His grip tightened when I tried to shrug him away. “Lex, you know you’re the only girl for me, right? You’re the girl I want to marry.”

I snapped.

My hands flew out in a karate-chop move I must have seen on one too many Kung Fu movies. A stunned look crossed his face when his arms were knocked away.

“Fine! Goddammit, I’m just trying to make it right again. Fucking bitch!” he yelled, storming out of the room.

There I stood amid ringing bells, screaming kids, and arcade machines.

Shaking.

I had to pull it together before my sister saw me have a nervous breakdown.

“Maizy, stay right where you are and don’t go anywhere,” I shouted, holding my finger out. “I’m going potty.”

She nodded and I walked to the restroom, only a few feet away. But once I entered the empty hall, I couldn’t go any farther. I allowed my body to slide down the wall and I covered my eyes as a tidal wave of pain surfaced.

I’d been with Beckett for two years, and through our ups and downs, I had started to imagine a life with him. One that might have involved kids, or maybe even going to college and figuring out what I wanted to do in life besides working a cash register. It took me two years to give him all of my heart, and he threw it away in one night. I’d thought he loved me. How many other times were there? Didn’t matter.

Once was enough.

“Lexi?”

Two heavy hands covered my knees. “What’s wrong?” The controlled anger belonged to Austin Cole.

My stupid tears. Damn them. I was already trying to get myself together and now my emotions switched gears to another part of my life that was an open wound.

“Why did you leave us?” I finally asked. The words felt like a sword because I’d said them a number of times over Wes’s grave. It hurt to breathe for the first year after his death.

Austin sighed hard. The kind of sigh that had a long, regretful story behind it. “Lexi, I can’t talk about this with you right now. Are you okay?”

Finally wiping my tears, I glanced up. Austin crouched in front of me wearing a white shirt and a leather-rope necklace with a round medallion made of silver. The tattoos on his upper arms briefly caught my attention, but when his sharp blue eyes cut through me, I looked away.

“I’m fine,” I lied.

He lowered his head with a doubtful glare. “No, you’re not.”

“What are you doing here? Why do you keep showing up out of the blue at the worst times?”

“I’m back for good, Lexi. I want to set things straight and there’s a lot I need to tell you, but this isn’t the place. You tell me when’s a good time and we’ll get together.”

I sniffed and gave a barely perceptible nod.

Austin let go of my knees and reached forward, sliding his hands down my hair with a short grin.

“It’s Pretty Pigtail Day,” I said in a small voice. “I do this with Maizy a couple of times a month.” I didn’t even bother explaining who Maizy was.

Austin didn’t laugh. “It reminds me a little bit of you at that age. I remember you wearing your hair like this, or sometimes braided in the back. Come on, let’s get up.” He hooked his hands beneath my arms and lifted me to my feet. “You sure you’re okay?”

Before I could answer, his thumb slid across my cheek, wiping away a tear. All those stupid rehearsals I’d played out in my head of telling him off were stuck in pause, and I felt ashamed I’d later be rewinding this moment, wishing I had tossed him into the bin of plastic balls.

He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a business card, placing it in my hand. “Call me when you’re ready to talk, Ladybug.”

I lifted my hand and admired a plain off-white card. Austin’s name was on the front with a phone number beneath. A symbol of a bow and arrow filled in the right-hand corner, but nothing indicated what he did for a living. Did that mean he was Robin Hood?

When I looked up, Austin was gone.

The card went into my purse and I decided to take Maizy home. Austin had left the ball in my court, and while it felt good to know the mystery of his disappearance would be solved, it also irritated me. Now in order to get any answers, I’d have to go crawling back to him, and that didn’t leave me in a position of power. I didn’t know how to feel about it, but I knew one thing: panic flooded my veins like rocket fuel when I didn’t see Maizy in the play zone.

“Maizy?”

My heart raced and I whirled around, dizzy with fear. I frantically searched the tunnels, peering through the clear plastic domes just to make sure she wasn’t hiding.

“Maizy? Come out from hiding! It’s time to go!”

When she didn’t answer, I went into a complete state of panic, screaming her name and pacing around. Kids were turning to stare and a few moms lifted their chins and glanced around the room.

Oh God, I’ve lost her.

After I’d combed the room five times and scoured the bathrooms, I ran out of the restaurant to the brightly lit entrance in front of the parking lot.

“Lexi! Lexi!” a bright little voice yelled out.

My head swung to the right. Beckett stood motionless beside my little sister, holding her hand.

“Maizy,” I gasped, my arms flying out. She let go of his hand and ran into my outstretched arms. “Don’t you ever leave me like that, do you understand?”

“Uncle Beck gave me a ring,” she said, holding up a plastic toy affixed to her finger.

I glared at him and he shrugged, walking away.

But something else made me uneasy—Maizy would have never left that room by herself. Beckett lured her out of there on purpose just to scare me.

It worked.

He’d resorted to a low tactic by taking advantage of my sister’s trust in order to threaten me. At least, that’s what it felt like. Beckett wasn’t aggressive, nor did I take him for the kind of guy who would kidnap a child. He had a mouth on him when he drank, but I’d never seen him do anything like this before, and what gave me chills was how smooth he was when I caught him in the act, and how casually he walked away.

“Let’s go, Maizy.”

I tossed her ring in the trash and she started to cry, so I picked her up. “Sweetie, don’t be mad at me.”

