Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64527 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 323(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64527 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 323(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
She had me there. Why did I? “Just call it curiosity,” I said.
“Well, you know what they say about what curiosity did to the cat,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I should get back to work.”
She turned away and walked down the aisles of the store, fidgeting with every step she took as she walked away.
I’d clearly struck a nerve and put her on the defensive. I wasn’t sure why that surprised me so much. I would have reacted the exact same way if the roles had been reversed. I valued my privacy and my isolation and clearly, she did too. However, my damn cop instincts were still pinging on high alert.
I finished grabbing the rest of my groceries, adding a few more odds and ends to the basket that I knew would last me at least a few weeks before going to check out at the cash register. I barely paid any attention to the person helping me, looking over her shoulder toward Macy, who I spotted pulling bottles of detergent out of a cardboard box at her feet. I turned back to the person in front of me, getting a raised eyebrow from the dark-haired woman I recognized from most of the times that I came down to the market.
“You alright up there on the mountain, Dillon?” Alison asked. “It’s lookin’ like there might be some storms comin’ up soon.”
“So everyone keeps sayin’,” I said, unable to help myself from falling into the twang when I was around other Smokies. “I’m alright, though.”
“Alright. I just know that everyone thinks about you a lot up on that mountain, you know?”
“If you say so,” I said, handing over the money for the groceries. I grabbed the bags and headed back out to the truck. I hadn’t brought Bucky into the market with me that time, so he was really excited to see me when I finally opened the car and got inside, starting it up again and heading back to the mountain where I could focus on myself and forget all about Macy.
4
MACY
I should’ve thrown the phone away after Alex’s call. It was a burner, after all, and I could replace it easily. But for now, it was the only way my mom had of contacting me. I didn’t believe for a second that she had given Alex the number, at least not on purpose, but he was resourceful as all hell. He’d probably gotten one of his less than upstanding cop friends to search her phone records and gotten the number that way.
And if he could find my number once, then he could find it again.
Shit. Shit.
How was I ever going to be able to live if he just kept finding me again? Would I spend the rest of my damn life running?
I couldn’t just keep wandering around the few square feet of my apartment, waiting for it to suddenly transform itself into the home I’d been dreaming of back when I’d left LA.
I needed fresh air; I needed to breathe and get out into nature. I got up, unable to sit in that same spot anymore, and went into my closet to dig out my hiking boots and socks. I hadn’t worn them in so long that, when I stuck my hand into the boots themselves, the leather seemed to have gotten much stiffer than they’d been the last time I’d worn them.
I pulled on my socks and then the boots, moving my feet around so that the leather slowly became flexible once more and, I headed outside to my car.
I remembered the spot out at the mountain where there was the trailhead from when I’d first come to town and looked up the list of good hikes and things to do in the area, and I drove out there on autopilot. Hiking was something I’d done every weekend or so when I’d lived in LA, but I hadn’t made the time for it since I’d come out here, since I’d been clinging to my sanity by the skin of my teeth and nails.
I was grateful that Singer’s Ridge was little enough for me to have gotten to know it like the back of my hand in barely an hour, and I found the trailhead without a problem. I tied the precautionary sweatshirt I’d brought with me around my waist and got out, heading into the woods.
The air was crisp and clean, and it wasn’t for the first time that I thought of how ironic it was that the air in a place called the Smoky Mountains would be this fresh and beautiful. The hikes were gorgeous in LA, but there was way more gunk in the air out there than I’d ever breathe here.
As I turned a corner on the trail, I felt my phone start to vibrate, and I reached for it. But just as I’d pulled it out, the vibration stopped, and the banner on the screen told me I had a new voicemail. The screen told me I only had one bar of service, so I stopped before the reception could get any worse, and I opened the message while I still had enough service to hear it.