“Please, LeeAnne, give me his number,” I said.

“Still can’t see right out of his left eye, my boy,” she countered.

I didn’t doubt this was true. Alec did a number on him. Detached retina, amongst other things.

It wasn’t more than he deserved. He’d done a number on me. We were both in the hospital at the same time.

I got out earlier.

Pete got out and left town. He didn’t press charges. This was likely due to Morrie, Dad and a variety of other townsfolk making this Pete’s only option.

I wasn’t going to say I was sorry.

I was sorry. Very sorry. So sorry it had seeped into my soul. But not sorry for Pete Hollister.

Having had a very long time to look back, Pete had always been an asshole. But he’d been a good-looking one. Not as good-looking as Alec but with Alec lost to me, Pete would do. And I needed someone. Someone to fill the hole Alec left. No, it wasn’t a hole. It was a wound. I couldn’t close the wound so I needed someone to numb the pain. Or take my mind off it. Pete did that, he was good at it. He delivered his own brand of pain in order to succeed wildly in this endeavor.

What I was sorry about was the fact that Alec hurt Pete and I knew he’d hate himself for doing it instead of hating me. And I was sorry that I put him in that position. It was the only one he had, he and Morrie had been looking after me so long they didn’t know how to do anything different even if things had changed between Alec and me. And I was sorry that he saw me the way he did, beaten, not his February, never to be his February again. She was gone like he told me the Alec he was once was gone. Pete had beaten her out of me. I answered to my name but I didn’t know who February was any longer. I’d spent nearly two decades trying to figure it out but never could. The only thing I knew was she wasn’t the girl I used to be.

“LeeAnne, if you don’t want to give me his number then just please call him and warn him –”

“I’ll call. I’ll tell him the bitch is back and he should brace. It was a dark day, the day he met you.”

Then I heard her hang up.

I flipped my cell phone closed and curled my fingers around it.

“Well, that’s done,” I told Jessie and Meems. I was shaking.

I’d forgotten how much I hated LeeAnne. I’d always been so focused on how much I hated Pete that I forgot to hate his mother. But now I remembered.

I knew hate, even as a kid because I always hated Alec’s parents.

Even as a kid, before I understood it and before it happened between him and me, I hated the way Alec’s face looked when the call came, his Mom telling my Mom to bring him home (those times she remembered he was over at all). Or when his Dad would come around to get him.

Then when I grew older and I understood somewhere right and true inside me that he was mine, I hated them more when he’d get in a mood because of them. Because the town was talking about something they’d do that was crazy, like when his Mom went drunk to the liquor store and fell into a display, making a bunch of bottles of rum fall over and crash to the ground and the police had dragged her in. Or when his Dad showed up sauced at a football game and stood at the other team’s bleachers and alternately bragged loudly about Alec or insulted their boys and he’d been jumped before some men from our side, some of the coaches and even some of the players, including Alec, had had to pull his Dad out of the fray.

But that hate slipped away after that night when the police took his Dad away and Social Services had told his Mom he wasn’t coming back and Dad and Morrie moved Alec into Morrie’s room. Because after that night, he was safe, he was healing, he was finally home and I didn’t have to hate anymore.

And for awhile, those years when Alec finally was mine, I forgot what hate felt like.

Glory days.

“Feb –” Meems started.

I got up. “I need to get to the bar.”

“Ain’t no one gonna be bothered, you take a coupla days off,” Jessie told me.

“I’ll go into hiding when the town finds out anyone who ever looked at me funny might be the next one to end up bloody and dead in an alley.”

Jessie and Meems looked at each other before they both looked back at me.

“No one’s gonna blame you for this, Feb,” Meems told me.

“Right,” I replied.

“Feb, everyone on some level is gonna understand you’re feelin’ exactly as you’re feelin’ right now,” Jessie said.

“Maybe, after Alec catches this guy and the fear fades away. ‘Til then…” I let that hang.

I’d been in a lot of small towns, sometimes spent only months in them, a couple, the towns that reminded me of home, I spent over a year. I knew how people thought. I knew how they could turn. I’d even seen it once and it hadn’t been pretty. I hadn’t even been involved and it still hurt to watch.

“Girl –” Meems started again.

“I need to get to the bar.”

