Page 68 of Love Bound

I pause and then look out the kitchen window. "When she told me that night, I was irritated with her. Rule one is you don't let strange men into the house. Ever. But he left, she told me, and soon a tow truck roared by in the direction of Merkle's so she figured he got his car towed."

"Why are you telling me all this now?" Her voice is quiet.

"The next day, Steven Miller stopped by and dropped off a cherry pie for her as a thank you. He didn't come in and was just leaving it on the stoop when she opened the door. I came home and had dinner. We laughed, watched a movie, and then she brought out the pie. We each ate a slice. I never thought twice about it. Never once did it register. Nothing he did registered."

Claire lets me take my time, because I know she knows how this story ends. We've never talked specifics though.

My voice sounds robotic to my own ears. "The next day, I left for work. I got a call from her around eleven that morning, telling me not to bother coming home for lunch. So, I didn't."

I pause again, and Claire touches my hand.

Folding my arms against my chest, I continue. "Instead, I stayed out after work, late, without checking in, and came home at seven at night on a weekday. She wasn’t anywhere. Nowhere. And then I saw that the chaise lounge by the pool was overturned. And I found her there. In the pool, tangled up—"

"Finn, it wasn't your fault."

"My job was to keep people safe. It’s what I'd been trained to do." I feel a sob start somewhere in the back of my throat. Now I look at Claire, directly at her. "I can’t remember if her voice was strained. If there was something in her voice that should have told me."

Claire cups my face in her hands. "Why is all this so raw today?"

My eyes are stinging now. "The pie was on the counter, open. But she hadn’t eaten any more. It was his calling card. His warning."

A tear falls on the counter and I stare at it for a moment. "I still don’t know if he was there when she called me. She died at two in the afternoon. He could have tormented her verbally for four hours."

Claire still doesn’t have the final piece, the one that will bring all this into sharp focus.

"Someone left a cherry pie on the front porch this morning," I tell her.

The deal was, Claire would go nowhere without me. I was impressed she did not seem at all frightened. She listened, nodded, and agreed to my terms. She opened the surgery that morning, extracted a tooth, fixed a male cat, and then started seeing patients. I spent my time watching the clinic, the comings and goings of her patients and their owners. At my request, she referred a man with a sick dog to another vet farther inland because he wasn’t anyone she knew.

At the end of the day, she assures me that’ll be the last time she'll do that. “Not so good for business,” she tells me.

Nic sends her a photo of Steven Miller so she knows what he looks like.

Tonight, she's got the window above the sink open. It's a quiet May evening and the sun has decided to set later. Claire offers a backrub while I sit on the edge of the ottoman.

Her hands are strong and I can feel the knots in my shoulders start to melt. At one point she takes her elbows and really digs in. "It's like trying to massage a rock," she says, then kisses me on the nape of the neck.

Tonight, I don't want to make love to her. I just hold her for a long time, staring out the window into the blackness of the night. She moves against me, small struggles as she tries, in her sleep, to set some bed boundaries, but I don't let go.

The next morning at seven, she gets a call from the police chief—Alan Morrison. One of his milking goats is suffering through a difficult delivery.

"I'm going," she says. "And Devon's hitching a ride in with me, so you don’t have to come."

What Claire doesn't tell me is Devon is not riding back with her.

A couple of hours later, two things happen almost simultaneously.

First, my phone rings and it’s Nic. He and Bryce are on speakerphone.

"Miller's there," says Nic.

I feel the ground surge under my feet and I’m nearly lightheaded. "How? How is that possible?"

Bryce's voice, steely and low, breaks in. "'Cause the asshole's working a ship. A boat."

My mind races.

Shit.