Whatever Kinsey Callahan and I were to each other, we're not anymore.
The wound closed.
We don't talk about it. We don't need to. Some shit you survive and move on from, and moving on is the whole damn point.
I bus another table and let it go.
What I don't let go is Ounce.
He's leaning against the wall near the jukebox, arms folded across his massive chest, a beer loose in one grip.
He's been in the same spot for twenty minutes. Not talking. Not moving.
He's been staring at Kinsey since she walked in and either doesn't know he's doing it or doesn't care.
She doesn't see him looking. Or if she does, she's better at hiding it than I am at catching it.
Ounce's business is his own. Whatever he sees in Kinsey is between him and the wall he's holding up.
But I notice the way his grip tightens on the beer bottle when she laughs at Bracken's joke. The way his jaw moves, once, like he's chewing on something he's not ready to swallow.
Kinsey is a grenade with the pin already pulled, and Ounce is standing in the blast radius on purpose.
Not my problem. Not my war.
I've got my own.
Saylor is wiping down the bar, her movements efficient, automatic, the body running while the mind is somewhere else.
I've seen this from her before. The disconnect between what her body is doing and where her head has gone.
She's been carrying something since that night she showed up at my room shaking.
I don't know what.
She didn't tell me, and I didn't ask, because asking means she has to choose between the truth and a lie, and I'm not ready to know which one she'd pick.
But whatever it is, it surfaces in small ways.
The way she checks the parking lot through the window every twenty minutes. The way her phone sits facedown on the bar all night, screen hidden, like she's afraid of what might light it up.
The way she flinched when a customer came through the door with a baseball cap on, and covered it so fast I would have missed it if I hadn't been looking.
I was looking.
I'm always looking.
By midnight, the bar is loud, warm, and running on fumes and goodwill.
Ellie makes a toast. Stands on a chair because she's five-foot-four and refuses to be spoken over, lifts a glass, and says twelve words.
"Backroads is back." Her voice cuts through the noise like a blade. "Thank you for showing up."
Ruger lifts his glass. The room follows.
Saylor is behind the bar, dish towel over her shoulder, a glass raised in her free hand.
She's flushed from the work and the heat and the energy of a hundred people packed into a room built to hold eighty.