Page 9 of Daddy's Little Convict
She hurried back down the destroyed aisle where two store employees had already repaired the shelf and were now loading it up again with the fallen food boxes.
“Did you guys find a pink wallet?” she asked.
The employees paused in picking up to look at one another, then her.
“Nope,” the woman told her. “Sorry, not yet.”
“Are you sure this is where you left it?” the freckled teenaged boy added.
An elderly couple drifted into the aisle behind them, looking everywhere but at her as they eavesdropped on what was going on, but Tabby wasn’t fooled.
“It’s here. It has to be right here.”
The two employees picked up the floor, cleaning up her mess while she watched, the fear growing ever more pronounced the more they cleared off the white-speckled tiles with no wallet appearing anywhere around them.
She couldn’t handle just waiting. Getting down on all fours, she scrambled to pick up the scattered boxed dinners too.
“We’ve got it,” the boy assured her. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”
“Did you take my wallet?” Tabby accused. “Where is it?”
How the hell was she going to replace her ID and her social security card without a car or her birth certificate, and all while stranded in the middle of Starvation?
The two workers looked at one another and then went back to rummage through the boxes in search of it.
It was gone. It wasn’t here anywhere.
Clambering painfully to her feet, she retraced her steps through the store, but she could find it. It wasn’t on the floor, on the shelves, near the apple display or the discount rack… it wasn’t anywhere. She ended up back at the register, checking through her cart desperately one more time, but hope died hard.
She’d lost everything. Her father, her friends, her home, her life… and now her wallet and money too. Almost in tears, she threw her hands up in defeat and limped out of the store.
“Hey,” someone called after her.
Tabby didn’t care. She didn’t stop, pause, or look back. This was all just another page in the nightmare story that had become her life. And to think, for the last three years she’d thought that just getting out of prison would make everything all right again.
Chapter 3
Hands on his lean hips, Jeffrey Barnes stood at the front window of the store, watching that little girl with the big attitude storming across the parking lot. It was a slow storm, broken by each limping step she took.
He felt bad about that. He’d never given anyone a ticket for jaywalking in his life. A lecture, sure, but never a ticket. There was just something about her that made him itch to put his foot down.
Did he have any business doing that? No.
Had that stopped him? Also, no.
Was he proud of himself now that she was flouncing away, walletless and without her groceries? Definitely not.
He glanced back at the checkout lane where Tabitha’s groceries lay abandoned and wished he could reset this entire situation, and this time be less of a dick about it all.
“Poor girl,” the cashier said with a shake of her head. She gathered the groceries off the conveyor belt. “I feel bad for her.”
So did he.
A high-pitched squeal suddenly erupted several aisles away. Seconds later, seventeen-year-old Willow Blankenship, a one-time rider of the same bus Tabitha had come to town on, came jogging toward them, waving a glittering pink-plastic wallet with a unicorn on the front. Jeff smothered that triggering twitch that shot through him when he saw it. That was not a grown woman’s wallet, but it was the kind a Little might be drawn to.
So proud of herself, bouncing on her heels and hands clasped behind her back, Willow said, “It was on a shelf in the bread aisle. Someone must have set it there and forgot it.”
Someone.
