by Serena Bell
Alfie thought about that a minute, looked from the contents of the truck to the new sign above the shop. “Yeah. I think I can do that.” Then he surprised Jax by extending his hand for a shake. “Glad to see you back here, Jax.”
“Glad to be here, Chief.”
He realized, watching Alfie turn the car and spin away, that it was true.
20
Chiara was having a beast of a time concentrating.
It was probably because she was now on her fourth—or was it fifth?—interview of the day, part of the lineup Buyathon had prepared for her second round of interviews.
First, she’d met again with the Buyathon CFO, the guy who would be her boss if she got this job. His name was Greg Pepper. He was thirty-five-ish, with a neatly trimmed beard, a man bun over shaved sides, slim fit pants, and a button-down with rolled sleeves. Chiara had liked him right away when she’d met him two weeks ago. And this time, he welcomed her like an old friend.
He set her up in a conference room overlooking Lake Union—dotted with boats and sparkling in the Seattle summer sun—and led a succession of finance team employees in to meet with her. Somewhere around the third interview, she’d lost her edge, and her focus. She’d managed to answer all their questions, but her mind kept wandering.
She wanted to blame the gorgeous view outside, but the truth was that she was thinking about Meeples. And Evan. And Jax. She was worrying that whatever Jax’s surprise was, it wasn’t going to be big enough to save Meeples. And she didn’t know what she would do if she had to deliver that news to Evan.
Not to mention that she thought her own heart would break if the store had to close.
Even though she was probably moving to Seattle. If she didn’t blow this interview.
“Chiara?”
The COO had apparently just asked her something, because he was looking at her impatiently. Well, shit. She needed to concentrate.
Pull it together, Kee.
It was her dad’s voice, pushing her to ignore distractions so she could succeed—as he’d always wanted her to do. If he were here, he’d tell her to keep her eyes on the prize and nail this thing to the wall. Stay strong. Swat unhelpful thoughts away like mosquitoes.
She sat up straight. “I’m so sorry. Could you repeat the question?”
“You describe yourself as detail-oriented—tell me what that means to you.”
She winced at the irony of zoning out in the middle of that question. It was a softball, and she had a hundred stories she could tell. She chose her favorite, about how she’d caught an invisible two-cent error that had repeated itself enough times to cost a client nearly six thousand dollars.
She thought of Jax, giving her shit as she rearranged the Terraforming Mars game pieces. No one who’d watched her do that would question her commitment to detail.
She wondered what would happen if she told that story.
She didn’t think the COO would be impressed.
At the end of the interview session, Greg Pepper came back to wrap up the day. He chatted casually with her for a while, then threw her a zinger.
“Tierney Bay’s an awfully beautiful place to live,” Greg said. “Why would you leave it for Seattle? Especially when you’ve got a pretty cushy gig, working for yourself? What if I’m a cruel taskmaster?”
She’d done her homework on that last point. “A friend of a friend of mine—Damien Howers—worked for you at Meridian, and he says you’re smart, funny, and the kind of boss who would throw yourself under a bus for your employees.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That last part is probably an exaggeration. Maybe a Segway scooter.”
They both laughed.
“But seriously,” he said. “I wouldn’t leave Tierney Bay, ever, if I had a job that let me live there.”
Go for it, Kee, her dad said. You’ve got this.
“I’ve always wanted to work for a big company. And I’m not going to lie. I’m ambitious. I promised myself as a little kid that I’d be the CFO of something one day.”
He grinned. “Funny that,” he said. “I promised myself I’d be the CEO of something one day. And I respect ambition in my people. Damien probably told you that, too.”
She smiled. “Sure did.”
“Did he say I had good coattails?”
“He did.”
“Sounds like we’ll get along very well,” he said. “There are a few more people we need to you to meet, but unfortunately, August is a rotten time for hiring, and getting them lined up might take a few weeks. Are you in a hurry for a decision?”
She shook her head.
“I’m guessing we’ll be able to call you within two weeks to set up the final round of interviews.”
“Perfect,” she said.
They chatted for a bit longer, and then he showed her out, promising to call “with news” as soon as he could.
That’s my girl! said her dad’s voice in her head, as she climbed back into the driver’s seat of her aging VW Passat and pulled out of the parking garage. Strong work!
“It couldn’t have gone any better, could it?” she said out loud.
I’m so proud of you.
He would have been, too. She knew it to her soul. She wished—so much—that she could call him right now. Or better yet, drive home, find him, throw her arms around him, and tell him all about it.
Her eyes filled with tears. The adrenaline that had propelled her through the interview now slowly leached out, and she leaned her head back against the seat, suddenly almost too tired to move.
It was going to be a long drive home.
She cranked her psych-up playlist, pulled herself together, and backed out of the parking space.
21
Jax didn’t leave the shop, except to get food, from Thursday at dinnertime all the way through closing on Friday.
The trickiest part was Friday during store hours. He did everything he could to keep the disruption to a minimum during those hours. And when customers wandered in, he made them collaborators, explaining the situation and making them promise not to post anything about Meeples to social media or mention anything to the Campbell family. A few seemed confused or irritated, but most of them thought it was cute and were excited to be in on the secret.
