I came to Cutter’s Creek with a false name, a beat-up car, and one rule -- don’t get attached.
I didn’t account for Molly Morrison -- or her father.
Seven-year-old Molly slips past defenses trained professionals never could. Blake is quiet, observant, and far too good at noticing everything I don’t say. I should keep my distance from both of them. Instead, I find myself building a life I never expected to have.
Then my past finds me.
I’ve always known when to fight and when to run. But this time, running means leaving Blake and Molly behind. And I think I’m finally done running.
Lupita
I pulled into Cutter’s Creek on a Tuesday afternoon, and the town didn’t seem to notice. The gravel lot beside the gas station was empty except for a pickup with a boat trailer hitched to it, and my ten-year-old Civic rolled to a stop with the cracked side mirror catching a gray sky. The gas station doubled as a bait shop, according to the hand-painted sign in the window, which told me most of what I needed to know about the place before I ever cut the engine.
I had picked Cutter’s Creek off a map three days earlier, in a motel outside Amarillo, using criteria I’d developed over eight years of finding people who didn’t want to be found. Population around five hundred. No interstate within forty miles. No regional airport, no casino, no anything that would bring in outside traffic or outside money. A town that small didn’t show up in databases unless somebody went looking for it specifically, and nobody was going to go looking for it specifically. That was the whole point. If I couldn’t have found me here, nobody could.
I cut the engine and sat there with my hands on the wheel.
The main road ran maybe a quarter mile, and I saw most of it from the lot. A grocery store sat across the street, its name painted by hand on a board above the door, the letters a little uneven, like whoever did it had gotten tired toward the end. Farther down there was a hardware store, a church with a gravel parking lot, a squat brick building that might have been a post office or a bank or both, and a diner with a faded red-and-white awning. Even from here I could see the white card taped inside the diner’s glass door. Help Wanted, probably. Everything else looked like it would rather be left alone.
Out of habit, I ran the assessment anyway. Two ways in and out of town by road, north and south. Sightlines were long and clean, which cut both ways. Anybody coming would be visible for half a mile, but so would I. The buildings were low, one and two stories, nothing with a rooftop worth worrying about. It took me about ninety seconds to conclude that Cutter’s Creek presented no tactical concerns whatsoever, which was either reassuring or depressing, depending on how I chose to look at it. I decided not to look at it.
The smell came in through the cracked window before I opened the door. Diesel from the pumps and, underneath it, creek mud, that green smell of slow water. Somewhere behind the gas station there had to be the creek the town was named for. I’d look at it eventually. There was no rush. There was, for the first time in longer than I wanted to count, no rush about anything.
Eleven days. That was the entire age of the woman sitting in this car, and I ran the arithmetic behind her the way you press a bruise, to find out whether it still hurt in the same place. Six weeks on the Gulf Coast before that, recovering at Jeb’s place from what had been done to me. Before Jeb, the Dixie Reapers. Before the Dixie Reapers, a prison. Before the prison, a career.
My father was dead. Ernesto with him, which was the only sentence my life had ever handed me at a discount. Everything the two of them had spent forty years building had come apart in a single night while I was in no condition to watch it happen, and I had made my peace with not having been there, mostly. My badge went with them. The men who had opened the prison door for me had opened it because they thought I could be useful. When I turned out not to be, one of them had arranged for something to go into my arm, and there was no version of it in which men like that simply forgot my name. Jeb never understood that part, mostly because I never explained it to him. I wasn’t hiding from my father. I had outlived my father. I was hiding from everyone else who had ever had a use for me, and there were more of them than I cared to count.
And Emmie was safe. That was the line at the bottom of the column, the one all the rest of it added up to. My sister had married a man who put himself between her and Luis Montoya without needing to be asked twice, and she was living behind a gate in Alabama with a hundred people who would do the same thing without being asked at all. She didn’t know where I was. She wasn’t going to. That was the last thing Lupita Montoya did, and of everything on the list it was the only item I had chosen freely, and it was the only one that cost.
I should have gotten out of the car then. Instead I sat for another minute, longer than made sense, watching the road. Nobody drove past. A screen door slapped shut somewhere down the block and that was the extent of the afternoon’s activity. This was what I had wanted. I reminded myself of that, the way you remind yourself to take medicine that tastes bad, and then I got out.
The duffel bag was on the back seat. One bag. Everything I owned fit in it now, which had seemed efficient when I packed it and seemed like a stunt now that I was standing in a gravel lot in a town I’d never heard of two weeks ago. I pulled it out and my grip on the strap was tighter than it needed to be. I noticed my knuckles going white and made myself loosen my hand, one finger at a time. The bag didn’t weigh much. That wasn’t the problem. On paper, I owned considerably more. Luis Montoya’s will left all of it to me.
