A Night With A Stranger novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Forty Witnesses

I went back to the Cellar on Friday to quit properly.

Evan had wanted to drive me.

I said it would take five minutes, and that the owner deserved to hear it from my mouth, and that I would not be afraid of a basement.

He had put two men on the street outside and Dennis's name on a list at the steel door.

"Dennis is under a no-contact order," he said. "If he gets within a hundred feet, he goes back."

"Then I'm safe."

"You are never safe when a man like that has a lawyer." He kissed my forehead. "Five minutes. Text me when you're out."

The club was half full at six on a Friday.

The owner was in his office behind the bar with a cigar he wasn't allowed to light, and he shook my hand twice.

"I knew what he was," he said. "I did not know what he'd do. That's on me."

"It's not."

"It's on me a little." He opened a drawer and put an envelope on the desk. "Your last two weeks of tips. Bree held them."

When I opened it later, it was exactly right, to the dollar.

I walked out into the bar and Bree came around the counter and hugged me, hard, in front of everyone.

"I'm only staying till they find someone," she said. "Then I'm gone. I got a day job at a bakery."

"A bakery."

"I'm going to smell like bread. For once I want to smell like something that isn't smoke."

I laughed, and she laughed, and for a moment I forgot to look at the door.

That was when I heard the steel door at the top of the stairs.

A man came down slowly, one hand on the rail, the other in his coat pocket.

The gold watch caught the lamp.

Forty people stopped talking.

"Sweetheart," Dennis said.

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