Page 103 of Rule the Night

He picked up his burger. “Wishing things were different doesn’t make them different.”

“I know that. I’m not a baby.”

Sometimes Bram thought he’d cornered the market on life lessons on account of the rough deal he’d been dealt with his parents’ death. And yeah, I hadn’t suffered the way he had, the way Poe had, but that didn't mean I didn’t understand how the world worked.

“She just wants something from us,” he said.

“That help you sleep at night?” I asked before biting into my burger.

“Fuck you again,” he said.

“Back at you.” I hesitated. “I know how we can find out if she just wants something from us.”

I already knew it wasn’t true, but sometimes you had to play Bram’s game.

“How?”

“We can take care of her problem.”

“She lost.”

“Obviously. But we could do it anyway. Then you’ll know.”

“What makes you think I want to know?”

My mistake. It was always a mistake to insinuate that Bram wanted something. First of all, it was rarely true. Second, Bram saw wanting something as weakness, a chink in the armor he’d spent the last ten years forging around his psyche, his life.

I shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

“She lost,” he said again. And I knew from the set of his jaw that that was the end of it. He wasn’t going to budge on helping Maeve, not because he didn’t want to, but because if he did, it meant I was right.

He did want something. And that something was Maeve.

65

MAEVE

“Grocery store?”

We were walking to the Hummer, our arms loaded with bags from the farmers market, when Poe asked the question. It was ridiculous how warm it made me feel inside, like we were regular people doing regular things, like Poe knew the routine well enough to know that we saved the grocery store for last so the freezer stuff didn’t melt while we went to the farmers market.

“Yep.”

I’d been with the Butchers for over two months, and I’d come to love my errand days with Poe. We listened to music in the car and talked about the food I wanted to make the following week. Sometimes he told me stories about him and Whit growing up or about his grandparents, and sometimes — okay, a lot of the time — it even felt like we were friends.

We put the bags in the backseat and headed away from Blackwell Falls toward the main road leading away from town. The town planning board knew which side their bread was buttered on, and no one wanted to see a big grocery store in the middle of the quaint shops downtown, their green awningsmatching like they were part of a storybook village instead of a real-life town where bad things happened all the time.

All of that meant the practical stuff — the grocery stores and big-box stores and chain restaurants — were on the outskirts of town where they couldn’t ruin the experience for the tourists who came to Blackwell Falls because they wanted to believe there were still storybook villages where bad things didn’t happen.

It also meant the rest of us had to drive farther to get everyday stuff, butc’est la vie, as my mom would say.

We were about a mile from the grocery store when Poe’s phone rang. He picked it up and held it to his ear.

“Everything okay?” He paused to listen, and I heard a man’s voice coming from the other end of the phone. Poe swore. “Is he okay?”

The concern in his voice got my attention, mostly because the Butchers hardly ever seemed concerned about anything.

“I’m on my way.” He disconnected the call. “Mind if I make a stop? I could take you back first but…” He trailed off, like he didn’t want to finish his sentence.