He wanted to make them sign a contract in blood so no one would spoil the surprise.
He couldn’t wait to see Evan’s reaction to the shop. His brother was long overdue for news to celebrate. The idea of being the one to put a smile on his face was reason enough to work overtime.
But Jax knew he had another reason, too.
Chiara.
He wanted to see her face when she saw the shop. He wanted to watch her eyes light and her expression open up. He wanted her to look at him like he’d performed a miracle.
Walker, you’re screwed, he thought.
Luckily, he had hours and hours of backbreaking work to distract him from his own idiocy. Although it didn’t staunch the flow of memories. Something about being back in Tierney Bay, about spending time with Chiara, had unleashed them, and they were coming thick and fast now.
Like the night long ago when SuperJax met SuperKee, for example.
It had been a bad week. Evan had been sick, and the doctors had been trying—again—to figure out what might be wrong with him. Jax had barely made it to school that week, because Evan hadn’t been able to go to school, and their mother—
Well, she had been waking up in the late afternoon and having a mimosa. Or a Bloody Mary. She’d actually explained to him that a Bloody Mary was a good breakfast because it had vegetables in it, and no sugar.
She’d tried to hug him but her breath smelled of Clamato juice, and he pulled away.
That week, between work shifts and what school he could manage, plus shopping and cooking to try to entice Evan to eat, Jax was exhausted. He hadn’t been able to accept any of Rich’s dinner invitations, and Chiara hadn’t been at Cape House during his shifts.
But this afternoon, Chiara was w
orking in the Cape House lobby and Jax was drawn straight to her. He drifted over to where she was working and even though he knew he couldn’t pull out a chair and sit down—Rich was a generous boss, but not that generous—he knelt on the floor and leaned on the table and said the thing that set the world in motion.
“I want a superhero, too.”
She raised both eyebrows. “Okay.” She tugged her notebook close. “Does he look like you?”
“More or less,” he said. “Bigger shoulders. More muscles.”
“I like the way you look,” she said. She sounded like she was kind of teasing him, because that was what he’d said to her. But the way she was looking at him wasn’t teasing at all. She was staring at him. Not just his eyes, not just his face, but all of him. He wasn’t sure a girl had ever looked at him, like that, like she liked what she saw. It made him hard, which made every useful thought go out of his head. He had to look away.
“They should have an adventure,” Jax said, to fill the awkward silence that followed.
She was still looking at him. Her eyes were very big and her cheeks were very pink and he wondered if their eye contact just now had messed her up, too.
That thought did not help with the brain fog.
She dug into her backpack and pulled out her notebook and her pencils. She set them out, opened to a blank page, and said, “What kind of adventure?”
“What does SuperKee do?”
“Anything I wouldn’t do,” she said promptly.
“Like what?”
“Skip school. Deface public property. Smoke pot.”
Jax laughed, a short bark of surprise.
“Yeah, I know. None of that probably sounds like an adventure to you.”
He shrugged. “Not so much. I skipped school Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday this week. I’ve probably skipped more school than I’ve attended. And when I was in Virginia—we’ve moved around a lot. I’ve never lived a single place more than two years.”
She was watching him. There was no judgment in her eyes, just curiosity.
“My mom gets herself tangled up in things. Or screws stuff up. And she gets antsy. She doesn’t like sorting things out. They get messy and she runs. Finds a new place to live.”
He could tell she was having trouble understanding. The Campbells, they were people who would stay and clean up their messes, no matter how ugly or complicated. But still, there was no judgment in her eyes, which made it easy to keep going.
“Anyway, I guess it was a couple of years ago, we were in Virginia. My mom was still with Evan’s dad. He wasn’t a perfect guy, but he had a good effect on my mom. She sort of held things together, and he always had a job. And then…I don’t know, he met someone else, and moved to France. That was when my mom got bad, and I did, too, for a while.” He sighed. “Until I figured out no one was going to take care of Evan if I didn’t. Anyway, during that time, I did all kinds of stuff. Spray painted the side of a school, shoplifted, ate my weight in pot gummies, stole my mom’s liquor. And then one day I came home really late. It was after midnight. And Evan was awake and watching TV. There was a crime show rerun on and it was really violent. He was four, and he was scared—big eyes, tears running down his face, but he was just sitting there, like he didn’t know what else to do. My mom was passed out in a chair. And I don’t know, I just kind of knew. That I had a choice to make, and I was going to be making it for both of us. Evan and me. So I pulled it together.” He grinned. “I did still miss a lot of school.”
“Not for fun, though.”
“No,” he said. Her sympathy carved out a hollow spot in his chest. “Not for fun.”
She just looked at him for a while with those vivid blue eyes. Then she sighed and turned back to the blank page. “SuperJax and SuperKee need to have an adventure that’s an adventure for both of them.”
“What if they solve a mystery?”
She pursed her lips. “Okay.” She thought for a moment, then began sketching.
