Chapter 9: The Man at the Gas Pump

Eli's POV

I drove into Marlow at six in the morning for diesel, because I needed a reason to stop looking at the farmhouse window.

I had slept four hours in the cab of my truck behind her barn.

I wasn't sorry.

At the pump, I stood with the nozzle in my hand and counted what I knew.

Lena Haskell was thirty-one, and she had come back from the dead.

She had taken her ring off in front of me and put it in her pocket.

That was all I had, and I had been in love with her since the day she cut my boot off with trauma shears and told me to stop being a baby.

I wasn't proud of that, either.

She had been married when I met her again, so I had kept my mouth shut and my hands in my pockets.

"Eli?"

I turned my head.

A woman stood at the next pump with a gray hatchback behind her.

She was in a rumpled sweatshirt with her hair pulled back, and her eyes were swollen.

I knew the face.

It took me a few seconds.

Then it came to me, and the name came after it.

"Shell," I said.

She flinched.

Seven years ago, I had spent one summer in Duluth working a pipeline job, and a waitress at a lake bar had made the hot days pass faster.

She had been blonde then. She'd said her name was Shell.

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