I moved and they stepped aside. They knew me, they knew when I meant what I said and when I meant business.

I gave a wave to Meems and Jessie walked beside me the short distance to J&J’s.

“When’re Jack and Jackie getting here?” Jessie asked.

Morrie had called them from the bar yesterday morning about two seconds after Alec had walked away. They were driving their RV up and were on the road by yesterday afternoon. Depending on how hell bent Dad was to get here, they could arrive at any time. I figured Dad was probably pretty hell bent and they could be crossing the town line as Jessie and my boots hit the sidewalk.

“Any time now.”

“That’ll be good,” Jessie murmured as I opened the door to the bar.

I didn’t agree with her.

Mom and Dad were going to feel the same pressure Morrie was feeling. The pressure to keep me safe. The pressure to keep me from feeling this weight hanging so heavy over my head, knowing, any time, without any control had by me, it could drop, crushing me underneath it. The pressure that was there from Alec and me, the pressure they felt in the short time before I found Pete, the pressure they felt in the short time I remained home after Pete was gone. The pressure of wanting with everything they were for Alec and me to go back to what we had, wanting it so much they’d be willing to make it happen, the pressure and disappointment of knowing they had no means of doing it.

Morrie’s head (and everyone else’s in the bar) came up to look at me when Jessie and I walked in.

I had no idea when the bomb would drop. Last night Morrie told me that Alec told him that Angie’s note was going to remain under wraps and any chats he had with anyone I’d put on my list he’d do his best to keep under wraps too.

Alec was good at a lot of things. He’d been an All-State tight end. He’d gained a partial scholarship to Purdue. He’d graduated top of his class at the Academy. He’d crawled out from under the stench of his parents and been a kid, and now a man, that people respected. He was good at being my brother’s best friend, another son to my folks. He was a good cop. He’d even been a great boyfriend, the best, until he’d stopped being that.

But this was a small town. He wasn’t that good.

Then again, the last person who wronged me breathed through a tube for a couple of days, courtesy of Alec, so who knew?

I split from Jessie who went straight to the bar. I went to the back, secured my purse in the office and went behind the bar.

My departure from Morrie’s apartment meant he’d had to open up for once.

My longer-than-usual stay away, due to moving in with Jessie, having a shower there and getting ready to tackle the day there then having to call Pete’s bitch of a Mom in Mimi’s office meant I was in a lot later than usual.

When I hit the back of the bar, Morrie said, “Feb –”

“Save it,” I didn’t even look at him when I spoke, “you need to give me time.”

That was all I was willing to say but I felt his relief because me asking for time meant him knowing I was holding a grudge but also knowing I’d eventually let it go.

“I don’t know about you but I need a drink. Meems’s coffee is the bomb but it ain’t gonna cut it right about now,” Jessie announced.

Joe-Bob laughed at Jessie’s comment.

Joe-Bob was a regular who planted his ass on the barstool by the front door at noon, opening time, every day and didn’t pry his ass from that stool until closing time unless it was to take a leak or wander down to Frank’s restaurant to eat a burger. Hell, he’d fallen asleep at that stool more times than I could count.

We left him to it. He paid his tab at the end of every month, though God only knew how he managed that. Things were rough for Morrie now that he was paying rent, helping Dee with the mortgage and paying child support. It was sad and it was wrong but Joe-Bob was now beloved by Morrie. His tabs were helping to keep two roofs over Morrie’s kids’ heads.

I didn’t laugh with Joe-bob, got Jessie a drink and then got down to work. I spent that time, like last night but more so today, trying not to think about Angie, about the note, about Alec, about whether my cat Wilson would make Jessie’s husband Jimbo sneeze or about anything at all.

About an hour later the door opened and Alec and his partner Sully walked in.

Unable and maybe unwilling to stop it, I felt my jaw move in a nonverbal greeting, the way it always did when I saw Alec. Always and forever. Since I could remember.

I used to do it because it made him smile at me, a smile I hadn’t seen in years, a smile that others saw and it was handsome so I was sure they liked it, at least the girls. But they didn’t get it. They didn’t get how precious it was. They didn’t understand, it not being directed at them, what that smile could do. The power of it. It was like every time he smiled he’d opened a chest of treasure and said, “All this is yours.”