15 Days Before I Left Him novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Back in Hollis Lake

Clara's POV

I had not driven into Hollis Lake since the morning I left it in the back of Raylan's rental.

It was the Friday before Rescue Day, gray and cold, and the main street was strung with orange banners.

Every lamppost had a laminated poster zip-tied to it.

Faye's face smiled out of each one, in her old graduation photo, above the words: Our Hometown Hero.

Raylan slowed the car, and neither of us said anything.

"Stop at the diner," I said.

"You don't have to."

"I do. I'm not going to sneak in by the back road the night before."

He parked outside Pell's Diner, and I walked in alone.

The room went quiet in sections, booth by booth, as people looked up from their eggs.

I knew every one of them.

The man from the hardware store looked away first.

A woman I had gone to church with whispered behind her hand, and her husband shushed her too late.

I sat at the counter and ordered coffee.

The waitress who had poured it since I was a kid set the cup down and did not leave.

She was seventy, with reading glasses on a chain, and she had slipped me free pie every Sunday after my mother's shift.

"Your mother used to sit right there," she said, low.

"She'd drink one cup and never say a word, and then go home and clean for those people."

"I know."

"She never told me about the pond."

"She told nobody."

The waitress nodded slowly.

"I always wondered why you wouldn't come down to the bank on Rescue Day. Everyone said you were scared of the water."

"I am."

"That's a different thing." She patted my hand twice, hard. "Pie's on the house. Don't argue."

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