Bullies Spit On A Waitress — Unaware She Was A Commander For 10 Years!
Chapter 21
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What she could control: herself, her timing, her positioning.What she couldn't control: Tyler Mace. Which meant Tyler Mace was the variable she needed to account for most carefully.She stood up. She made coffee. She dressed slowly and deliberately—not in her waitress uniform, in her own clothes: dark jeans, a gray long-sleeve shirt, work boots, the jacket she always wore, worn at the collar, nothing remarkable about it. She drank her coffee at the window. Below on Birch Street, the town was beginning its early morning: the bakery lights were on, a delivery truck was making its first stop, a woman walked a dog past the hardware store without looking up. Normal from the outside.At 5:30, she went out. She walked four blocks south to Kevin Webb's house. The lights were on inside. She knocked twice—the knock she'd used the day before so he'd know it was her. He opened the door on the second knock this time, no chain.He looked like he hadn't slept either, but his eyes were clearer than they'd been the day before: something had settled in them—the particular clarity that comes when a person has made a decision and stopped fighting the weight of it."They called me back last night," he said. "After I called in.""I heard," she said."They want me there at 8:30," he said. "Harrisonburg.""I'll drive you," she said.He nodded. He was quiet for a moment. He looked at his right hand. "I kept thinking last night," he said, "about what James would say if he knew I'd been sitting in this house for two years."Claire didn't answer right away. "He wouldn't judge you," she said finally. "He knew what it cost to keep going after something knocks you down. He just also knew you always could."Kevin looked at her. "Did he tell you that?" he said."He told me about the time you were twelve," she said. "And you fell off the roof of your grandfather's barn trying to fix the weather vane in a storm. Broke your arm in two places."Kevin almost smiled."And then the next morning," Claire said, "before the cast was even dry, you went back up to finish the job.""My mother was furious," he said quietly."James was not furious," Claire said.Kevin nodded slowly. "No," he said. "He wasn't."He picked up his jacket from the hook by the door.They left at 5:45. Claire drove a truck she'd bought second-hand in August, nothing memorable about it. She took back roads she'd memorized over three months of careful attention—routes that added eight minutes to any trip, but kept them off the main arteries of town where sheriff's department vehicles ran their predictable patterns. Old habit.