Denise

“Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

“With what?”

Molly gave me this looks like I was messing with her, but I really wasn’t. It took me a minute to figure out what it was that she was talking about. I should have known that she was talking about Ethan. That was what she wanted to know about and I had had to answer a lot of questions about him as of late and I wasn’t sure what else to say.

She’d asked me when I went over to her house for the night and now she was asking me again over breakfast.

“Molly, I’m telling you that it just sort of happened. He came over to do some hunting and I don’t know one thing led to another. It was that sort of thing. It wasn’t planned or anything like that. It just happened.”

She snorted and I laughed at her. “What do you want me to tell you? Do you want to hear a lie?”

“Well it would have to be better than the crap you are giving me right now. I’ve seen the way the two of you look at each other. I would think that this had been going on for a while and I wasn’t made aware of it until now. I knew that you couldn’t be as lonely as you made it out to be.”

She just didn’t get it. “I hadn’t been with anyone since I came here. That’s been a long time and it does get lonely. I think Ethan just filled a void for a little while, but it didn’t mean anything.”

“If it didn’t mean anything, why him?”

It was a good question, but it was one that I didn’t really have an answer for. I wanted to tell her that he was just there and I’d felt like it. But there had been something with Ethan or I would have ignored him like I did all of the other advances that I’d received since I’d gotten here. With Ethan I had wanted to. It wasn’t just something to do, but I should have kept my heart away from him.

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t like the answer, but I did increasingly not like all of the questions. I never remembered Molly being so nosy or me wanting to keep so much in.

“Well there has to be something about him. A woman doesn’t wait that long for nothing and they certainly don’t just give it up after all that time to someone that doesn’t mean something to them. It doesn’t make sense and you’ve always made sense Denise.”

I was about to deny the accusation that I really liked him. I didn’t. Ethan was just another man and he would soon be gone so there really wasn’t a reason to get all attached when I knew that he was going to be going back home soon and I would never see him again.

“There is something about him and I’m not really sure what it is, but I can’t get enough of him. I know now that I was just being silly and I should have seen it for what it was a while ago. He’s going to be out of here before I know it and then what? Ethan was just a much needed distraction. That’s all.”

Molly didn’t have an answer for my question and neither did I.

“You’ve always said that you have to go where you are happy. It doesn’t have to be here in Nome. I’m starting to wonder if my happy place is somewhere else now that everything is changing.”

I didn’t like the way she was talking, because it sounded like she wasn’t going to reopen the restaurant. She didn’t have to. Everyone in town knows that she married into one of the richest families in Nome and I knew for a fact that she was sitting on property that was worth a fortune. It wouldn’t be hard for her to get the restaurant going again, but now she was talking like she wasn’t going to be around to do it. I hated to think of her leaving because I'd worked with her for so long and I really liked Molly.

“What are you saying?”

She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders simultaneously. I could tell that she had a lot on her mind and here I was spilling my beans. I hadn’t even thought to think of how she was feeling about it all. It was her restaurant that these guys had burned to the ground. She could have been there doing paperwork just as much as I could have been there doing some sort of detail cleaning. Maybe her reaction was going to be to leave.

“I don’t know, but I’m not feeling very good about this town right now, or the people in it. I want to wait and see what the police find out, but I have a feeling I know who did this and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. It’s hard to imagine ever having this happen here. What if I start all over and they burn it down again?”

She was more upset than I had known and I felt bad for not seeing it sooner. It was hard for her to keep it all in when she was supposed to be the strong one.

“It’s going to be okay Molly. You get your restaurant back and we get some security or cameras, I don’t know and we make it work. You can’t let them dictate what you do. If you want to serve out of owners, then so be it.”

“That’s rich coming from someone that did more than serve one coffee.”

I grinned but waved it off like it wasn’t a big deal.

“I didn’t have much choice with the selection going here.”

Molly agreed. She wasn’t feeling very generous towards Nome at the moment, but I knew that would change.