When my shift was over that afternoon, the rain still hadn’t stopped. Apparently, RJ’s hip or whatever bone it was that could sense the weather had lied to him.

I said goodbye to Rosie and Reggie and grabbed my cardigan and purse. I wished I would have brought my rain jacket with me, but when I’d peeked out the bathroom window this morning, I hadn’t noticed the dark clouds collecting overhead because it was still dark outside. It wasn’t until I was scurrying toward the car, and raindrops started pelting my forehead that I realized I’d dressed completely inappropriately for the stormy day.

Standing near the front door of the restaurant, I decided I would run over to the gas station that had a small convenience store attached to grab something for dinner before hightailing it to my car. Maybe they’d also have a cheap umbrella.

I didn’t relish the idea of spending extra money on an umbrella, but today it felt like a necessity. Then I could walk up to the school building to get Max if I had to without both of us getting soaked.

Set on the idea, I burst through the front door to Rosie’s and scurried across the street to the Pump and Pantry, soaking my sneakers. Damn.

The floor inside the gas station was slick from people walking in from the rain all day. I skidded to a halt narrowly missing a pyramid of winter weather wiper fluid.

“Hey, Ruby!” Maria, the long-time daytime cashier at the P&P called out. “Some rain, huh?”

“Hey,” I smiled at her. Our shared dislike of this town’s population had bonded us over the years. “It’s pretty much the worst.”

“Umbrellas are in a bucket near the door,” she told me, reading my mind. “I’ll give it to you for half price.”

My smile widened. “You’re the best.”

She turned to a customer that stepped up to the counter and I walked toward the freezer section. I didn’t make it a habit to shop here for groceries. It was usually too pricey for my budget, for one. But also, their selection wasn’t awesome. I tried to stay away from processed foods as much as possible, but it wasn’t easy when the outer edges of the grocery store were so expensive. Still, I made a concerted effort to give Max food I had never been offered as a child. Fresh fruits and veggies, proteins that didn’t come from a can, and real, non-plastic cheese. It cut into my paychecks a lot and set me back from saving as much as I wanted. But I figured while I was living with my mom and had some financial freedom to feed him healthy options, I would take advantage.

However, I didn’t get paid until the end of the week and I was saving my big grocery shopping trip for Saturday. Which meant today’s supper was courtesy of the good old P&P and would probably come from a box of some sort.

As I perused the meager choices of frozen options, the front door opened and closed, bringing with it a gust of wet wind. I shivered in my damp cardigan and grabbed a box of hot chocolate from an endcap close by.

“It’s not that cold outside.”

I turned, not at all surprised to see Levi Cole standing there. I blinked at him twice and then backstepped into an aisle with pantry items to resume my search for supper options. “Cold enough,” I mumbled at the shelf. “Why are you everywhere all of a sudden?”

“What do you mean?”

“For someone who disappeared for seven years, you’re suddenly everywhere that I am. It’s strange.”

“I saw you run in here,” he admitted without shame. “I was just over—” He gestured outside and I pictured him sitting in a surveillance van watching my every move. “I, uh, I wanted to apologize for this morning. At breakfast.”

Keeping my mouth shut, I reached for a box of cheeseburger macaroni. Thanks, Hamburger Helper.

I wasn’t going to make this easy on him. He needed to suffer a bit. He might have gotten away with murder in high school, but times had changed.

I had changed.

“It’s just weird.” When I still didn’t look at him, he added, “I mean, you have a kid now, Ruby. That’s hard for me to process. I mentioned it to Finch and Mercer and that was a mistake. Mercer shouldn’t have grilled you like that. I’m sorry.”

Lifting a shoulder in a casual shrug, I pretended to read the nutritional facts on the back of the box. “Same old shit, Levi, different decade. It’s not anything you need to worry about.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him lift his hand as if he wanted to rest it on my shoulder before dropping it back to his side. “It’s just that… They don’t know who Max’s dad is.”

His tone caught my attention before his words made sense in my head and my entire body snapped around to face him. He wasn’t actually apologizing for his stupidity earlier today. He was making an excuse for it. Unbelievable.

I blinked at him, which apparently prompted him to say, “So who is it? Who’s Max’s dad?”

The way he kept saying Max irritated me. The way he remembered his name at all, after only having met him once, bugged me. He said it like he knew my son, like they’d had a conversation or some kind of memorable interaction. Worry churned in my gut and the urge to flee made my feet itch.

Good lord, he was the very last person that wanted the answer to that question.

Besides, it wasn’t any of his business.

“Excuse me?” I tried to step around him, but anticipating my move, he blocked my path.

“Listen, I’m not trying to be a dick—”

“I don’t think you have to try— it just comes naturally.”

“But,” he redirected, away from my insult, “I’m curious. And I feel out of the loop. Everyone else knows and I don’t, so instead of listening to town gossip, I thought I would come straight to you. Set the record straight.”

My mouth went suddenly dry, the truth soaking up whatever moisture was there like a bitter sponge. “How nice of you,” I managed to growl. I tried to step around him again, but he moved in front of me and held out his arms.

“Ruby, come on.” He laughed, a smile pushing the corners of his mouth wide. It was an act though, smoke and mirrors. He wasn’t relaxed. And he wasn’t asking out of some friendly obligation to save my reputation. “I’m sure whoever the guy is, he’s decent. Mercer said you’re not with him now. I’m just curious—”

God, this had to stop. Now. “I don’t know.”

He stilled, his entire body turning solid. He had been bobbing and weaving before, blocking my path and boxing me in. Now he was an impossibly hard, marble statue and I was afraid I’d never make it past him. There was a kind of quiet fury to him that made my hands tremble. “What?”

