Page 236 of Wild Card 13

“Yes.”

“That is new.” Naomi made a thoughtful sound. “Tragic for him. Wonderful for professionalism.”

“He said if I tell him to stop, he stops.” The words scraped something raw on their way out.

“Damn it,” she laughed, throwing her gloved hands dramatically into the air.

“What?”

“I was comfortable with my position,” she groaned, eyeing me with a slight smile on the back end.

“You liked him once.”

“Yes, and then I thought he cheated on my best friend. My opinion adjusted.”

“He didn’t.”

“But,” Naomi’s voice softened without losing its edge. “He still left you standing on that porch. He still chose silence when you needed him to fight. He still let you carry the weight of not being worth the explanation.”

The path blurred for a second.

I stopped walking.

Dottie, who had been trying to drag us toward a trash can withapparently fascinating historical value, came back and shoved a stick against my shin.

“No thank you,” I whispered.

She pushed harder.

Naomi crouched slightly. “Dottie, babe, we are having a crisis.”

Dottie wagged.

I laughed, and this time it did not break.

Naomi straightened. Her expression was still warm, still unsparing, still hers. “You’re scared.”

I stared out at the lake. Snow blurred the far shoreline into a pale gray haze. The frozen surface looked calm enough to walk across, but I knew better than to trust ice just because it looked solid from a distance. “I don’t want to punish him forever,” I said.

“Then don’t do that.”

“That sounds very simple.”

“It is not simple. It is just not today’s job.”

I looked at her. “What is today’s job?”

Naomi tucked the empty carrier more securely under one arm. “Today’s job is walking your dog, drinking your coffee, going to work, and not making a permanent decision while your body thinks three hours of fake sleep counts as a recovery plan.”

Dottie barked once at a squirrel and then startled herself with the force of her own opinion.

We had reached the far end of the loop. The parking lot was visible through the trees, our cars softened beneath a thin layer of new snow. The park still looked impossibly beautiful. Gentle. Clean. Like the whole city had been given a fresh page.

I hated how much I wanted one.

Naomi stopped beside me before the path curved back. Her cheeks were pink from the cold. A strand of hair had escaped her bun and stuck to her lip gloss. She brushed it away impatiently and looked at me with the kind of love that never asked permission before telling the truth. “Showing up once is easy,” she said. “Let’s see if he can be boring about it.”

I looked down at Dottie, who had dropped her stick and was now licking snow off the top of my boot.