I locked the car, which was probably unnecessary in a town like this, and walked toward the hardware store. There was a Room For Rent notice in the grocery store window, hand-lettered like everything else here, with an arrow that pointed vaguely up the street and a name and the words see Earl at the hardware store, upstairs. I’d spotted it from the lot. Convenient. Suspiciously convenient, said the part of my brain that had spent eight years being paid to be suspicious, but I told that part of my brain that small towns had rooms for rent because small towns were dying, and there was nothing more to it than that.
Before I reached the door, I stopped on the sidewalk and mouthed the name to myself. Lucy Alverez. My jaw worked through it stiffly, like the syllables didn’t fit right, like a line I hadn’t finished memorizing. Lucy Alverez. Lucy. I’d chosen it because it was close enough to my real name that I’d turn my head if someone called it, and far enough that it wouldn’t ring any bells in the wrong ears. On paper it was clean. Out loud it still felt like a lie, because it was one. I’d been Lucy Alverez for eleven days and I was still waiting for the name to feel like anything other than a coat I’d stolen off a rack.
The landlord was where the sign said he’d be, in a cramped office at the top of a staircase behind the hardware store’s register. He was somewhere north of seventy, wearing a hearing aid in one ear that he clearly didn’t trust, because when I said I was there about the room he cupped his other ear and made me say it again, louder. I said it again, louder. That was fine with me. A half-deaf landlord asks fewer follow-up questions.
He asked how long. I said month to month. He asked if I had cash. I did. He named a number that would have been a rounding error in most cities, and I counted it out on his desk while he watched the bills and not my face. He never asked my name. He never asked what brought me to Cutter’s Creek, or what I did for work, or whether anyone would be joining me. He wrote in a spiral notebook, slid a key across the desk on a plain metal ring, and pointed at the ceiling.
He pushed a key across the desk with two fingers. “End of the hall. Bathroom’s shared with the room next door, but there’s nobody in the room next door.”
“Thank you.”
“What?”
“Thank you.” Louder this time.
He waved that off and went back to whatever he’d been doing before I interrupted his afternoon. The whole transaction had taken four minutes. I’d worked cases where getting a hotel receipt took longer.
The room was at the end of the hall, like he’d said. It had a bed, a dresser, a chair, and one window facing the main road. I stood in the doorway and gave it the same ninety seconds I’d given the town. One point of entry through the door, one through the window, and the window had a straight drop to an awning I could use if I had to. The lock on the door was a joke, but I could fix that. The sightline from the window covered the whole street in both directions. Professionally, I approved. Personally, the room was small and smelled faintly of sawdust from the store below, and there was a water stain on the ceiling shaped like nothing in particular, and it was mine, and it produced a feeling I didn’t have a word for and didn’t try to find one.
I didn’t unpack. I set the duffel on the bed, looked at it, and picked it back up.
The honest moment came standing there in my rented room with the bag back on my shoulder. I could have waited until Thursday, or the next week, or until the cash ran lower and forced the issue. But I’d seen the card in the diner’s door, and I knew myself well enough to know that if I sat in this room tonight with nothing to do tomorrow, I would start finding reasons to leave. Momentum was the only thing I had going. So I locked the door behind me, went down the stairs, past the landlord who didn’t look up, and out onto the main road.
The diner was a five-minute walk. The Holt Family Diner, according to the sign, in lettering that had been repainted more than once over the same outline. The red-and-white awning had faded closer to pink and cream, and through the front window I could see a menu board on the wall, hand-lettered in chalk, listing things like meatloaf and chicken fried steak and three kinds of pie. The white card taped inside the glass door said HELP WANTED in block capitals, and underneath, smaller: ask for Ruth.
I stood outside for a moment, looking at my reflection in the glass. A woman of thirty in plain clothes with her dark hair pulled back and a duffel bag over her shoulder, looking like what she was, which was somebody who had just arrived from somewhere and wasn’t saying where. I couldn’t do anything about that. I forced my shoulders down from where they’d crept up around my ears and arranged my face into the neutral, approachable one, the expression I’d practiced in motel mirrors between Amarillo and here. Lucy Alverez was friendly. Lucy Alverez was open. Lucy Alverez had never testified before a Senate subcommittee, never woken in a motel room with drugs in her system she hadn’t put there, and never spent six weeks on the Gulf Coast recovering from what someone else had done to her. I pulled the door open and a bell above it announced me to the room.
