The messages. The truck. The wave. The forum post still sitting online with my name tagged underneath it.
Tildie is behind the bar with me tonight. She's mixing a whiskey sour for a regular when she glances sideways at me.
I'm staring at a glass I've been drying for ninety seconds. The same glass. Dry as a bone. My hands move in circles because stopping means thinking and thinking means drowning in those thoughts.
She doesn't say anything for a while. Serves the drink, takes an order, pours two drafts. Moves around me with the easy awareness of someone who's worked bars long enough to navigate another person's bad night without tripping over it.
Then, during a lull, she leans against the counter beside me and folds her arms.
"You don't have to tell me." She says it without looking at me, her attention on the room, watching the crowd the way a lifeguard watches water. "But I can see it."
My grip tightens on the glass. "See what?"
"You've been somewhere else all night." She unfolds one arm and taps the bar with her fingernail, a steady rhythm. "Your body's here. Your head left about two hours ago."
I set the glass down, pick up another one, and start drying it.
My grip tightens on the glass. "I'm fine."
"I didn't ask if you were fine." She turns her head and looks at me. Amber eyes, direct, no pity in them. "I said I can see it. Those are different sentences."
The rag stops moving in my hands.
"Whatever's going on." Tildie turns back to the room, her voice dropping under the music. "You don't have to carry it by yourself. Carrying things alone is how you end up on the floor, and I say that from personal experience."
She pushes off the counter and grabs a bottle of bourbon from the shelf, pouring a neat double for Bloodhound without him having to ask.
I stand there with a dry glass in my hands and a crack running through me I didn't feel open.
She's not pushing. She's not asking. She's leaving a door unlocked and walking away, and the simplicity of it is what gets me.
Because Tildie knows. Not about my father, not about the cellmate, not about the messages. She knows what it looks like when a woman is holding everything together with both fists and running out of grip.
She knows because she's been there. Everyone in this bar knows the story.
Abusive ex. A baby she lost. Running to Morgantown with nothing, rebuilding behind this same counter.
She looked at me and saw herself, and instead of asking me to explain, she told me I wasn't alone.
The crack widens. My eyes sting. I blink it away and pick up the next glass.
Rookie is on the other side of the bar, clearing tables.
He catches my expression from across the room and his body changes.
Shoulders squaring, chin lifting, the subtle recalibration of a man who's picked up on something wrong and is trying to figure out if he should come closer or give me space.
He gives me space. He always does.
I don't know if I love him for it or if it's slowly killing me, this patience he has, this willingness to wait for me to come to him with whatever I'm hiding.
Because I am hiding. From him, from Tildie, from Ellie, from every person in this bar who's treated me with more kindness in six weeks than my own town has in six years.
They don't know who I am. They know Saylor Bell. They know the girl who pours clean drafts and shows up on time and almost-laughs at the right moments. They don't know Saylor Halstead.
And the people hunting for Halstead are getting closer every day.
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