Tears streamed down her ruddy cheeks and her mouth was agape. “But that was my ring,” she whined.

“Maze, can I tell you something? It’s a secret.”

She nodded and wiped her nose.

“Never take a ring from a boy unless he’s your prince.”

Something sparked in her teary eyes.

“Remember how you said you wanted to marry a prince? Well, if you take a ring from another boy before you meet the prince, then he won’t marry you.”

Panic flooded her eyes. “But I took that one!”

“No, it doesn’t count because I threw it away. That’s the rule. Your big sis has to take it off and then the spell is undone.”

She smiled and hugged my neck. Maizy loved stories about magic and spells. In her eyes, the world was nothing but a fairytale. Adults were blind to the magic that existed and only little kids could see it.

“Come on, little girl. Time for us to go home. You know, you’re getting way too heavy for me to carry,” I grunted out dramatically. “Are you sure you’re not hiding a moose in your pocket?” She giggled and rested her head on my shoulder.

That did the trick, and Maizy hummed one of her favorite songs for the rest of the ride home.

* * *

After a grueling day at work on Saturday, I threw my keys on the bar and collapsed on my sofa. The neighbor downstairs decided to have a party and the music thumped against the floor, rattling one of the pictures on my wall.

All these months, I’d managed to successfully avoid telling my mom about my breakup with Beckett. She liked him, and that made it more difficult. After the other night, I decided to let the cat out of the bag because I was afraid of him showing up at her house. When I finally confessed, I left out the part with Maizy because I still didn’t know what to make of it myself. It wasn’t a deliberate threat, but it just left me with a sick feeling. Mom didn’t say anything and it was probably for the best. If she had defended him and gone on about forgiveness, I might have sped out of there at ninety miles per hour in “angry mode.”

A woman screamed downstairs and laughter followed. I wondered what Wes would have thought about my life. I still saw him as the cool guy and he might have gone downstairs to join them. But he would be thirty and who knows… maybe married. It was hard to imagine him as anything but the young man I once knew.

I could still remember the last time I saw him, two nights before the accident. I was living at home and he stopped by to have a talk with Dad. He walked me into my bedroom and told me I needed to get a full-time job and move out. I’d been slacking off at my job because I hated flipping burgers. Wes shared his concern with me and wanted to know if Dad had been giving me a hard time. He told me about a job at Sweet Treats and suggested I could move in with him until I found a place. “Call me tomorrow and we’ll go to a movie,” he said.

God, why didn’t I call him? I ended up blowing him off and it had become one of the biggest regrets of my life. A last chance to see him, or maybe that could have changed his fate and he would never have gone out on the night he died.

Suddenly, a knock sounded at my front door. I catapulted off the sofa and grabbed the fireplace poker—my weapon of choice.

Through the peephole, I watched Naya impatiently pacing in circles with her arms folded.

I opened the door.

“This is the last straw. I called the police this time,” she announced, rushing past me and going straight for the can of Spanish peanuts in the kitchen.

“The party girl called the cops?” I smirked.

Naya strutted into the living room and plopped down on the floor, leaning against one of my chairs with her long legs crossed.

“Lexi, on more than one occasion I’ve invited them to my parties, but they’ve never once returned the courtesy.”

I flopped onto the couch and grabbed a magazine from the coffee table. “Do you really want to party with a bunch of college kids?” My gaze flicked up. “Wait, don’t answer that.”

She popped a peanut into her mouth and brushed the salt from her fingers onto her tight shorts.

“Crash it,” I suggested.

Naya rolled her eyes. The root of her irritation wasn’t the noise but that she wasn’t a part of it. Naya hated exclusion. “I have more class than that, chickypoo. So are you going to tell me what’s been bothering you?”

I slowly turned the page, glancing at an article about the top twenty ways to turn on your man. “Nope.”

She set the peanuts down and hopped on the sofa beside me, lifting my legs onto her lap. “Ooo, it’s a man, isn’t it?”

“Naya, it’s—”

“A man.”

I snorted. “Drop it.”

“Dish, Lexi. I can tell it’s not about Beckett because you have a totally different look on your face when you’re stewing over him. So who has your feathers all ruffled up?”

I hurled the fashion magazine to the floor. “A ghost from my past. Just someone who took off years ago and never once contacted me.” Now I was irritated all over again and sat up with my knees against my chest. “He just showed up out of the blue and now he wants to talk.”

“Someone you dated?”

“No. Just an old family friend.”

“Hmm,” she pondered, setting her feet on the coffee table. A silver anklet slithered down to her foot and a tiny heart dangled from her toe ring. “Maybe he was in trouble.”

Something I’d considered. “Maybe he was in prison.”

“That’s kind of sexy.”

“That’s kind of not,” I said. “I have no desire to graduate from a cheating bastard to an ex-convict.”

“So talk to him. Either that or sit here night after night, wondering what happened while wearing your bitchy face.”

“I don’t have a bitchy face,” I argued, trying to conceal my smile.

An unexpected knock at the door startled the both of us. I glanced around but forgot where I’d set down the fireplace poker.

“Shhh.” Naya tiptoed over to the door and peered through the peephole with her index finger pointing up.

“Who is it?” I whispered over her shoulder.

“I can’t tell. Oh, shit.”

“What?”

Naya looked at me and winked. “It’s a cop. He flipped a badge.”

After using her pinky finger to pick a peanut skin from her teeth, she casually opened the door. “It’s about time!”