I look at him for a moment too long, and he doesn't look away, and the space between our desks feels smaller than the eighteen inches it's been all semester.
"I'll think about it." I stand, pull my bag over my shoulder.
He nods and doesn't push. "The offer stands."
I walk out of Armstrong Hall into the cold and pull my phone from my pocket to text my mom about dinner.
The screen lights up with a notification I didn't hear come in.
Missed call. Unknown number.
Morgantown area code I don't recognize, but underneath it, in the automatic transcript the phone generates for voicemail, two words freeze me on the sidewalk.
Correctional facility.
My father. Not a letter this time. A call.
How did he get my new fucking number?
The phone vibrates again. Same number. Calling back.
I stare at the screen. His reach, extending through stone and wire and every boundary I've ever set.
I decline the call.
It rings again before my thumb leaves the screen.
I decline it again, power the phone off, and stand on the sidewalk outside Armstrong Hall with the dead screen in my hand and the wind pulling at my hair and the knowledge that no drawer, no name change, no amount of distance will ever be enough to make him stop.
Because men like my father don't hear no.
They never have.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rookie
Ellie doesn't ask questions she already knows the answers to.
She's behind the counter at Backroads, unpacking boxes of glassware, when I walk in.
The bar is two weeks from its grand reopening and the place still smells like fresh paint and sawdust. New hardwood floors. New windows.
New everything, built from the bones of what Coin's mess left behind when the firebombing took the original.
Ellie rebuilt it herself. Not with her own hands, but with her own stubbornness, which in this part of West Virginia amounts to the same thing.
"Need something, Prospect?" She doesn't look up from the box.
I lean against the doorframe. "Got a friend who needs work."
"Afriend." Now she looks up. Her eyes are sharp, knowing, the eyes of a woman who raised Ruger, survived Striker, and still gets up every morning to open a bar in a town that's tried to burn it down.
"From school. She was bartending at Pint House. Had a situation with a customer and the owner wouldn't back her up."
Ellie sets a pint glass on the shelf. Straightens it. "What kind of situation?"
"He grabbed her. Boss told her to deal with it."