Chapter 1 - THE MAN WHO STOPPED BREATHING
The robber was still moving when I took off my glasses.
That was the part I remembered later. Not the gun. Not the beer bottles rattling in the cooler. Not even the little girl crying beside the freezer aisle.
His mouth was moving.
“Open the register, freak.”
I had one hand under the counter and the other pressed against the bridge of my glasses because the left lens had cracked when he shoved me into the cigarette rack.
Behind him, June Bell was crouched beside a display of canned soup. Eight years old. Purple raincoat. One sneaker untied.
She had come in for cough syrup for her dad.
She should have been home.
I should have been invisible.
Instead, the robber swung his gun toward her.
“Hey, kid. Quit crying.”
June made a sound like she was trying to swallow a scream.
I said, “Don’t point that at her.”
The robber looked back at me.
Bad choice.
My mother’s rules came to me the way prayers probably come to better people.
Never let them see your eyes.
Never let them know what you are.
Never love anyone enough to make those rules difficult.
I had already broken the third one six years ago when I married Noah Hale.
The first two were about to go with it.
The robber stepped around the counter and grabbed my hair.
“Glasses off.”
“No.”
He laughed. “What, you ugly under there?”
June whispered, “Mara…”
That did it.
I yanked his wrist down. The gun fired into the ceiling. Plaster snowed onto the lottery tickets.
He hit me hard enough that the cracked lens dropped out.
For half a second, my left eye was bare.
He saw it.
His laugh stopped.
People expect magic to look dramatic. Thunder. Green fire. A curse shouted in a dead language.
It didn’t.
His pupils widened.
His skin went gray at the throat.
A dry line spread up his jaw like frost moving across a window.
“What the—”
His fingers locked around my sleeve.
Stone climbed over his face.
His gun hit the floor first.
Then he did.
Except he didn’t fall like a body.
He tipped.
Two hundred pounds of terrified man struck the tile with a sound I would hear in my sleep for years.
June stopped crying.
I put my glasses back on, one lens missing.
“Close your eyes.”
She already had.
Smart kid.
I stepped around the statue and picked up the gun. My hands were shaking now. Too late for them to be useful.
“June, listen to me. You’re going to walk to the back office. Keep your eyes closed. Count to fifty.”
“What happened to him?”
“He fell.”
“That didn’t sound like falling.”
“I know.”
A pause.
Then: “Are you crying?”
I touched my cheek. I was.
“Go count.”
She went.
I locked the front door, killed the store lights, and stared at the stone man lying beside the gum display.
My first thought was that Noah could never know.
My second was worse.
Someone had to move him.
I found a dolly in the stockroom. It took three tries to get the statue upright. On the second try, his stone thumb broke off.
I stared at it on the floor.
“Oh, God.”
The words came out stupid and small.
I put the thumb in my apron pocket.
There are moments when your life changes and you feel it. A door slams. A bridge burns. Music swells if you’re lucky enough to live in a movie.
Mine changed while I was dragging a dead man toward the loading bay with his broken thumb in my pocket.
Then someone knocked on the glass front door.
Three slow taps.
I froze.
A man stood outside beneath the buzzing OPEN sign I had forgotten to switch off.
Tall. Silver-haired. Dark coat.
He smiled at me through the glass.
And lifted his phone.
He had been recording.
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