Needing this conversation to end as soon as possible, I gave a feeble shrug. “I don’t know, Levi. Okay? I don’t know who Max’s dad is. And I don’t want to speculate with you of all people. You’re pretty much a stranger to me now. So just drop it.”

He ignored me—all of my straightforward commands to stop asking questions and my veiled insults. He ignored everything. Instead, his low growl voiced his desperate curiosity, “What do you mean you don’t know?”

I ground my teeth together and resisted the urge to scream for help. Not that anyone would step in to help me. Even Maria could see we were only talking. It wasn’t like I was in danger. I just didn’t want to have this conversation.

Bravely meeting his unrelenting gaze with courage I did not feel, I spread my hands helplessly. “I don’t know, okay? It’s not something I like to admit or talk about. For obvious reasons, I want to protect Max from this as much as possible. But please understand, I don’t know who his dad is.”

This answer had placated everyone before. Even my mom and my closest friends. For the rest of town, they found it easy to believe that I had slept around enough that the mystery man could not be named. The conversations I’d overheard, speculated that he was most likely someone from out of town.

For my friends, I had made enough sketchy decisions around the time I suspected I was pregnant that I was able to cast doubt over when and where and with whom I could have accidentally slipped up. I started going to more parties. I started disappearing at the end of them, claiming drunkenness and confusion.

Besides, I had always been a loner. There were plenty of nights, Coco and Emilia couldn’t account for my whereabouts. I just embellished the truth enough to make it ambiguously shady.

They knew I hadn’t had that many partners, but my inability to confess Max’s father, made it clear I’d had enough to cast doubt on who it could be. And they had supported my decision not to pursue knowledge about the subject. It made sense to them that I would want to do this solo, that I didn’t want to know the father.

And by the time the truth had finally come out about my unplanned pregnancy, they’d both left for fall semester, so they couldn’t exactly cross reference any of my bullet points.

And my mom? She hadn’t cared enough to press the issue. I knew she knew I knew. But she never asked questions. She never pushed. She just… did her thing and let me do mine.

So, it would be easy to understand why I thought Levi would do the same as everyone else—assume I had made a series of poor decisions that led to a forever kind of consequence. He was supposed to believe my reputation over the truth, just like everyone else. He was supposed to think the worst of me and let the matter drop.

Instead, he took a step forward, pointed a finger at me and snarled, “Bullshit.”

For the second time in minutes, I asked a stunned, “Excuse me?”

“That’s bullshit, Ruby. You know exactly who the father is.”

I held his gaze, too afraid to look away and let him see how quickly he’d gotten to me. Breathing through real panic, I snapped, “Get out of my way, Levi.”

He didn’t. “Why are you playing this game? Who are you protecting?”

“Stop.”

“What do you have to lose?”

“Stop, Levi.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but you’re only going to end up hurting Max—”

I couldn’t take another second of this. I couldn’t listen to him accuse me and say my son’s name and…. and…. See straight through me. I dropped the box of Hamburger Helper and slammed my hands on his chest to get his attention, fire blazing in my eyes, a storm ten times stronger than the one outside building inside my chest. “I said stop!”

He finally blinked, the furious expression on his face melting into something no less dangerous. His hand landed on mine, covering both with the breadth of one of his. “Ruby,” he whispered.

But I was too mad for sympathy now. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I hissed at him, pushing him away from me. He pressed my hands against his chest with his and my entire body moved with him. I could feel how hard his heart beat beneath my palm, echoing the same frantic rhythm of my own. “I told you I don’t know. That needs to be enough for you.” I pushed him again. He pulled me to him again and this time when his feet got their footing, I was standing so close to him I had to crane my neck upward to meet his eyes. “This is none of your business.”

We stood there, like that, my chest bumping into his torso with every labored breath I dragged in and pushed out. His warm hand stayed firm over both of mine, locking them against his body. Our eyes in a war of wills, challenging, daring, accusing.

He broke away first, dropping his head to press his mouth against my ear. “You can fool them,” he rasped, his breath as broken and ragged as mine. “They all see what you want them to see. They let you get away with whatever you want. They don’t know any better. But you can’t hide from me, Ruby. I see you.”

My world tipped, spinning off its axis and throwing everything inside me off balance. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move.

How? How did he do this? How did he walk back into town and within days completely tear apart my carefully crafted existence?

It had been seven years. He was supposed to have moved on with his life and forgotten about me. He was supposed to have found somebody else and become a different person. He wasn’t supposed to notice me anymore. Or care about me. He definitely wasn’t supposed to see me.

Not like this—not at my most vulnerable.

Finally, I gathered my wits and stepped away from him, ripping my hands from his grasp. I wanted to say something snotty, to get the final word in and declare another victory. But I couldn’t form coherent thoughts, let alone say something zingy.

Instead, I picked up the box I’d thrown to the floor and pushed past the mountain of a man in front of me and marched with my supper to the counter. Sensing my rage, Maria didn’t ask any questions besides the necessary. I paid, forgot my umbrella and fled the Pump and Pantry like the hounds of hell were chasing me.

Later that night, after Max finished his homework and we’d had supper and a special bowl of ice cream I thought Max and I both needed, I let him curl up in bed with me while rain pelted the outside of the trailer and the chilling wind pushed through the poorly sealed windows of our small home. We read books and talked about school and friends and a hundred innocent things. And when he fell asleep in my arms, I curled up next to him and held him there.

For almost seven years I’d had this life with him. And while it wasn’t perfect or necessarily ideal, it was ours. He was mine. And I worked hard to give him everything he needed.

Nobody had ever questioned me or my story. Nobody had bothered asking penetrating questions with answers I wasn’t prepared to give.

Nobody until Levi Cole.

And I’d be damned if I let another Cole boy mess up my life again.