My eyes moved before the rest of me did. That was training, and it happened whether I wanted it to or not. Front door behind me, second exit through the kitchen at the back, past the swinging door. Windows along the front wall giving anyone inside a full view of the street, and giving the street a full view of anyone inside. A pie case near the register with curved glass that reflected the whole dining room, so a person standing at the counter could watch the door without turning around. I filed that away as useful and hated, a little, that I’d noticed it at all.
There were maybe six people inside. None of them looked at me directly. All of them were watching me. I’d spent enough years in rooms full of people pretending not to watch each other that I could feel it like a change in temperature. In a town this size, a stranger with a duffel bag was going to be the most interesting thing that happened all week, and I had just volunteered for the position.
Behind the counter, a woman in her early sixties was wiping down the countertop. Silver hair pinned up in a bun that was losing the fight, an apron dusted with flour, and a rhythm to the wiping that said she had done this motion in this spot for thirty years and expected to do it for thirty more. She didn’t look up when the bell rang. She finished the section of counter she was working on, moved to the next, and let me stand there for the length of time it took me to understand that she knew who was in her diner at all times and didn’t need to look up to confirm it.
“I’m here about the sign,” I said. “The help wanted. I’m looking for Ruth.”
“You found her.” She kept wiping for another few seconds, then set the rag down and looked at me. Her eyes were sharp. Whatever the flour and the bun and the slow hands suggested, I had the uncomfortable feeling that she was reading me faster than I was reading her. “Can you carry four plates at once?”
It wasn’t the question I’d prepared for. I’d built Lucy Alverez a modest work history, references at businesses that had closed, a story about a divorce and a fresh start, all of it ready to deploy. None of it was required.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you have a problem with early mornings?”
“No.”
Ruth nodded slowly, like both answers had been the expected ones and neither had told her anything. Then she asked the third question, in the same level voice, and it landed differently than the first two.
“Are you staying?”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. It was a simple question. It was the simplest question anyone had asked me in a year, and I didn’t have that one loaded and ready. I had everything else. My jaw tightened. My gaze dropped a half-inch, to the counter she’d been wiping, and I made myself bring it back up to her face. She waited. She didn’t repeat the question or soften it or fill the silence for me. The regulars along the counter had gone very interested in their coffee.
Was I staying? I had a room I’d rented and a name I’d owned for eleven days and a car with a cracked mirror. Every instinct I had said keep the answer vague, keep the exits open, commit to nothing you can’t walk away from. Those instincts had kept me alive. They had also gotten me here, alone in a diner in a town nobody could find, with everything I owned cutting a groove into my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said.
Ruth studied me for a moment longer. I don’t know what she saw. I’d like to think my face gave her nothing, but I’d been off my game for a while and she struck me as the kind of woman who’d spent decades reading faces across that counter and rarely got one wrong. Whatever she found, she didn’t comment on it. She picked the rag back up.
She picked the rag back up. “You can start Thursday. Six in the morning. Wear shoes you can stand in.”
“Thursday. Thank you.”
She was already wiping the counter again, the same slow, methodical strokes, like the conversation was finished and the matter was settled, and apparently it was. No application. No references. No questions about where I’d come from or why a woman my age turned up in Cutter’s Creek with one bag and no explanation. Either she didn’t care or she’d decided the answers would come along eventually on their own schedule, and I honestly couldn’t tell which one worried me more.
I stood there a beat longer than I needed to, the duffel strap digging into my shoulder, the regulars still tracking me from the edges of their vision, the pie case reflecting the whole room back at me in curved glass. Then I nodded to nobody in particular and turned for the door.
That morning I’d woken up in a motel with a destination but no room, no job, and nothing planned beyond reaching Cutter’s Creek. Now I had all three.
The bell rang behind me on my way out, and nobody in the diner turned to watch me go. They didn’t have to. In a town this size, they all knew they’d be seeing me Thursday.
Harley Wylde is an accomplished author known for her captivating MC Romances. With an unwavering commitment to sensual storytelling, Wylde immerses her readers in an exciting world of fierce men and irresistible women. Her works exude passion, danger, and gritty realism, while still managing to end on a satisfying note each time.
When not crafting her tales, Wylde spends her time brainstorming new plotlines, indulging in a hot cup of Starbucks, or delving into a good book. She has a particular affinity for supernatural horror literature and movies. Visit Wylde's website to learn more about her works and upcoming events, and don't forget to sign up for her newsletter to receive exclusive discounts and other exciting perks.
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