Maybe I would have been more shocked and appalled had I not spent many a nights holding my sobbing sister and imagining new and terrible ways to slowly and painfully murder the man who’d put those bruises and cuts on her body.
If I’d been given half the chance, I would have done it too. Without hesitation.
We were all capable of great violence.
Some of us were just more honest about it than others.
“So Anthony will be at the diner tonight?” I asked.
I watched as surprise melted to pleasure on his face, and I wondered if him telling me was a test of sorts. To see what conclusions I came to, and how I reacted to those. It seemed, by his smile, that I’d passed.
“Yeah. He’s gonna be a bit. He’s on his way back from a meeting. But I will drop you off. And things are usually busy for the first hour of your shift, so I don’t think we have to worry about you too much.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him as I slipped my panties back on.
I wouldn’t say that I’d stopped worrying about Josh. I mean the man had been an ever-present problem in my and my sister’s lives for years. I never stopped being aware of his threat lingering around any given corner.
But the fact of the matter was that I was protected now. I wasn’t alone anymore. Things had changed. I didn’t have to be so afraid.
So with that, Salvatore actually pulled his car out of the parking garage he kept it in, and I was pleasantly surprised to find he liked classic muscle when it came to vehicles, and dropped me off at the diner.
Where I quickly fell into work tasks for the first hour and a half.
I’d only been mildly aware that Anthony hadn’t shown up when the door opened, and there was Wren.
“I thought I’d surprise you!” she said, giving me the easiest smile I’d seen in a long time as she came up to the counter and dropped down on one of the stools. “Also, I am craving something fatty and greasy,” she added.
My gaze moved over her, finding that her face seemed fuller than it had just a week or so ago. Her wrists didn’t look quite so breakable. Her shirt even seemed a little tight.
She’d been putting on weight.
Happy weight.
Because that was what she was.
One look at her eyes told me everything I needed to know.
She was finally, freaking finally, finding some joy in her life.
See, I’d been assuring Salvatore the past few days that I would tell Wren about Josh, about what had happened. He’d been the one to tell me that it wasn’t protecting her—but rather, putting her in danger—to keep her in the dark.
I’d seen his logic.
And agreed.
But, looking at her, there was no way. There was just no way I could take that light out of her eyes, not after so many years of seeing her without it.
Because I knew my sister.
She would feel guilty.
She would lose focus again, would be pulled back into that hole again, into the traumas of her past.
I couldn’t do that to her.
“Greasy and fatty is pretty much all we serve. Oh, and once, salmonella. So just… don’t order the chicken, okay?” I asked, giving her a smile as I pushed a Sprite in her direction. “You seem happy. How have things been going?”
“Oh, my God. So good. I think I was struggling a little at first. I just felt out of place. Too old, I guess. But once I got over that, I really started to make a lot of friends,” she told me. “I, ah, I even met this guy.”