by Abby Knox
"And your mom never told you?"
He shook his head. "I'm not sure she even knows."
Harper took his hand. "Should I not have shown you this? You seem upset."
Again, he shook his head. "No. I'm not upset. This blows my mind. I think…I think I need some fresh air."
She bit her lip and took his hand. "Then let's go."
The elevator went up instead of down. "Harper, what are you up to now?"
She smiled. "Getting you some fresh air. Humor me." The elevator reached the 66th floor. They exited, and he followed her down a darkened hallway to a wooden door that looked like it was over 100 years old.
"This looks abandoned up here. Are you sure we're supposed to be up here?" Dash asked.
"Oh my god. Are you a man or a mouse?"
"I thought you didn't like tight spaces," he said as they climbed the narrow staircase that ended at a hatch on the ceiling.
She replied, "This is not a tight space for me. Sorry, I didn't think about your height. But this is amazing. Come on."
"Uh," he started, but Harper was undeterred. She opened the hatch and continued up more steps. A blast of cold wind almost knocked Dash over. "Come on! You gotta see this!"
"Are you taking me on the roof, or…" Dash's comments cut short when he joined her on the landing. To his left and right stood the back of the building's iconic clock faces, which faced east and west. In front of him lay the entire city north of the river. He could see Ecco Tower straight ahead, St. Patrick's Cathedral to his left, and beyond that, Newcastle Pier and the harbor. He turned 180 degrees and spied the Riverwalk shops and eateries that dotted the river. Beyond that, all the familiar Dockside landmarks, including the wharf, the Port Authority, and Holy Rosary.
"This is the weirdest-ass date I've ever been on but also hands down the coolest," Dash said.
Harper jumped up and down excitedly. "I'm so glad you're having fun. And look."
He grabbed her close. "Oh my god, do not jump around like that up here."
"Is Dash Fitzgerald afraid of heights?"
"No comment."
"Look," she said, gesturing with her forehead to the south. Dash followed her gaze over the river and watched where she pointed. "Over there is where our boat was, where the tunnels begin. And according to the tour guide, it goes that way, toward uptown. But according to that article, the tunnels stretch all the way to the community college, where the Ross farm used to be. It's all interconnected. They never closed off the tunnels, and that's why we have that sinkhole now. And I'm going to find out why the city never closed them off after knowing about it for almost a whole century. If they don't let me investigate the missing women, then I'm going to dig up some dirt on that tunnel, so to speak."
Dash was about to tell her to be careful—as if that wouldn't fall on deaf ears—when a loud clang drowned out the conversation.
"What the hell!" Dash shouted but could not hear his voice over the din coming from the clock tower chimes.
He could not hear her, but he could read her lips as she covered her ears.
"It must be noon!"
That night, Dash once again slept over in Harper's bed.
"You know, tomorrow is Monday," he said, holding a naked Harper against his chest after a lively boning session.
"Yeah, and…"
He reminded her, "And every Monday, the squad meets for breakfast at Crow Bar."
She hummed sleepily, tracing her fingers over his bare chest. "Yum. Breakfast."
"With my mom."
Harper sat up, suddenly wide awake, eyes wide. "Oh. Okay."
"And I'm going to use that opportunity to tell everybody. About us. That we're together."
Harper stared at him for a moment, thinking. Then, she said, "Alright. Let's do this. If you're ready."
Dash nodded. "Mom's gonna wonder where I've been. The same thing happened when Holden and Katie got together. She's like a mom to him, too."
Harper bit her thumb. "Are you sure she's ready to lose two boys in two months?"
Dash reached up and drew her back in close. He didn't like being in the same bed and not touching her. He didn't like not touching her in general. The feelings were growing by the minute.
"She'll be ready when she understands that I'm…that I'm serious about us," he said, holding back what he wanted to say. It was too soon for I love you. He needed to be sure, and he didn't want to spook her.
As Harper covered his midsection with one leg while kissing him goodnight, he felt himself growing aroused once again. He couldn't get enough of her lips, her body, her mind, and her sweet, caring soul. That kiss bled into more kissing, touching, a tangle of lips, and a slow, sleepy sensuous expression of their togetherness.
When the moon shone high in the sky and bathed them in its yellow light, and they'd both climaxed together for the second time that night, Harper's chatter lulled him to sleep, happily.
"We're going to blow everyone's minds tomorrow," she said.
"Mmhmm," he agreed and fell into another deep, satisfying sleep.
Chapter Seventeen
Harper
* * *
"We all knew," Holden said.
Harper gaped and looked around at those people. Holden and Katie, Mrs. Fitzgerald, Levi and Fiona, Ricky, Alex, Billy, Declan, Honey, and Griff. All of them stared back at her as if she'd just announced she was going to the store for milk. Like it was the most mundane fact known to humankind.
Dash and Harper had spent all day Saturday and Sunday together. Dash had only left Saturday night to work his shift at Crow Bar after agreeing to keep it a secret for the weekend.
The crew had gathered for its weekly Monday morning cinnamon buns at Crow Bar. It was a bright and sunny late winter morning, and everyone seemed more relieved than surprised.
"You knew?"
