Heat burns up the back of my neck and my stomach hardens. My hands grip the handle of my cart so tightly my knuckles ache.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing in the hallway staring at the board when the door to the break room opens and the manager walks out.
“Gretchen,” I say.
Her jaw stiffens. “Emma. I didn’t think you shopped here anymore.”
“I know, it’s been a while. Sam has been coming for me. I’ve been working so much.”
“I’m well aware of your work,” she says, cutting me short and biting off the last word as if she’s catching me in a lie. “But that’s not what I meant. I didn’t think you would have the guts to show your face around here again.”
“Why not?” I ask, disturbed by her reaction to me.
“Because of him,” she says, gesturing sharply toward the picture of Gabriel. “His life was just getting started. He was so young and had so much potential. Then you came along, and now he’s gone.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. What did you do to convince him to chase you to Harlan?”
The initial surprise at her reaction turns back to anger, and I take another step toward the manager.
“I don’t know what you think you know, but he didn’t chase me anywhere. I didn’t even know he was there,” I say. “It shocked the hell out of me when I looked into that car and saw it was him. Especially after watching him run a woman down just a few seconds before.”
“Don’t you dare talk about him like that,” she says. “He was sad and vulnerable after his grandmother’s death, and you knew that. You led that poor boy on, and he died a horrible death because of it.”
I open my mouth to correct her but stop myself. I’m not supposed to go into the details of his death while the case is still being reviewed.
“How do you think he died?” I ask.
“You want me to tell you the gory details? Was it not enough to actually see him smash his car like that?” she asks. “Is it fun for you to know you manipulated him like that?”
“I don’t know where you get off blaming me for anything, but you need to educate yourself before you open your mouth again. He killed a woman. A woman I was at that park to talk to. Right in front of me. Right in front of a lot of other people. If we’re going to talk about people who shouldn’t be showing their faces around, maybe you should pay more attention to who you’re glorifying in front of the public,” I say.
Yanking my cart out of the hallway, I stalk back into the store and do my best to follow the rest of my list. I’m so angry I can’t even think straight, and by the time I decide I’m done and leave, I barely even know what I got off the shelves.
Chapter Seventeen
“Hey, babe,” Sam says when I get home and carry my first couple of bags through the front door toward the kitchen. “Are there more groceries in the car?”
“Yes,” I tell him.
He heads out to get more while I start unloading the first bags.
“Um, honey,” he says when he walks into the room a few moments later. I look up and he’s staring down into one of the bags in his arm. “Not that I would want to question your Thanksgiving cooking plans or anything, but could you warn me before I eat whatever has the Scotch Bonnet salsa in it?”
“The what?” I ask.
He sets the bag down on the table and reaches in to pull out a jar. I take it out of his hand and look at it. Rolling my eyes, I set it down.
“I don’t remember picking this up. You would not believe what happened while I was shopping.”
“Come on, let’s go get everything else and you can tell me all about it,” Sam says.
It takes two more trips to get all the bags out of the car, but they’re finally strewn all around the kitchen. It’s weird seeing the full aftermath of my anger blindness.
“Everything was going really well. I was even starting to get into the whole spirit of it all and picked out the turkey. Those women are crazy, so I needed a little bit of a break and I stepped off to the side. Which put me right face to face with a bulletin board honoring their poor fallen comrade,” I say.
“Gabriel?” Sam asks.
“That would be the one,” I sigh. “There’s this whole bulletin board lamenting his death and sending up messages and prayers to his dearly departed soul. I couldn’t even believe what I was seeing. Then Gretchen walked out of the break room and acted as if I was doing a voodoo ritual right in front of their sacred altar.”
“Gretchen?” he asks. “The manager? She’s been perfectly pleasant to me every time I’ve seen her since.”
I snatch up a canister of raisins I have no recollection of choosing and stuff it into the pantry.
“That’s probably because she pities you,” I say. “Not only did she say she couldn’t believe I would show my face in the store, but she essentially accused me of being some sort of twisted seductress who led sweet innocent Gabriel astray and caused his death. She asked why he followed me to Harlan and suggested we were having an illicit liaison when he died. But she’s completely convinced he died in the crash.”
“So, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Sam says. “The police aren’t releasing all the details about his death because it’s still technically under investigation. We don’t know who put him in that
