It was a lie. Angel hadn’t said a word about the common room. But I needed to stand in this shop and see her face and decide whether yesterday was a bad afternoon or trouble that followed you home.
“What are you thinking?” she asked. Professional now. In her element. “For the common room, I mean. Are we talking a centerpiece or a few smaller arrangements?”
“Whatever you’d recommend.”
She came around the counter and moved toward the cooler, scanning the buckets with her usual precision, assessing color and shape and what went together. Her hands were steadier now. Her hair was down, dark and past her shoulders. She was wearing a green apron over her clothes and there was a smear of pollen on the inside of her wrist, bright yellow against her skin.
She was trying to look fine. She probably looked fine to anyone who wasn’t me.
She definitely wasn’t fine.
It was there in the architecture of the performance. The smile that arrived on cue. The conversation that flowed without catching. How she positioned herself near the workbench instead of the counter, which put the back hallway and the stairs to her apartment within three steps. She’d done this yesterday too, gravitated toward the exit without seeming to realize it. A pattern that looked like habit and felt like escape planning.
“The sunflowers are fresh,” she said, pulling stems from a bucket. “They’d hold up well in a space like that. Big enough to not get lost on a table.”
“Sounds good.”
She carried them to the counter and started working. Trimming, arranging, her movements quick and practiced. I leaned against the cooler and let the quiet settle between us, comfortable, the silence two people share when they’ve occupied the same space long enough that conversation is optional.
“You doing okay?” I asked. Kept it light. Gave her room.
“Fine. Why?”
“Yesterday. You seemed off.”
“Headache.” She didn’t look up from the arrangement. “I get them sometimes. Barometric pressure, allergies. Montana’s got a dozen things that’ll mess with your sinuses.”
She delivered it perfectly. Casual, mildly self-deprecating, with just enough detail to sound like the truth. If I hadn’t seen her in the dark shop with the shade drawn and terror behind her eyes, I’d have believed every word.
“Fair enough,” I said.
She glanced up. Met my eyes for a second, and in that second I saw the relief. She’d expected me to push. I hadn’t. She was grateful, and underneath the gratitude was exhaustion so deep it made my chest ache.
I wanted to ask. I wanted to step around the counter and tell her that whatever was wrong, I’d been dealing with wrong my entire adult life and I was good at it and she didn’t have to carry it alone. But she hadn’t asked for that and we didn’t really know each other that way. She’d asked me to leave her shop yesterday and she’d done it with a voice that shook and I’d respected it because respecting what she asked for was the only thing I could give her.
I heard the engine first. A car on Main Street, accelerating when it should have been cruising, the RPMs climbing wrong. My brain classified it before the first shot landed. Drive-by. Moving vehicle, automatic fire, short burst. An attack that relied on volume and speed, not accuracy.
Suddenly, the front window exploded. I was already reaching for her when the glass came apart.
I grabbed her by the waist and hauled her down behind the counter, pulling her into me, my back to the windows. I curled over her, head tucked against hers, arms wrapped tight. Rounds punched through what was left of the shopfront, shredding stems and scattering glass across the floor. The cooler blew out in a spray of cold air and crystal. A round hit the pressed tin ceiling and sent fragments raining down. Another caught the wall behind the register, plaster dust filling the air.
A burn across my left shoulder. Sharp, hot, the specific pain of a bullet that catches skin without burying itself, fortunately it was likely just grazed. I cataloged it and dismissed it. Irrelevant in this moment, I was protecting Macy.
Three seconds of fire. Four. Then the engine pitch shifted, accelerating east, and the sound thinned, faded, and the shop went quiet except for the hiss of the ruined cooler and water running from toppled buckets onto the hardwood.
I held position. Counted to ten. In the Rangers, the silence after a burst was the most dangerous part. The instinct was to move, to lift your head, and that’s when the second volley found you. I waited. Listened. No engine returning. No footsteps. Just the tick of debris settling and the drip of water and, underneath me, the rapid expansion of her ribs against my arms.
“You hit?” Low, close to her ear.
She didn’t answer right away. Her breathing was ragged, shallow, the kind that happens when the body is running onadrenaline and the mind hasn’t caught up. She was shaking against me, hard tremors running through her whole frame.
“Macy. Are you hit?”
“No.” Barely a whisper. “No, I don’t... no.”
I checked anyway. Ran my hands along her arms, her sides, her ribs. Glass dust everywhere. A cut on her forearm where a shard had caught her, superficial. No bullet wounds. She was okay, at least physically.
I eased off her and she sat up slowly, her back against the counter, her hands flat on the floor. Her face was white. She was staring at the ruined shop, the blown-out windows, the water and glass and scattered petals, and her mouth was open and nothing was coming out. Shock. The delayed kind that hits after the noise stops and the brain has to reconcile what just happened with every assumption it had about the next five minutes.