Katie nodded. "The two of you cannot keep your hands off each other."
Harper protested. "What are you talking about?"
Katie continued. "Remember when you came to Holden's boxing match just to piss Dash off? You were baiting him."
"I wasn't baiting him. I was there because I like a boxing match."
Katie ignored that, shifting her gaze to Dash. He had that familiar severe look on his face like the world was against him. "And he took the bait."
Dash spoke up then. "I didn't take the bait."
Harper exclaimed, "There was no bait."
Blithely, Katie replied, "Sure. Well, that's not what I saw when he threw you over his shoulder and stomped out of the Union Hall like he was going to take you back to his cave for a good railing."
Holden sprayed coffee out of his mouth. "Katie! Mrs. Fitzgerald is right there."
Mrs. Fitzgerald played it off. "I do know how babies are made. You kids act like I'm purer than the blessed Virgin."
Fiona cackled.
Harper bit her lip, still not knowing if she should be terrified of Mrs. Fitzgerald. The woman was holding something back. "Are you upset that we told you like this, Mrs. Fitzgerald?"
The older woman handed Harper a plate of gooey cinnamon buns. "It wasn't the best way for a mother to find out about her son's new girlfriend, and I'll be honest, it's going to take me a minute to wrap my head around my son pairing up with a Ross. But I'll manage."
Harper hardly expected a warm welcome from Dash's mom. She wondered how much she knew about the facts of the two feuding families.
Harper looked around sheepishly as she held the cinnamon bun, not sure if her stomach was calm enough to eat anything at the moment.
Fortunately, Dash's arm that was around her shoulder held her tight, squeezing out a bit of her anxiety. "Maybe you all saw something we didn't see ourselves," Dash said.
She looked up at him. He'd never given up an argument so fast. "Really?"
He shrugged. "I'm trying on this new attitude. Feels good."
Billy scoffed. "You're still the same empty-headed string bean with a bad temper. Don't get too proud of yourself."
>
Harper felt Dash stiffen next to her. "Oh, Billy," Dash said. "I would never let you down."
Chapter Eighteen
Dash
* * *
He braced himself for the third degree from his mother, because he had questions himself.
Harper had said her goodbyes and cut out of breakfast early, having errands to run before work. Dash drove with his mom, with the intent of picking up a few things from his apartment. He knew his mom wasn't going to approve of that last part.
"I was wondering why I hadn't seen you around at all over the weekend," she remarked as they sat in the driveway. The ride to his childhood home had been spent in silence.
"I'm sorry for springing this on you. It all happened fast," he said.
She sighed. "The same thing happened to my little Holden."
Holden might not have been the tallest but was the brawniest of all of the bouncers at Crow Bar, but Dash wasn't about to quibble with his mom.
"You know, that girl isn't going to be satisfied with a husband working for a defense contractor. You know what she's like."
Dash turned to his mom. "What do you mean?"
Mrs. Fitzgerald worked hard to speak with kindness, but Dash could tell the old feud was tainting her tenuous grasp on keeping an open mind. "She and her mothers handcuffed themselves to a tree when the company broke ground on that factory where you now work, you know."
Dash conjured the memory of that. "Oh yeah. I forgot about that." He couldn't help but chuckle. "You know, they have a point. We make things that get shipped around the world to kill people."
"You have health care; that's all I'm concerned about. You have better health coverage than your father did back then," Mrs. Fitzgerald continued. "She's going to ask you to quit. Then what?"
Dash shrugged. "I kinda hate the job anyway. Maybe I'll quit and do something else. Maybe I'll find my thing. I only took the job because it paid enough to help you out. I have enough saved to take care of you if I quit.
Mrs. Fitzgerald swatted her son on the arm. "Ow!"
"Listen," she said. "I appreciate that, but I didn't ask you to do that."
"But that's what sons do for their widowed mothers. That's the rule."
"Is it? I thought I was supposed to take care of my baby boy forever," she said with a smirk.
Dash laughed. "No, that's not how it works. I make sure all my people are taken care of. But what about you? I have questions for you, Ma."
Mrs. Fitzgerald studied her son's face. "She told you all about the reason behind the feud, didn't she?"
"I'd like to know why you never told me. All I ever knew was her great-grand-somebody stole a fortune from my great-grand-somebody, and nobody ever apologized for nothing. That was how Dad described it. All I knew was I was supposed to hate that family, but I wasn't sure why. But now that I know the truth, I think it's time to forget about those old hurts and move on, don't you?"
His mom looked at him skeptically. "You know, I only cared about it because your father carried the grudge around. We all tend to carry around this idea that people who have passed on were right about everything. We think we're honoring their memory when we don't identify their faults. But maybe you're right. Maybe it's all meaningless."
"It's not meaningless, Ma. It's just time to talk things out so we can give each other some grace."
Mrs. Fitzgerald reached over and patted her son's cheek. "Harper's a lucky girl."
"You've no idea how wrong you are about that. I'm the lucky one."
Chapter Nineteen
Harper
* * *
She had a boyfriend and a full-time job. Was this her life now? Was she settling down into normal life?
Ever since graduating high school, Harper had worked with her moms at the distillery and volunteered with a long list of community groups.
