“Evie, honey,” he whispered. “Come back to me, yeah?”

I made myself nod.

He took his fingers from my chin but did it gliding one along my jaw a little in a light, sweet, reassuring touch.

“You’re gonna have moments like that,” he shared. “When I’m not here, you still got people around. Let them help you pull yourself out of ’em. Okay?”

I made myself nod again.

“This is gonna get sorted, Evie. It seems a lot and it seems scary, but,” he grinned a grin I could tell he didn’t fully mean, glanced toward the store then back to me and joked, “we haven’t lost one yet.”

I made myself smile.

He knew I didn’t fully mean it either when he vowed, “I promise, it’s gonna be okay. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I pushed out.

His face got soft.

Oh God.

That look.

That look on Daniel Magnusson aimed at me.

I WANNA MAKE YOU MINE! I screamed in my head.

“Forget the custard,” he ordered. “I’ll take you for more when you can eat it without it being melted. Eat your curds and your burger.”

“Roger that, sergeant.”

“I only made corporal.”

“What?”

“Nothin’,” he said then took a massive bite of his burger.

Why did dudes do that?

It wasn’t going to fly out of his hands and make its escape before he shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

He watched me watching him chewing.

And with his mouth still full, he asked, “What?”

“You eat like a frat boy.” I said it like a tease so he wouldn’t take offense.

He didn’t.

He swallowed, smiled (again! gah!) and then leaned close to me. “This is normally fifteenth- or maybe sixteenth-date stuff. You know, when I really got my hooks in you after dazzling you with fried cheese curds and impressing you with my masculinity that I didn’t cry when they killed John Wick’s dog. But just sayin’, that’s only ’cause I’ve seen it so often, the tears for that little fella are done and gone. But heads up, I am a frat boy, Evie. I’ll prove it to you tonight when we shotgun some beers.”

I started giggling.

Mag stopped looking so worried.

I fought crying.

“Eat,” he whispered.

I nodded and turned my attention to the burger and curds.

“How long you stayin’?” Mag asked, and I cast my gaze in the direction of his question.

It was to Tex.

“As long as you need me to stay.”

These people.

These crazy, kindhearted people.

And then there was…

Me.

“I don’t want her leaving you, Duke and Nightingale’s cameras,” Mag went on. “And I won’t be done until around five thirty, six.”

“We don’t close until seven so you’re good,” Tex replied. “You get tied up, I’ll take her to Nightingale’s offices. They always got someone workin’ in the control room. She can hang with whoever that is.”

Mag nodded.

“We gotta get stuck into sorting out Evie’s place,” Lottie said to Mag then looked to me. “Ava and me are gonna head out in a bit. You cool with hanging here and reading?”

I nodded.

I’d had other things to do with my day, which was an unusual day off, this being when I did those other things. Like pay bills. Laundry. Go to the grocery store. Clean the house. Check in on my sister to make sure she hadn’t done something outlandish to garner attention from the online community. Like film herself allowing strangers to do shots off her body (not something I made up in my head, something she passed by me as an “idea that held merit,” but it wasn’t me who talked her out of it, apparently someone else did that as their shtick).

I had no house, or laundry, and the bills could wait.

And honestly, if my sister wanted to let random people do body shots off her, what did it matter to me?

“Yeah, I’m cool with hanging and reading,” I told Lottie. “And I need to call my insurance company about my car.”

“After the police were done with it,” Mag cut in, “Auggie secured it. If they need access, let me know and I’ll text you the details on where it is.”

Before I could ask after that, any of it (the police, I knew, his friend Auggie had called them in and they’d done their thing at my apartment and with my car—the other bit, my car being “secured” and Mag giving me the details if my insurance company needed it, I did not know), Lottie spoke.

“We’ll just clean up,” she assured me. “We won’t throw anything away until you have a chance to go through it.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

“Tex’ll listen, Duke too, and I’m just a phone call away, you get another one of those moments,” she went on.

So she hadn’t missed it.

“I’m okay,” I promised.

“Tex’ll listen, Duke too, and they’re both good at it,” she asserted. “But I’m just a phone call away.”

“Thanks, Lottie,” I muttered.

“He’s my boy and you’re my girl,” she stated, jerking her head in turn to Mag and me, and I stared at her, not sure why she was saying that. “I would not fix him up with anyone who didn’t deserve him, and the same with you. Are you understanding me, Evie?”

I nodded.

“You really need to understand me, Evie,” she said quietly, but there was a fierceness to her tone.

I thought I understood her, but that fierceness to her tone made me wonder.

Nevertheless, I nodded again.

She looked to Duke, who was sitting with us, throwing curds into his mouth like M&M’s. “I don’t think she does.”

“They don’t,” he said sagely. “Then they do. It’s a process that can’t be rushed. Don’t rush it, darlin’.”

Lottie heaved a sigh.

Before he left, Mag did the holding-my-hand-and-guiding-me-to-the-door thing that ended with the lip touch, but he added, “I’m not on anything intense. You need me, baby, you call.”

I wondered what “anything intense” was.

I didn’t ask because it wasn’t my business but also because “intense” seemed an alias for “scary as shit” and I wasn’t ready for more scary.

I just, again, nodded.

Mag took off.

Lottie and Ava took off.

I cleared away the detritus from Culver’s, then sat down with my book but didn’t open it because Smithie was looming over me.

“It’s always the quiet ones,” he said when I looked up at him.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“Child,” he murmured gently, “the minute I looked at you, you broke my heart. That lost look in your eyes. Damn.”

Oh God.

I felt my chest rise and fall with the effort to stop myself from crying.

“Look around, Evie,” he said. “You’ve been found.”

I swallowed.

Actually, it was more like a gulp.

Smithie bent and kissed my cheek.

When he straightened, he told me, “I got a phone too. You need anything, darlin’, you call on me.”