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Elise nodded. “Sure. You won’t be gone long?”
“No more than ten minutes,” he told her. “I promise.”
But of course, ten minutes stretched to fifteen, which stretched to twenty. Elise realized that she didn’t have Wayne’s number, so she couldn’t check in on him without running a few blocks down. She made conversation with one of Anna’s friends and grabbed another drink. She suddenly felt like a foreigner.
Around ten in the evening, a figure appeared at her table. Elise blinked up to find the same man who’d broken into her BnB room. Alex Swartz.
He looked at her like she was evil incarnate.
Tracey ambled up beside him, her eyes glossy with a drink. She grabbed his upper arm and said, “Hey there, baby brother!”
But Alex hardly budged. He pointed his other finger toward Elise.
“What the hell is she doing here?” he demanded.
Elise felt cornered, like a little animal trapped in the woods.
“Oh, that’s just Elise,” Tracey said. “Isn’t she adorable? She’s just visiting, but I think Wayne has taken a liking to her.”
Elise stood up and inched to the left, away from the table. Her eyes held onto Alex’s. She no longer felt afraid of him; it was like the events of the day, seeing her father for the first time, and meeting her beautiful, kind, considerate sister, had burned up any idea of her fear.
Still, she didn’t like him very much.
“Don’t you get what she’s trying to do?” Alex demanded from Tracey.
Tracey arched her brow. “Alex, just have a glass of wine, okay? I know you’ve had a hard day, like always, but...”
“No. It’s not that, Trace. This woman has come here to manipulate you and Dad and probably Cindy when she finds her,” Alex said.
Tracey’s smile faltered as she glanced toward Elise again. “What does Dad have to do with this?”
Elise staggered back. Wayne had been gone over twenty minutes now, and she felt too tipsy to stand up for herself.
Apparently, these were her siblings.
“I’m sorry,” Elise murmured. Her eyes found Tracey’s. “I didn’t know. When I first met you, I couldn’t have...”
She stepped toward the door. Tracey furrowed her brow in confusion.
“Get out of here,” Alex barked at her. “If I find you around here tomorrow? I’ll make it my mission to walk you to the ferry myself.”
The other guests at the wedding turned to catch the chaos. Around twenty pairs of eyes latched onto her and bored through her. Elise took several more steps back toward the front door of the restaurant.
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice only a whisper now. She’d lost all the strength she’d had earlier that day. “You don’t know what I’ve gone through. I didn’t mean to cause any pain.”
