the sweet almond-liquor flavor that counterbalanced the tart apples. The flaky crust melted on his tongue.
“Worth the five extra miles we’re going to have to run, isn’t it?” Trevor said.
“Oh yeah.”
Jamie pushed the burger aside and finished all but the crumbs of the pie. By then, Sarah had returned.
“Great, as always,” Trevor told her as she cleared away their plates.
“Yeah, great,” Jamie echoed.
“Thanks.”
Her voice was soft, but the corners of her mouth lifted.
When she moved to the cash register to print out their bills, Jamie couldn’t help watching her again. She was as oblivious to him as she was to her own beauty. To her effortless allure that always had him catching his breath in her presence. If he believed that the earlier moment between them had been anything more than a product of his imagination, he was smoking stuff stronger than the K2, or synthetic marijuana, he arrested suspects for.
His friends were already pulling on their jackets when Sarah returned to drop off their bills. Jamie glanced down at his. He hoped the pie would be on his ticket instead of Trevor’s, but only the burger and the coffee were listed.
Farther down the page, her signature was the same—that loopy, feminine cursive that contradicted Sarah’s guarded demeanor. But then his fingers brushed a second slip of paper beneath the bill. The azure color of a sticky note was visible through the filmy ticket.
Though she’d probably stuck it there by accident, her grocery list attached where it didn’t belong, Jamie straightened in his seat. What if it was something else, like a call for help? Why would she reach out only to him in a room full of cops? He blew out a breath. He really was losing it tonight if he was coming up with damsel-in-distress theories.
Still, he made sure no one else was watching before he flipped over the bill.
Thanks for everything you do. You’re one of the good ones.
He read the words twice. People didn’t say things like that to cops. Now profanity-laced rants, topped with middle-finger salutes, those messages were more familiar. He studied the note again. No name. And the letters were block-printed. It wasn’t even addressed to him. Or any officer.
So how pitiful was it for a twenty-seven-year-old man to tuck that folded square of paper in his jeans pocket, as if it was a secret note from study hall? Jamie decided not to answer that question as he shrugged into his sweatshirt. At the cash register, Sarah accepted Vinnie’s money and impaled his receipt on that tiny spike as if nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had, though this time the note in Jamie’s pocket made him wonder.
Sarah caught him watching, and she didn’t look away immediately. He couldn’t have if he’d tried. His pulse pounded so loud in his ears that everyone in the restaurant had to hear it. His palms were as damp as his sweatshirt. With a shy smile, she turned away.
Jamie couldn’t stop blinking. He dug in his pockets for his car keys.
The connection had been as short as the one when he’d first arrived. Shorter. Had it not happened twice, it wouldn’t have seemed significant. But now he was certain of a few things. For one, it was possible for every nerve ending in a person’s body to become instantly alert. The other was that the note folded in his pocket really had been intended for him.
What those things meant was less clear. Could she have overheard the other troopers talking about him before he’d arrived? Could all of this be about pity, after all?
But when he started toward the cash register, Sarah was gone. Ted had replaced her and was checking out the last few troopers. Jamie slowed. Sarah wasn’t clearing tables or filling salt shakers, either. Where had she gone? The answer to that and his other questions lay beyond the swinging door that separated the restaurant’s dining room from its kitchen.
He couldn’t burst into the back, locate her and insist that she explain herself, but he couldn’t let her raise these questions and vanish, either.
“Officer, ready to check out?”
Ted waved him over to the counter. Jamie opened his wallet and pulled out his debit card.
Two minutes later, he pulled up his hood and headed outside. The jangling bells jarred him, reviving those same memories that had chased him into the diner earlier. Had he conjured this whole mystery to escape thoughts about the suicide investigation? Had he clung to the distraction because it might at least offer some answers when the other matter remained a black hole of question marks? Either way, he had to know.
He glanced one last time toward the kitchen as the door whooshed closed. Sarah might not be around to answer his questions tonight, but he was about to become Casey’s best customer until she did.
Sarah Cline hated cowering in the kitchen, but it seemed like her only option now. Even if the dishwasher had to be watching her as he sprayed gunk off plates with the pre-rinse hose, she didn’t dare look his way. How would she explain herself, anyway? For someone who understood just how critical it was for her to keep a low profile, who knew what she could lose if she didn’t, she’d practically leaped on the counter and performed a country line dance in her sensible shoes for all the customers to see.
For all of them? No, her side steps and kick-ball-changes had been for been for just one guy. And she couldn’t explain why she’d done it. A cop? She’d learned the hard way how much she could trust them. She hugged herself tighter, her thumb tracing the jagged pucker of a scar on the underside of her left arm. It was covered, just inside her short uniform sleeve. Hidden. Like so many others.
She lowered her arms and wiped her sweaty hands inside her apron pockets. From her awkward angle, she could no longer see the officer through the scratched, round window. She couldn’t blame him for his curiosity after her odd behavior tonight, so she was relieved when she caught sight of him again as he slipped out into the rain. Relieved and something else. Wistful? It couldn’t be that. If anything, regret was the thing pushing down on her shoulders like a lead blanket. Maybe tinged with the same anxiety she awoke to every morning and tried to sleep with every night.
What had possessed her to write that note? She should have minded her own business. She knew better. It couldn’t matter that she’d only today realized that “Mr. Jamie,” the after-school-program volunteer her sweet Aiden had been gushing over for months, was the same “James A. Donovan” whose debit card she swiped at least twice a week. Or that, from snippets of his coworkers’ conversations, she’d learned that something bad had happened to him at work tonight. Or even that the raw expression clouding his hazel eyes was similar to the one living inside her own mirror.
Not one of those things was a good enough excuse for her to meddle in some guy’s situation with a note...or even two-fifths of a pie. Getting involved in people’s lives encouraged them to ask questions. She couldn’t afford that.
Especially not from a cop.
With a shiver, she glanced back at Léon, who was watching her so closely that he’d sprayed water down the front of his apron. He lifted a thick black brow. She frowned at him. This wasn’t
