Page 11 of Burning Hearts
Me:I’ll keep the center bare so you don’t have to waltz around chairs.
Ellis:Kind. We don’t deserve you or your cones.
Me:Cones don’t care who deserves them. It’s their charm.
A quiet laugh filtered through plaster. Or maybe I’d imagined it. Hard to tell with hotels; everything sounds softer.
Ellis:One more thing… if you see my people drifting where you don’t want them, point with your whole arm. They obey confidence.
Me:I don’t know what else to point with.
Ellis:Fair. See you out there.
I pocketed my phone and pretended my pulse hadn’t sped up because a man in the next room liked clear lanes and whole sentences. I wasn’t here to like anything; I was here to make sure nobody tripped or injured themselves.
Safety.
I rinsed my hands and flattened a collar that wasn’t even on me anymore. I took inventory: keys, multitool, a folded A-frame sign I’d lettered too neatly.
The wall gave me one more small sound: the beep of a lock, then the hush of carpet swallowing footsteps.
Ellis was out.
I waited ten seconds. Not on purpose, or maybe entirely on purpose.
Then I left, too.
CHAPTER THREE
ELLIS
Saturday on MainStreet had its own warm-up: brooms on brick, and a band playing somewhere out of sight. Beau’s laugh ricocheting off windows.
I headed for Cast Iron Café and noticed the parking officer half a block away with his scanner up. Brickyard Brewery’s van—the one Cade drives when he’s not riding the engine—sat with its nose out by the peach fountain. Magnet on the sliding door, cooler in the back, no stub under the wiper.
The kiosk blinked, indicating only twenty seconds remaining.
I fed it my card, tapped +45 minutes, and the printer spat out a ticket. I slid the slip beneath the wiper, centered and impossible to miss.
Not flowers, but forty-five minutes of grace.
“Officer,” Miss Pearl called from the Cast Iron stoop, sugar over steel. Clipboard in one hand, coffee in the other, surveying her stretch of sidewalk. “He’s all paid up, sugar.”
The officer checked the windshield, tipped his cap at Miss Pearl, and moved on.
Her eyes found mine, and she gave me a micro-nod.
“Consider this my noticing,” she said, “not my praising. My favorite kind of help doesn’t need a hashtag.”
“Understood,” I said.
She’d retired from radio years ago, but you could still hear dispatch cadence in the way she ran a sidewalk.
Calm at first, orders wrapped in honey. When she spoke, everyone moved before they realized they’d been directed. She was the town’s living incident log: who called at three AM, which cousin needed a quiet ride home.
Where the Biscuit Fire had licked and where it hadn’t.
People said she knew everyone’s secrets; I’d learned she mostly knew everyone’s tells, which is worse if you’re trying to bluff.
