Then her eyes moved to the space behind the counter, to the shelf just beneath the register where a motorcycle helmet sat. It was old, black with a silver stripe, the kind of helmet that had been on real roads in real weather. She'd kept it there for years. She told herself it was because she didn't want to throw it away because it had belonged to her father. Both of those things were true.
They just weren't the whole truth. William saw where her eyes went. He didn't say anything else. Emma sat very still for a count of 10. Then she reached under the counter and picked up her phone. "
Can you stay with them?" she asked William, her eyes moving briefly to Kayla and Teresa. " I'm not going anywhere," he said. Emma walked to the back room. She closed the door behind her, and she made a call.
The phone rang twice. " Emma," the voice on the other end was deep and unhurried. A man who had spent a long time learning not to be surprised by things. " Marcus," she said. " Long time."
A pause. " What's wrong?" Emma looked at the wall of the back room at the framed photo of her father that she kept on the shelf above the old ink supply cabinet. He was younger in the photo than she was now. He was laughing at something off camera, and whoever had taken the picture had caught him mid laugh, and the realness of it had always made her chest ache when she looked at it too long. "
Golden Rose needs help," she said. Silence on the other end. The kind of silence that isn't empty but full. How bad? Marcus asked.
Emma thought about Derek Holloway's face. The deliberate way he dropped her portfolio. The thing he'd said about pipes bursting in the night. " Bad enough that I'm calling," she said. Another silence.
Then stay inside. Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone you don't know. " Give me 45 minutes." " Marcus, I don't want—" "Emma."
His voice was steady, warm and hard at the same time. The way certain things are both things at once. Your father stood beside us for 20 years. We're not having this conversation. The call ended.
Emma stood in the back room with her phone in her hand and looked at her father's photograph and felt something in her chest loosened slightly. Not fear leaving, not everything being okay, just the particular relief of not being alone in a thing that felt too large to carry alone. She walked back out to the front. William looked at her from the chair. She gave him a small nod.
He closed his eyes briefly, nodded back. Kayla looked up from her phone, visibly still shaken. " Is everything okay? Should we call the police?" " We can call the police," Emma said.
She sat back down on her stool and reached for her machine. Her hands were steady. " But first, you came here for something." Kayla stared at her. " You want to keep going?"
And after all of that, Emma looked at her directly. " You saved three months for this. You're nervous, and you were nervous before those men walked in. And you're going to be nervous until the needle touches your skin. And then about 30 seconds after that, you're going to feel something shift, and I'd really like to be the one here when that happens."
Kayla blinked at her. Then she put her phone down slowly, and she walked to the chair. Emma smiled. Outside the street was quiet for now. In the back of her mind, Emma was already counting the minutes.
45 Marcus had said less now. The shop was locked. William was there. Kayla was settling into the chair with the particular held-breath concentration of someone about to do something they can't take back. Which was its own kind of courage.
Emma dipped the needle. She worked. She did not look at the window. She did not let her hand shake. But in a part of her mind she kept very quiet and very separate from the work she was listening to the street outside to the sound of things that hadn't happened yet because Derek Holloway had not struck her as a man who took 48 hours to think about things and she was right.
20 minutes after he left he came back. This time he didn't use the front door. He came through the alley entrance at the back of the building. A service door Emma kept bolted from the inside. She heard the impact of something heavy against the metal and then the crack of the bolt giving and then the door opened.
All three of them came through. Derek walked to the front of the shop and stopped when he saw Emma still at her workstation, machine in hand. Kayla frozen in the chair, Teresa standing up from hers with a hand pressed to her shoulder. He hadn't expected that. He'd expected to find her on the phone with the police or on the floor afraid.
He'd expected to find the upper hand he'd come back to secure. Instead, he found a woman finishing a tattoo. " I told you," Emma said, not looking up from Kayla's arm. " There's nothing for you here." " I told you," Derek said, "that the next conversation would be different."
He nodded to the thick-necked man who moved toward the equipment shelves along the sidewall and put one hand on a tray of ink bottles. Kayla made a sound that was almost a word. Derek looked at her, then at Emma. " How much is this equipment worth?" " 6 figures, seven.