Bullies Spit On A Waitress — Unaware She Was A Commander For 10 Years!
Chapter 17
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"What are you going to do?" Lena asked."I'm going to talk to Kevin," Claire said."He won't answer the door," Lena said."He'll answer it for me," Claire said.Lena looked at her, studying her. "Who are you?" she said. It wasn't accusatory; it was genuine—the question of someone who has been standing in the dark and has just seen something move in it that might be worth trusting.Claire reached for the door handle. "Someone who made a promise," she said.She got out. She had twelve blocks to walk. She walked them in fourteen minutes, which was slower than she usually moved because she spent the time thinking.Not about strategy, exactly; she had the strategy. It had been forming since the night before, since the moment Tyler's boot came down on her apron. She was thinking about Kevin. She'd last spoken to him eight months ago. His voice on the phone had been flat in a way that had nothing to do with volume: it was the flatness of a person who has been through something that rearranged the world, and come out the other side to find that the rearranged version is the one they now have to live in. She knew that flatness; she'd heard it in the voices of people she'd served with after certain kinds of operations, after certain kinds of losses.Kevin Webb was twenty-four years old, and he was living inside the aftermath of someone else's cruelty, and he had been doing it alone for two years. And the person who had helped create that aftermath was walking around this town with a badge and a title and the comfortable posture of a man who had never once been held responsible for anything.That was the part that moved inside her chest like something with edges. Not Tyler's spit on her face; not the apron on the floor. Kevin Webb: twenty-four, a bad knee, a damaged hand, a grandfather's land being swallowed by a development deal greased by the same man who covered up the accident that took the first two things from him.James had asked her to keep an eye on his brother. She had tried to do that from a distance. Distance hadn't been enough.Kevin Webb's house was a small rental on the south side of town: white paint going gray at the edges, front curtains drawn, a truck in the driveway that hadn't moved in long enough for the tires to look permanently settled.She knocked. Silence. She knocked again."Kevin," she said. "It's Claire Harmon. James's Claire."That was how James had always referred to her to his family: not Lieutenant Commander, not even Claire from work—James's Claire.Silence from inside. Then, after a very long time, the sound of movement: a lock turning. The door opened six inches, a chain still attached.