Then she began writing letters to the editor. So many that she was eventually an often-quoted source for TV and newspaper reporters who needed a source in the city's most struggling neighborhood. And then came the guest editorial. And then came the thing she never told anyone. Not her mothers, not her boss, and not Dash…yet. Then came the death threats in her social media DMs. And most recently, delivered to her home. She knew enough to take them seriously, so she did show them to the police. So far, they hadn't turned up any leads as to the source. One or two of the trolls in her DMs had turned out to be just that—trolls who didn't even live in Newcastle.
But Harper was Harper, and she refused to live in fear. She was smart about it. She varied her routes when she walked. She frequented establishments where she knew people'd surround her. Crow Bar always felt like the best place to frequent. It was almost always crowded and always secure, even when the customers got rowdy.
She'd never told Dash, but she went there because she felt safe. If she ever felt as if she was being followed, she would duck into Crow Bar and was snug as a bug.
If Dash knew all this, he would flip his lid.
But now that they were together, she knew she would have to tell him. And he would insist she start carrying a gun. Knowing him, he might quit one of his jobs just to keep his eyes on her full time.
The idea of that, even though ridiculous, made her smile as she parked her car at the public beach lot under the boardwalk.
She had an hour before she needed to report to work, and she needed to walk on the beach.
It was an unseasonably warm February day, and the sun was shining off the water.
Harper was a person who could never stop moving. When she wasn't working, volunteering, or meeting up with friends, she would just walk.
Her favorite place to walk was the Newcastle Pier, and sunrise was her favorite time. But knowing full well the depth and breadth of crime in this city, she varied her schedule. Some days she went at noon, sometimes at sunrise. Always when it was light out.
Instead of going to the pier on this day, she decided she needed to feel the sand between her toes.
Peeling off her sneakers and stuffing her socks into them, she considered whether she should carry them with her.
She decided to leave them where they were so she could walk freely without carrying smelly shoes. "If someone wants my old beat-up sneakers that badly, they can have them," she said out loud to no one.
The packed, damp sand felt cold, but soon she became used to the temperature as she walked on and forgot about it as her mind wandered.
A couple walking a dog strolled past her coming from the other direction. They smiled at her, if seeming a little hurried when the dog stopped to sniff Harper's outstretched hand. The woman looked a bit out of place for a morning stroll on the beach. Apart from not wearing enough warm layers, she wore expensive high-heeled boots, which hampered the woman's strides and left deep heel prints in the compacted, wet sand where they walked. How strange, Harper thought. Wearing heels while walking one's dog was already a risky choice. Heels on the beach is asking for a twisted ankle.
Then again, Harper never knew what she might see at the public beach. Newcastle was full of characters, and that was one of the things she loved about her town. She felt relatively safe there at the beach, with very few people out on a February morning other than runners and dogwalkers.
She knew that Dash would not want her to go walking alone. Her boyfriend. She still could not seem to wrap her head around that fact. On Thursday, they'd been arguing about one thing or another; on Friday, they were sneaking kisses in between public arguments, much to their mutual surprise.
Today? Today was a whole different world. She felt as if she were on another planet. Was it called Bizarro World when Superman went to that planet where everything worked in the opposite way than how it should? She'd have to ask Dash about that.
God, now she was thinking about superheroes. She groaned out loud. I'm doomed, she thought.
She meandered under Newcastle Pier and held on to the piling while she jumped with the waves, her jeans rolled up to her knees. The water was frigid,
but she found it invigorating. The word "doomed" barely escaped her lips when her day started to go sideways.
"Excuse me, ma'am?"
Harper turned around and saw it was the woman who had walked by her earlier with the dog. Her heavily-made up eyes were wide, and she looked scared and anxious.
Harper exhaled, grabbing the spot on her chest closest to her heart. She'd just been thinking about how safe she felt on the beach; she'd hardly been expecting a stranger to walk right up behind her.
"Can I help you?"
"My dog. Have you seen her?"
Confused, Harper glanced around up and down the beach.
"You had a man with you earlier, in the blue jacket?"
The woman nodded. "Yeah, he went and looked for Sheba that way." She pointed up toward the north end. "You didn't see her run past this way, did you?"
Harper shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. I didn't."
"Darn," the woman said. She absently pushed up the sleeves of her sparkly cowl-necked sweater, and Harper got a flash of two things: a silver cuff bracelet with words stamped on it, and bruising on the woman's forearm.
"Do you have a phone number I can call? In case I see your Sheba?" Harper asked.
The woman shook her head and bit her lip. "He…that man…has my phone. He likes to, um, keep track of who texts me."
Harper didn't respond at first, only raised her eyebrows in alarm.
The woman shrugged, and her painted ruby lips smirked shyly. "Overprotective boyfriends, what are you gonna do, right?"
Harper let those words hang in the air for a few beats while she processed what was going on.
She blew out a breath. The poor thing needed help.
"Do you need a safe place to go to?" Harper pressed.
The woman looked around nervously.
"I… okay, here's the truth… I'm so sorry to bother you with this, but my sister said I could stay with her."
Harper nodded. "Good. You should do that."