“Good lord,” Nathan muttered.
Dayton succeeded in looking on without affect but the breath he held revealed his true feelings.
With startling efficiency, a black body bag was stuffed, zipped, and rolled around to the front of the bar where it was loaded into a white truck.
“I hope my pregnant wife is alright. At home. Alone.” Nathan raised his voice enough so that the nearest officers would hear. They didn’t acknowledge him in the slightest.
All around them, organized panic played out.
He hadn’t realized the music had stopped until another round of wailing police cars cut their engines. More cops. Their uniforms revealed that they weren’t local. Portland.
How long had it been since they were forbidden from leaving the bar? There was no traffic at that time of night. Even with clear roads, it took at least 45 minutes to get from Portland to Branch Spring.
It had gone from two officers collecting statements to six, not including the one dedicated to grilling the line cook. Occasionally, they broke away from the routine questioning to pass along updates. The disgruntled comments had less to do with useful insight regarding the crime scene and more to do with the fact that some guy named Reynolds wouldn’t be able to make it out until the following morning.
Dayton complied with the officers along with everyone else and after another hour they were released. He left calmly, getting into his car and pulling onto the road as if he hadn’t just had a brush with the entirety of the greater Portland area’s law enforcement.
With a sputtering heart and a questionable blood-alcohol level, he sped off into the bleak October night.
15
LACEY
He and Kenna sat side by side on the sofa in the living room of her apartment—somewhere he never thought he’d be permitted entrance again and yet there he was.
Though the foot of space separating them on the sofa was a reminder that they were still recovering from her discovery of his misdeeds.
Dayton continued to curse himself for the folly. He should’ve burned that box long before she ever set foot in his home. Even after knowing Kenna for only a few blissful weeks, he knew everything was meant to end with her, as if her appearance in his life had been divinely orchestrated by the universe. But now that destiny was barely hanging on.
Threadbare.
Every time he found himself frustrated with their stationary position on the timeline of their would-be relationship, he was faced with the painful realization that he was to blame for their lack of motion.
He wasn’t entirely sure why she had invited him over that evening, but he knew better than to complain when each second spent with her felt like a gift.
Ephemeral bursts of joy of which he simultaneously felt unworthy and greedily accepted.
She hadn’t spoken more than two words to him since his arrival and the uncharacteristic behavior triggered a wave of panic within him, undulating throughout his body and heightening his senses one by one.
Maybe Kenna had asked him here to terminate their relationship that had never truly begun. A premature death.
He would mourn the loss but, ultimately, he’d have to accept it. Tempting as it was, Dayton could not hold her prisoner. She had been his salvation, and if that was the lone purpose for their having met, so be it, for he now knew how to love and he’d carry that with him forever. And when he perished, a part of him would glow eternally because embedded within him was something that evaded so many others.
Love, that glorious blinding light.
“Shouldn’t you be out with your friends?” It was a question better left unasked and yet he dared to ask it.
Her presence at the apartment supported the idea that she’d invited him over for company. She was studious. Lonely. Much like he had been in medical school and later still during residency.
“Things are pretty bleak in the friendship department these days.”
“What about those kids on your trivia team?”
His question inadvertently triggered flashbacks to the previous night. Police lights. Yellow tape. Anxious faces.
“We aren’t on speaking terms. You should know that. You were there.”
At 22, she was already a seasoned wife despite her unwed status. There was no getting anything past her.