Fate's Return (Twisted Fate, Book 2)

Chapter Twenty

Except tonight, now that the rush was over, and the restaurant was about to close, he wasn't letting me do what we had always done.

"What's wrong, Mike?" I asked, holding out his half of the tips. "We always split."

He shrugged and stopped cleaning to look at me with a little half smile. "We can split it next week."

"Why not now?"

"Because you had to miss work Wednesday night."

"So?" I took ten dollars away from his portion. "There. That is what I missed out on Wednesday. Now take your share."

He looked at the money and then shrugged and resumed cleaning the table he'd been focused on without looking up. "I know how much earning enough to pay for dorms away from Hidden Springs means to you, and I want you to have it."

"This is ridiculous! I got sick. It happens. It's a pretty safe bet to say that Raffy will skip out on a shift before I'm done saving, and I can make it up."

He stopped cleaning again and met my gaze, but I couldn't make out how to read his. "Take the money, okay?"

"But—"

He walked away before I could finish. I grabbed the bar cloth and spray bottle and moved on to clean the next table. And the next. I cleaned every table except for the two being occupied in the right-hand corner of the restaurant.

I hated stragglers, but if I kicked them out nicely, I might get a decent tip. Plus, it put off going home to be alone with my thoughts. Thinking of it that way made me wish for a few more stragglers to serve and, hoping to prolong them instead of rushing them, I grabbed the coffee pot from its burner and headed back to offer refills. Mike would be too busy closing downstairs to notice, and I doubted he would care. I would just bring up tips if he did.

"Would anyone like some more coffee?" I asked with as much of a smile as I could fake. Please say yes.

"Okay," said a girl, her voice high and familiar.

Oh, God. Please change your mind. Say no, say no, say no.

"Yes, please?"

Damn.

I looked up slowly, as though drawing it out would relieve the experience we'd shared. But erasing it from our minds so we could start over—waitress to customer—wasn't possible. The horror and death that they had taken part of the credit for creating was too embedded to forget. I knew, just as they must know, nothing could change or diminish it.

Death was too final to erase.

"It's you," the girl said, her smile replaced with shock.

Of course, she knew me with long hair without streaks. I'd been weak, timid... devastated. Seeing them now made me feel like I was still the girl they had met instead of the strong girl I'd become. My height, my hair, even my tanned skin instead of a pasty white that had somehow added to my weakness as though I was fragile porcelain primed to crack, had changed.

My gaze slid across every face, fleeting but critical. All but one—Josh, the boy who killed David—was here. Suddenly, it was like all of the progress I'd made since that day evaporated like it was a foreign object that had to be removed.

She looks so sad.

Wow. The librarian grew up.

No. I squeezed my eyes shut. Not now.

I wonder if she knows what happened to Josh. Should we tell her? Say sorry?

I looked to the boy they had called Duke. He'd been so small before, but like me, had changed over the past year—they all had. Even sitting, I could tell Duke was taller, just an inch or two shy of his other friend, who had never seemed like he belonged to the group. He was too clean, preppy, and if circumstances were different, could have fit in at Royal Academy instead of Elixir High School.