Chapter 6: The Broken Shop

Harper's POV

When the phone started buzzing on the nightstand, my first thought was not to answer it — it was to shove it under the pillow and ask the night for ten more minutes.

Lucky thing it stopped. But a few seconds later it went off again, and on the third round I got it to my ear and Josie's voice came straight through it with no good morning in front of it.

"Harper. Where are you."

My head cleared a little. I looked around and realized that somewhere in the night I had ended up asleep in my room.

"…In bed." Only Clay could have gotten me in here.

"Something's happened at the shop. Get over here."

I came up off the mattress whole and put back on the clothes I had no memory of getting out of. When I reached the living room I saw the blanket on the couch folded neat and square, and Clay already sitting on the edge of it with his shoes on, looking up at me.

"Something's happened at my shop," I said. "I have to go out."

He stood up. He didn't ask whether he could come; he simply stood at my side and made the wanting plain.

The sky was gray and the town wasn't awake yet, but two blocks down I saw Josie, and behind her a crowd of neighbors who had come out to enjoy the show.

She was on the sidewalk with her arms crossed, her white apron still tied on, my shop's plastic sandals on her feet. When she saw my car she let her hands down, but the look on her face stayed exactly where it was.

"Don't get worked up yet." Four words was all she gave me, and then she pointed at the doorway and let me see the wreckage for myself.

The glass had broken from the middle out, the way it goes when somebody throws a whole block of ice into a room, the shards scattered under the counter and around the leg of the table by the window. The hinges still hung on the frame; the door was down to a rim. The outside had been bad enough. The inside was worse.

The coffee beans had been swept off the shelf and lay spread across the floor, walked through, dark prints pressed flat in patches. The drawer under the counter had been pried open and the register lay face down on the boards. On the wall straight across from the door, four letters in red spray paint, with my last name joined to a word. Everybody standing there knew the word. Nobody was going to say it out loud.

I stayed in the doorway and didn't go in, as if keeping my feet off that floor would hold the whole ugly picture at the distance of a dream.

Beside me Josie was saying she had called the police, that they were twenty minutes out, that she was the one who had found it. Not one word of it landed. My head was doing arithmetic instead: the property tax this month, the glass next month, and the register that had been pried open — bought on a credit card last year, four payments still to go.

"Somebody wanted to humiliate me," I heard myself say.

"Mm," Josie said. "Not one dollar has moved out of that till."

"Mr. Carver's inside." She dropped her voice. "He got here before anybody."

When I walked in, Bud Carver was standing behind the counter with his hands clasped behind his back, like a man inspecting a property he wasn't satisfied with himself.

"Ah. Miss Hayes," he said. "I was starting to wonder when you'd get here."

"When did you get here."

"Before you." He opened one hand. "I go past here at six every morning. At six this morning I found a wrecked door and a whole street standing around laughing at it."

He didn't look angry. He looked pleased with himself, and I couldn't see what he had to be pleased about. "Cypress Creek is a street of businesses. With a front like that, who's going to dare come near it. What it costs is the face of the whole street."

"Somebody smashed my door."

"Your door." He nodded, as though agreeing with me. "Right. Your door. So you might want to hear a true thing — nobody on this street has ever had a door smashed. You're the first. You want to ask yourself whether the problem is you."

I could hear my own breathing go rough. "This isn't me failing to look after the place," I said. "This is somebody—"

"Somebody." He brought his hands out from behind his back and came forward a step. "Somebody smashed your shop. But nothing's gone from inside it. The door was hit from the outside and that register never got carried off. So what do you call that."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out of it.

"I'm not accusing you." His voice went soft by half an inch, and that soft was harder to get around than the hard. "I'm only saying that once this gets told, the insurance company will have its own opinion, and the street will have its own opinion. I don't see any reason to wait till Friday. Best get moved out as soon as you can."

The anger pitched me forward and my heel came down on broken glass with a thin crack. I was opening my mouth when a hand came up past my shoulder — it didn't touch me, it only stopped there in the air in front of me, steady, at the height of a low railing.

"Why are you in such a hurry to draw a conclusion?" Clay said.

Bud's eyes moved over to him.

In that moment I felt a kind of safety I had never felt before — not even with Liam, back when we were together, had he ever once dealt with this kind of thing for me; and here was a man I'd met only yesterday, standing out in front of me, carrying it with me.

I couldn't control what moved in me. My eyes felt tied to him and stayed fixed on him.

"Who are you." Bud's tone had gone bad, like a lion that had just been insulted. "You watch your mouth in my building."

"Never mind who I am. Get back to my question." Clay's voice wasn't raised. "The police will be here in ten minutes. And in these ten minutes you've already settled what kind of thing this is, settled what it costs, settled who's responsible. I've never met anybody in such a hurry to close the book on a thing."

Bud's mouth pressed into a line.

I stood in the middle of the broken glass with a low dull hum in my ears. He wasn't sure of a single thing, and still he had whatever it takes to shut Bud Carver up. I couldn't help it — somewhere in me I was glad he had come along.

Bud lifted his hand. I didn't catch what he said; I only saw that blue cuff coming toward me, and Clay stepping half a pace sideways to take it on his shoulder. Josie caught Bud's arm from behind and called his name, her voice gone sharp, not like her at all.

"Let go."

"You settle down."

"This is my property."

"This is my friend," Josie said.

And that was when his phone went off. The sound wedged itself between the three of us, sudden as a shot fired inside a closed room.