Then it was too late to plan what she would say. Izzie arrived at their table, her smile a permanent etching on her face. She eyed their dirty dishes. “You’re done. Sorry, I wasn’t watching.”
Being Saturday, the lunch hour had extended past the weekday norm of one-thirty, but with the Copper Penny Café now close to empty, a second waitress seated herself at a table by the window, presumably to chat with friends. The window-washer used his vinegar mixture on the stainless behind the counter. And Izzie had been preoccupied with ... something.
Max beamed a smile she didn’t feel. “Join us.”
“Join you?” Izzie’s own smile disappeared, her thoughts written on her face. She watched CSI and Criminal Minds, and though she lived in a small town, she knew serial killers, rapists, and torturers lurked in every corner, waiting for the innocent and the unsuspecting. One shouldn’t be fooled by a couple, because sometimes they could be the worst.
“I was married to Cameron Starr.”
Izzie sagged into the seat beside Witt, lips trembling, face white. “Oh my God.” It was all Max would have said if their roles were switched. The silence went on. Max struggled not to fill it.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Izzie mouthed the words, then put a hand to her mouth.
“Why do you think that?” Witt asked when Max couldn’t.
“His letters stopped.”
His letters? “When did they stop?” Max’s palms had started to sweat. Her pulse pounded behind her eyes, at her throat, and throbbed in her fingertips.
“A couple of years ago.”
Cameron hadn’t told her about letters from Izzie. He hadn’t told her about Lines, about his sister, his aunt, Izzie, about his whole goddamn life that existed before they met.
Cameron had been writing to this woman. A waitress in a tiny town in the corner of Michigan, a town nobody of any consequence had ever heard of. Max didn’t care that it sounded snobbish, didn’t care that everything in front of her was now bathed in shades of green, jealous, angry, envious green, didn’t care about Evelyn or Cordelia or all the stupid questions she was supposed to ask.
Witt’s gaze sat on her, his sympathy burning her flesh like battery acid. She almost hated him for it. She wanted to speak, wanted to scream, wanted to run. Her muscles didn’t respond.
Her husband had betrayed her in letters to a girlfriend from high school. It wasn’t about sex: it was about secrets and lies.
“He died two years ago,” Witt supplied.
Izzie Monroe’s green eyes misted. “How?”
Death by gunshot at a 7-11 a mile and a half from our home.
Over the roaring in her ears, Max wasn’t sure how Witt replied, but a single tear slipped from the corner of Izzie’s eye.
Max had never cried for Cameron. Izzie Monroe did it within seconds of learning he was gone.
Dead but not gone, not from Max. That was something this woman could never take away.
“What happened to his sister?”
Izzie frowned, reaction to Max’s harsh, unbending tone. Witt dared to look at her with pity.
“Didn’t he tell you?”
Max saw the question as accusing, the sound of it disbelieving. She could hear Izzie’s thoughts. You were married to him. How could you not know?
Hating Cameron in that instant and glad she’d never shed a tear for him, Max sucked in a deep breath. She needed calm, a steady voice, a I that masked the anger boiling deep inside. Cameron was lucky he hadn’t voiced his thoughts inside Max’s head. She might have done something unforgivable if he had, the least of which would have been screeching at Izzie.
She liked the quality of her voice when it came. Reasonable, not too soft, not too loud, devoid of emotion, precise, formal. “I need to find Cameron’s sister. I haven’t been able to do so up to this point, hence my journey to Lines.”
Izzie regarded her with tilted head and furrowed brow, as if Max were an idiot or an alien. “No one’s heard from Cordelia in years, not since she ran away, not as far as I know.”
You’re a fucking waitress, how would you know anything? Max clamped her mouth over the words before they spilled out. Don’t upset the woman, don’t blow up at her, she might have answers, she might know something we can use.
One, two, three breaths, long ones, allowing oxygen into her brain, soothing like a drug. She felt calm, in control. As long as she didn’t look at Witt, at that compassionate gaze.
“When did she run away?” A good question, a safe and necessary question.
Izzie’s eyes were wide and bewildered. “Right after high school. That summer.” Didn’t Cameron tell you all this?
“Does anyone know why she ran away?” Two sets of eyes, one green, one startling blue and too damn understanding, stared at her as she spoke.
“Why, because she was pregnant. She ran away with BJ. She thought they’d get married.”
“BJ?” What the hell kind of guy would call himself BJ?
“Her uncle.”