“I need to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“But I have something you want to hear.”
His sad, plain tone caught my attention. I crossed my arms. “After all that’s happened, why should I give you the time of day?”
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “I don’t blame you for hating me, but you’re going to want to hear this. Please.”
I crossed my arms tighter. The urge to scream at him, to rage and rail and try to inflict a fraction of the pain on him that I’d endured—thatRonanhad endured—in the last three years was fierce but fading until I just felt sorry for him. And the fact that he was here, talking to me, sparked a little flicker that it wasn’t going to be the same hopeless day as every other day over the last three years.
“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 back room, put theWill Return Soonsign 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 Ihatethat I’m sitting here, desperate to hear whatyouhave 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 from him like the stink of his unwashed clothes.