Jax’s shitty pre-calc teacher got murdered and SuperKee found the dead body. Chiara drew it for him—the classroom, Mr. Mueller’s body draped over his desk, the murder weapon a blackboard pointer. SuperKee, distraught, in the doorway of the classroom, laying eyes on the slain teacher.
She bit her lip while she drew. Her eyes were bright and her breath came fast, like she was—
He made himself unthink that. If he thought about her that way, then he would want to kiss her (even more than he already did), and if he kissed her then she would have expectations for him, and if she had expectations for him there would be another thing in his life that he would be responsible for. And he would drop a ball, and it might be her.
And she did not deserve to be a dropped ball.
“Okay. So then what happens?” she demanded.
“SuperKee starts investigating.”
She was drawing again, sending SuperKee and SuperJax fingerprinting, DNA testing, and interviewing through the halls of the high school. He found himself leaning in closer to see. A strand of her hair tickled his cheek. She smelled like apple pie.
Jax wanted to push the strand behind her ear. He wanted to bury his face in her hair to find out if that’s where the apple pie smell was coming from.
He was a breath from doing it, when something caught his eye and he looked up to see the kitchen clock.
“Shit,” he said. “I was supposed to get Evan fifteen minutes ago.”
Right. That was why he was not supposed to get distracted by Chiara’s hair or cinnamon scent or drawings. Because he had responsibilities.
He left her sitting at the table, absorbed in the drawing. As he went out, he wanted to tell her, Wait for me. Don’t draw it without me.
But he didn’t. Because leaning over the paper, sketching as fast as she could, she looked vividly happy, and he didn’t want to take that away from her.
Now, ten years later and in the game store, Jax leaned against the wall beside one of the comic book racks and rested his head in his hands.
Something had taken away her joy, though, hadn’t it? he thought, as he finished toggle-bolting the last of the game shelves into the wall. She didn’t draw anymore. Even though he’d seen the longing in her face as she’d looked at those colored pencils.
For that brief time in high school, something had given her space to be herself. But over time she’d shaped herself back into the mold her father had laid out for her. Had Jax’s leaving thrown that switch, pushed her to clamp down on the parts of herself that didn’t check boxes or toe the line? If so, it was another sin he’d lay at his own feet. And Rich Campbell’s, too.
If he told her the truth, would it set her free again?
For a moment, hope scrabbled at the door. Then he shook himself and reset.
No. It might set him free, but he wouldn’t take that freedom if it would cause her pain. No way.
He looked at his watch. It was getting late, and he hadn’t heard anything from Chiara about how her interview had gone. Not that he’d expected a blow by blow. Maybe he’d text her and ask for an update.
He reached for his phone.
22
Well, this sucked.
Ten minutes ago, in the middle of an unexpected summer downpour, the acceleration in Chiara’s car had suddenly gone wonky—like the power had just dropped out from under her as she was going 55 miles per hour. A moment later, a wisp of white smoke seeped out, like fog, from under the hood. One glance at the temperature gauge told her that she wasn’t imagining things—it was climbing rapidly toward the danger zone.
Panicked, she pulled over to the side of Highway 101 and tucked the car as best she could onto the tiny shoulder, overlooking a drop-off into a forested gully. The wind was whipping around and the car shuddered a little. So did Chiara.
She called AAA and waited a long time as the rain lashed the windshield. Finally they came and towed her to a garage in Aberdeen—twenty minutes out of her way, on top of everything else. Her driver was a tall, thin man
named Joe who had four daughters under the age of six and said that the only time it was quiet was in the truck.
They didn’t talk much after that.
The garage was just closing for the weekend when they got there.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” said the garage owner, a petite woman named Jess in coveralls and a ponytail. “Pretty sure it’s a blown head gasket. Not a tough fix when I’m in the shop, but we’re closed on the weekend—and even if I wanted to help you out, this weekend I’ve got to move my mother-in-law into a nursing home. I can have it ready for you by the end of the day Monday.”
“Can I drive it back to Tierney Bay as is?” The car hadn’t ever died completely, so maybe?
The garage owner shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. Not unless you want to be looking at a hell of a lot more expensive repairs.”
“God, no.”
“You could get it towed. If you’ve got the long-distance towing option on your AAA, it’s covered—?”
Chiara shook her head.
She took a deep breath. She was two hours from Seattle and two hours from home, but she wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. Aberdeen was a decent-sized town with shops, restaurants, and hotels. She’d spend the night, get one of her siblings to pick her up in the morning, then have another sibling drive her back on Monday or Tuesday to retrieve her car. Not fun, but—well, as she frequently told herself, life was what happened while you were busy making other plans.
Her phone told her there was a hotel within walking distance—not likely to be a pleasant walk, considering the weather, but she had grown up walking the Oregon coast beaches in rainy fall, and she wasn’t going to let a summer storm get the best of her. She called the hotel and made a reservation, then, assured of a place to sleep, she turned her attention to food.
“Where should I eat?” she asked Jessie, who was lingering to make sure she was taken care of for the evening.