled me out of the car through the broken window.”
