“At the prison,” Paige murmured.
Where Olivia’s half sister was serving eight to twenty-five for armed robbery. “Yeah. The prison’s about an hour away from Chicago, and I hadn’t been able to get out there before then. I was kind of shaken up, meeting my sister that way, behind the glass. I got to the church late for the rehearsal and was running up to the steps on these stupid high heels, and then I saw him sitting there.”
“This David guy.”
“Yeah.” Olivia closed her eyes. “It was like getting kicked in the gut. I was mesmerized. His face… just, wow. He’s got this face, Paige. And the shoulders. And the rest of him… You can’t forget him. I was staring at his face when my heel hit a rock and I tripped. Flew right into his lap. I was too star struck to even be embarrassed.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever known you to be star struck,” Paige said quietly.
“I never was before. Not with Doug, not with anyone. I’d skinned my knee and he patched me up.” Her lips curved bitterly. “He had me at hello. It’s a wonder I got through the rehearsal and the dinner. All the women looked like they wanted to gouge my eyes out because he stayed with me. And we talked. We talked all night.”
“Did he know about Doug?”
“God, no. I didn’t want to look pathetic. I didn’t tell any of them. Mia didn’t even know. And frankly, sitting there with David, Doug was the last thing on my mind. He never took his eyes off my face. I felt… important. Sounds stupid now.”
Paige’s brow creased in sympathy. “It sounds normal to me.”
“I guess I really wanted to feel important to somebody, you know?”
Paige squeezed her hand. “Yeah, babe. I know.”
Olivia’s eyes stung and she willed back what would have been mortifying tears. “It wasn’t all bad, though. I told him about Kelsey. He’d known Mia for a long time, knew about our father. About the abuse. I was so sad to see Kelsey there, in prison like that, even if she did do the crime. David suggested volunteering with teen runaways, to help give them a chance. To help them not turn out like my sister.”
“And you do. It’s good work, Liv. You make a difference in those kids’ lives.”
“Thanks. So like I said, it wasn’t all bad. The rehearsal dinner was wonderful. It was the night after the wedding that went wrong.”
“After it went really well,” Paige said, brows lifted meaningfully and Olivia sighed.
“I wish I’d never met him, because I can’t imagine it ever being that good again.”
“But you didn’t…”
“Not all the way.” She sighed again. “But based on what did happen, I think all the way would have freaking killed me.”
Paige was quiet a moment. “Maybe he just lied about doing all that nice stuff. Maybe he’s really a colossal jerk.”
“I wish. Since he’s been here, he donates his time to charity. Habitat for Humanity, fixing stuff at the local shelters. Eve tells me about him all the time. She thinks David hung the moon. He really is a nice guy. He just… doesn’t want me.”
There. She’d said it out loud. I should be feeling better now. But she wasn’t.
“Liv, did it occur to you that maybe he’s waiting for you to make the first move?”
Olivia scoffed. “In my fantasies, sure.”
“Liv?” Paige waited until Olivia looked at her. “If I were a guy and we’d parted ways under the circumstances you described?”
“Only after you got me drunk,” Olivia interjected, frowning.
“Like you would have ever told me otherwise? Duh. Of course I got you drunk. But as I was saying, if I were Wedding-Guy, I’d be waiting for you to make the first move.”
Olivia remembered the tilt of David Hunter’s perfect chin before she’d driven away. It had felt like a challenge. But she also remembered that one night vividly. She remembered the one word, that one name he’d said, even more vividly. “No.”
“Why not?” Paige asked, exasperated. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“The same thing that happened the last time,” Olivia said darkly, and her body throbbed in places that had nothing to do with her workout.
“And that would be a bad thing, how? You haven’t had anyone since. You’re under so much stress that you’re about to crack wide open. What’s the harm in a fling? So he used you. Use him back. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Olivia sat up and swiped at her neck with a towel. I become like you, she thought, with so many boyfriends I need a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. But of course she said nothing of the kind. Paige was her oldest friend. “I’ll think about it,” was what she said instead. “Let’s stretch. I have to catch a little sleep before morning meeting.”
Monday, September 20, 7:10 a.m.
“Whoa.” Jeff Zoellner stood on the condo’s first floor, staring up through the room-sized hole that went all the way up to the fourth floor. “You woulda felt that for sure.”
Grimly, David followed his gaze up, then looked down into the basement. The first floor had also been burned through. “Yeah. I guess I owe you one.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.” Jeff starting walking again, tapping the handle of his ax on the floor as he sounded for weak spots. David did the same with the end of his Halligan, and together they moved toward the back of the condo. Each of the six floors had six units, but the units on this side of the building had sustained the worst damage. “I think we’re solid from here on out,” Jeff said. “We can let Barlow in now.”
Micah waited in the doorway. He wore a hard hat and boots, but was otherwise dressed like a detective. The end of his yellow tie poked up from the pocket of his suit. He held a video camera in one hand and a light bar in the other, and had worked alongside them diligently but intelligently, treading in areas they’d declared safe.
And he hadn’t said another word about Olivia and for that David was grateful. There were too many dangers here to be thinking about anything else but the job.
Which is what David had told himself every time he caught himself thinking about her, wondering why Micah Barlow felt she was his business, wondering if the two of them had history, not wanting that picture in his head. David grimaced. Except now that he’d thought it, the picture existed, if only in his imagination. Taunting him.
If Micah and Olivia had a past, at least they had no present. David had kept a close enough eye on her that he’d have known. But if she did have someone? I’ll walk away.
And if she doesn’t have anyone but just doesn’t want you? Given the facts, that was the more likely outcome. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
“Where can I step?” Micah called from the doorway.
“Floor’s solid where you’re standing,” David said, forcing himself to focus yet again, “but it gets spongy about two feet from the edge of the hole.”
Micah looked up, then down, just as David had. “Goddamn. You’re a lucky bastard.”
“Yeah, I got that part,” David said. “Over here was what we wanted you to see. They poured the carpet padding glue along this line.” David pointed to the pour patterns zigzagging from the front door of the unit to the hole, continuing through to the back bedrooms. “It’s the same pour pattern we found on the second floor. I think they poured a line from the door and from the back of the unit, meeting here.”
“Makes sense,” Micah said, filming. “They probably dumped what was left in the cans where the floor failed. Fire would have been hotter there. The manager said rolls of carpet were stored here, same place on each floor. Waterlogged, that would have been enough weight to crash through the second and third floors. When the first floor collapsed, all three carpet rolls fell into the basement.”
For a minute David thought Micah would venture to the edge of the hole to get video straight down, but he stopped while still in the safe zone. From the corner of his eye, David could see Jeff’s mouth snap shut, discarding the warning he’d been about to bark. It hadn’t taken more than a few runs with Jeff to know cops made him real edgy.