Page 3 of Duke's Rescue
“It’s a good one for a first,” he said. And then he smiled, and the warmth of it went through me so fast I didn’t have time to brace against it. Easy, unguarded, the smile of a man who meant it. Slightly crooked, slightly rough, a smile that lived in the lines around his eyes.
I looked away. Down at my hands, at the gravel, at anything that wasn’t his face.
The tow truck arrived. A flatbed with FORSAKEN IRON WORKS painted on the side. A young guy in a leather cut like the guy who’d stopped for us loaded up my car while I got Ruby out of the backseat, her teddy under one arm, her free handfinding mine with the automatic certainty of a child who trusts her mother completely.
He rode just behind the tow truck, his bike a low rumble in my peripheral vision the whole way into town. When we got to Forsaken, a town so small I wasn’t sure it counted as one, he peeled off ahead and was waiting outside a diner called Rosie’s by the time the tow truck pulled up.
Rosie herself was a woman in her sixties with sharp eyes and a soft voice. She took one look at me and Ruby and sat us in the corner booth, the one by the window where you could see the whole room and both doors. She brought crayons for Ruby without being asked and a coffee for me that was strong, hot and free.
She didn’t ask where I’d come from. She talked to Ruby about her teddy, about the crayons, about the pie she was making that afternoon. She let me sit in a booth and drink her coffee and not explain a single thing and I couldn’t have been more grateful for it.
Then she leaned against the counter when Ruby was coloring and said, quiet enough that only I could hear, “I’ve been looking for someone to help with the morning shifts. Nothing fancy, just coffee and breakfast. Tips are decent, the hours are reasonable, and there’s a room upstairs that nobody’s using. It’s small, but it’s clean, and it’s safe.”
It’s safe. She said it like it was nothing. Like she was describing the wallpaper.
She knew. She couldn’t have known the details, couldn’t have known Buck’s name or what he’d done or how long it had taken me to leave. But she knew the shape of it. She’d seen it before, in other women, in other booths, and she knew what safety meant to someone like me.
“I’m a hard worker,” I said. Because it was the only thing I could offer. The only currency I had.
“I know you are, honey.” She said it like she’d already decided.
I looked across the diner. He was at the counter, finishing a coffee, talking to Rosie’s husband about something car-related. He caught me looking and held my gaze for a second, just a second, nothing loaded in it, nothing that asked for anything. Just a man checking that the situation had landed somewhere safe.
Then he put his mug down. Stood. Nodded at me once, a gesture so small and contained it was barely there, and walked out. The bell over the door jingled. Through the window I watched him swing onto his bike, the movement fluid and practiced, and the engine kicked to life and he pulled away from the curb and rode down Main Street until the sound of him faded into the mountains.
I didn’t even know his name.
But the way he’d looked at me. The way he’d stood on that highway and waited and not asked a single question I wasn’t ready to answer. That stayed in my chest long after the sound of his bike disappeared.
Ruby tugged on my sleeve. “Mommy. The diner lady said there’s pie.”
“Yeah, baby,” I said. “There’s pie.”
I sat in the booth with my daughter, the four hundred dollars to my name and a job I hadn’t expected, and for the first time in six years the weight on my chest shifted. It wasn’t gone. Not even close to gone. But it felt different. Lighter by the smallest, most impossible fraction.
It was like something had shifted. Just enough to breathe through.
TWO
DUKE
I’d been thinking about her for four days.
Which was a problem, because I didn’t do this. I was the guy who showed up, got the job done, moved on. Somebody’s truck breaks down in or around this town, I arrange the tow from our shop - The Forsaken Iron Works. Somebody needs a hand in the shop, I’m already there. That was how I worked. Show up, be useful, keep moving. The moving part was important. You kept moving and you didn’t have time to think about what you were moving away from.
Four days, and every time I closed my eyes I saw her standing on the side of that highway with her shoulders drawn in and her body angled to keep her daughter behind her. I knew fear when I saw it, and that was it.
I hadn’t asked her name. Nor had I asked where she was from, or what she was running from. But I knew the look. The one that said she’d been measuring people for years, weighing every word, calculating how much honesty was safe.
Rosie called on Wednesday.
“The girl’s working out - her name’s Trixie by the way,” she said, without preamble, because Rosie didn’t waste words. She was no-nonsense in that way.
“Good with customers. She shows up early, stays late, and never complains. Ruby’s a sweetheart too. They’re managing.”
“Good.”
“But she’s careful, Duke. Too careful. She smiles at everyone and tells nobody anything. Won’t say where she came from, won’t say why she left. She jumped last night when I dropped a baking tray behind her. Full body flinch, hands up, the whole thing. Covered it fast, but I saw it.”
