Page 72 of Mountains Divide Us

“Some,” he said, looking out his back window as he reversed out of my driveway. His truck had a back-up camera, but he rarely used it. Sometimes, it felt like he was allergic to technology. He rolled his eyes every time I went to order something online. “I’ll drive you to the store,” he’d say with a smirk. “Besides, that keeps things local. Don’t you young’ns like doin’ that?”

Except lately, he wasn’t doing much smirking or smiling at all. He was back to not-very-talkative, grumpy Frank.

It had been several days since our stakeout, and he picked me up every morning and every night after I finished up at the library, but he was closed off, speaking in one-word sentences again. I’d tried talking to him to find out why there was a sudden cold front being aimed at me, but he shut me down pretty quickly, saying he was just busy with work.

We went to dinner once at José’s Diner, and he grumbled through the whole thing and took me home the second I’d finished eating my fried chicken platter. Man, was it good. I resisted the urge to lick the grease off my fingers. Frank wasn’t a fan of grease. He was so rigid with his diet, I thought he suspected it could harden his arteries just by being near it. Even José knew this. He didn’t even bother to ask Frank what he wanted to order, and when he delivered my fried chicken, Frank got grilled chicken with brown rice and steamed broccoli as sides. Blech. Where was the flavor?

I had the feeling that whatever his recent bad moods were about, they had to do with this kid Murphy.

Frank still hadn’t found him, and he’d told me he’d done nothing else but search. Murphy hadn’t been back to the library, at least as far as I could tell, and Frank checked my windows and doors and every single garbage can in the building when he dropped me off in the mornings and picked me up in the evenings. Sometimes on his lunch break too. I didn’t get bad periods since the miscarriage and all the surgeries, but I still had a period. Ruined though my uterus and ovaries were, they still existed, and occasionally I did have to pee, so I would’ve noticed a homeless kid hiding out in the bathroom.

I’d even tried to talk Frank into another driving lesson, with promises of another make out session after, but he’d said only, “Yeah, maybe tomorrow.” But tomorrow came and went, and he never brought it up again.

We were barely speaking.

“Listen,” he said, turning out of my gramps’s neighborhood, headed toward downtown. “That storm’s comin’ tonight. I don’t want you to be alone if things get bad. Would you stay at the station?”

I was surprised. I hadn’t expected that. Honestly, from the lack of communication from him over the last week, I was half expecting him to find an excuse to end things. Something had changed between us, but he wouldn’t say what it was. Maybe he’d realized things really couldn’t work. Maybe I was too young for him after all. Or maybe I was putting off some kind of “don’t pick me, I’m infertile” vibes.

“Please? You could keep Grum company. I have to be on the roads tonight, but I’ll be in and out. Abey and Shelley will be there though. I’ll worry if you’re alone.”

“O-okay. Or maybe I could hang at Ace’s House. Brady and Theo will be there.”

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Okay. Good compromise. Thank you. I’ll check in when I can.”

God. The angst pouring out of him was practically choking me. I wanted to shake him. In fact—

“Frank, talk to me, please? What the hell’s going on with you? You’ve been distant for days. I don’t know what I did wrong, but would you please just tell me so I can fix it?”

He sighed, and his voice was a quiet rumble when he said, “You didn’t do anything wrong, Samantha. Why do you immediately assume it’s something you did? It’s not. Work’s been busy, and I… I’m just tired.”

I scoffed. He expected me to keep believing that? “That’s a lie. I mean, maybe you are tired, but that’s not all that’s going on here. Whatever it is, I’m sorry it’s upsetting you, but you’re the one who said I wasn’t ready for this relationship, and now you’re the one acting like a sulky teenager. So it’s up to you to fix whatever’s wrong.”

He pulled up in front of the library and stared at me as I got out. He didn’t follow me in like he usually did, and I didn’t ask him to. He didn’t even say goodbye.

Freaking men. He may’ve been nineteen years older than me, but he was acting like a little boy.

And how did it work out that the one time he didn’t come in with me to check the doors and windows, the second I crossed the threshold and stepped inside, it was glaringly obvious someone had been there?

The garbage can had been kicked over next to the armchairs in the main room, and trash was everywhere. I thought I’d emptied the bins, but I must not have. Books lay scattered across the floor next to my overturned shelving cart. The downstairs bathroom light was on, shining off the wall in the back hallway.

As Frank drove away, I closed the door behind me and called out, “Hello?” I walked through the first floor slowly, ready to run at any second, but from everything Frank had told me about Murphy, I wasn’t too afraid. What was the kid going to do to me? Clobber me with a paperback copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer? “Hello? Is anyone here?”

I should’ve called Frank the second I’d realized someone had been there, but something stopped me, and I knew exactly what it was.

If I’d called him, Frank would’ve arrested Murphy, and I didn’t think Murphy deserved that. He’d been through so much already. How did Frank expect this kid to handle the sheriff’s station or a child advocate from the state who looked like Miss Trunchbull from Matilda and was just as mean? He was only looking for a safe place to sleep.

I was not about to help Frank punish him for that.

“Hello? If you’re here, please talk to me. I won’t hurt you.”

My head whipped up toward the ceiling when I heard a chair or something scrape across the floor upstairs. There was a loud thump, and I ran up there, skidding to a stop in the open conference room door because there was a child lying in front of it, clutching his side and rolling on the floor.

“Oh my God. Are you okay? What happened?”

He looked up at me, his dark brown eyes scared and squinting, probably trying to discern if I could be trusted.

I held my hands up in front of me to try to convince him I wouldn’t hurt him. “I’m Sam. I’m the librarian. I promise you, I don’t care that you’re here. You’re not in trouble. I want to help you.”

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