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“How about Wave?” I finally tried. “On the east side of Cincinnati?”
“I thought they were in Covington.”
“This is a new location,” I said, grasping at any small tidbit I could remember from the restaurant’s Instagram account, which had been served to me several times by the app algorithm. The pictures were gorgeous, but the tracking of my life by the app was annoying, and one of the other reasons why I hated social media, despite its necessity for a small business. “They just got an award fromMidwest Living.”
“Oh really?” He gave me a full smile, this one adding a playful air to his demeanor. “Then I guess that’s the sign where we should definitely go.”
“I’ll see you there. Six thirty.”
“Looking forward to it,” Robert replied, and tapped the top of my car twice before I backed out of the remaining part of the parking spot. “See you then.”
I gave him a curt nod and finally navigated out of the small parking lot and onto Main Street, the bustling road that wove traffic through New Burlington’s downtown and business district. It wasn’t a far drive to my house, but it felt like it took forever, and I mulled over what had happened as I mindlessly drove the route. I was having drinks. Tomorrow. With Robert Kilgore. The guy whose mere presence in town posed a direct and existential threat to the small life I’d built.
And I was excited about it.
That part confused me the most.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ROBERT
I hadn’t planned on asking Anya out.
I hadn’t planned ontalkingto her either but running into her while dropping off the paperwork for the parade felt like a prompt, a nudge from somewhere or something higher than me, something that had more control over my life than I did. Sort of like fate. And the culmination of what I’d been doing since rescuing her from the vault.
Research.
I’d been doing a lot of research on Anya Post.
Mostly innocuous, innocent stuff. After that day at the store, I checked out her social media accounts. It was all there—LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. She didn’t have much of a following on any of them, but she did have a healthy number of friends and acquaintances who wanted to keep up with her in whatever way they could. I had a burner account for Instagram, so I used it to send her a friend request, and when she accepted it, her private feed gave me a decent window into her life.
When I walked into the town hall to sign up for the parade, I knew three main things about Anya Post. She loved her job. She was married to it. And she didn’t have much going on in her life outside work.
Anya Post was a textbook small-town spinster.
This intrigued me, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because it was so different from the women I knew in New York. The ones I dated and worked with were cut from the same cloth—professional types with degrees from expensive East Coast schools and wardrobes to match. They were nice enough, polite in the ways that mattered, skilled at being good companions, and great in bed.
