“Does that mean you have a plan now?” he asked.
“No. Not yet. But you’re back, really back, and now there’s potential to make a new plan. I couldn’t bring myself to make one for myself until I had some kind of closure.” I looked up at him and smiled. It was shaky, but it was still a smile. “Or renewal.”
He beamed and held me close to him. His arms around me felt like old times and I leaned into him, breathing in the scent of something I’d thought I lost forever. “Why wait? Let’s make a plan now. You’re working, right? I’m working, but it just pays for my room. I can get another job or two.” He stopped short and I nearly tripped over a log.
“What is it?” I asked.
His eyes lit up and his shoulders tensed the way they did when he was excited. “It might not even take that long. Nobody knew where our stash was—if it’s still there—”
“No.” I knew where he was going with this. “Not a chance. If you go poking around in the woods right now, people are going to talk. You’ll look twice as guilty as you do already. And it’s not really safe to try to put a plan together right now even with that first idea. If I start picking up more hours and you’re suddenly filling all the open positions in town, my dad is going to notice.”
“So what? Let him notice. Does he have something against you working hard?”
“No, but he has a whole lot against you. He’ll put the pieces together, Kash, I know he will. And the second he suspects that you and I are together again all hell will break loose.” My stomach turned anxiously and I pressed the heel of my hand against it.
Kash took hold of my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “You’re a grown woman, Daisy. Are you really going to let your dad tell you who you can and can’t see?”
I shook my head, pleading with him with my eyes. “You don’t know how bad he’s gotten, Kash. As overprotective as he used to be, he’s way worse now. He’s so scared that I’m going to end up like Hunter…or like you. He’s drunk more and angry more and if he gets a hint of this…” I let the thought die on my tongue, not wanting to speak that into existence.
“So…what does that mean for us?” Apprehension lined his eyes, but they burned with a determined passion.
“It means…we wait. Just long enough for the panic to die down or for the cops to figure out who really did it.”
Kash groaned. “It’s a cold case, Daisy. It could take forever for them to solve it, if they solve it at all. What if they don’t? What if I’m all anybody wants to talk about for the next year? Two years? Ten? Are you really going to keep your life on hold forever just because your dad has control issues?”
“It’s not control issues,” I insisted. “He’s just really protective. I’m not saying we can’t be together or start planning a future, I’m just saying that we need to be careful. Maybe—maybe we don’t do it right now. Maybe we just wait a while, that’s all.”
“I’ve been waiting six years,” he said stiffly. “How much longer do you figure we have to wait?”
“I don’t know! I don’t have a plan for this. I didn’t think I was going to need one.” I grabbed his hand and held it close to my chest, searching his eyes. “I want to make this work. I want to see a future again, I do. But we just have to be a little tiny bit careful. Please.”
His expression softened and he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “A tiny bit careful, huh? So, what you’re saying is, I should strap bells to my boots before I come crawling through your window?”
I slapped at him playfully. “I’m serious, Kash. He’s gotten mean. I swear when he found out Hunter was selling drugs I thought he was going to bring him back to life just so he could kill him himself.”
Kash chuckled. “I dunno, sounds like a lot of work for a man who won’t even buy his own beer.”
“Right? What is that about? Like come on, dad, my reputation can only take so much of this.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes, his arm around my shoulders, just listening to the sounds of the forest.
“Actually, that’s not quite true,” I said after a while.
“What isn’t?”
“About my reputation. I don’t think there’s anything anyone could say that would trash it any worse. I’m already the crazy drunken librarian who’s down to fight over a drug dealing murderer. It doesn’t get much lower than that.”
“Sure it does,” he said cheerfully. “At least they aren’t calling you ‘Old Lady Raff.’”
I laughed and shuddered. “Fair enough. Poor guy.”
“What happened to him?” Kash asked.
I shook my head and sighed. “I don’t know. I think he disappeared around the same time you did, but I’m not sure. Like I said, my dad had me on lockdown for a long, long time. By the time I was allowed to rejoin the land of the living, Raff was gone.”
“Damn,” Kash said pensively. “Hope it wasn’t withdrawal. That’s a shit way to go.”
“Do you regret it?” I asked.
“What?”
“Selling. Lots of people in this town spent a lot of time really messed up. Do you ever wish you hadn’t started?”
Kash frowned down at the ground ahead of us. He was silent for a while, then he shook his head. “If it wasn’t us it would have been somebody else. We had our hands full defending
