She tugged on his wrists, and he released her. It felt good to be touching him, though, so she shifted her hands and tangled her fingers with his. “I never wanted to discuss it—or even think about it. Besides, people probably figured I already knew, since I was there.” There in the corner, screaming at just the wrong time.
Her explanation didn’t seem to placate him. “I’m sorry, Dais. I should’ve told you a long time ago, but you always used to walk away when I tried to bring it up, and I…well, I hated talking about it, too. I didn’t realize you were blaming yourself all these years. The clerk pushed the emergency button under the counter, and Dispatch sent out the call that an alarm had been triggered at Miller’s Convenience Store. I was only a block away, so I was the first deputy on scene. Almost all of those types of calls end up being false alarms, but I’d only been working as a deputy for six months, so my heart started beating fast. I’d been on my own for just three weeks after finishing my probationary training period, and I hadn’t had time to get bitter and jaded yet.”
As he paused, she watched the muscles in his jaw work. Listening to him tell the story made her feel disconnected from it, as if everything that had happened that day had ruined someone else’s life, not her own. It was completely different from her nightmares, which allowed her to say fairly calmly, “I can’t imagine you ever getting bitter and jaded.”
Chris smiled, but it was faint and disappeared quickly. “Miller always had those promo posters hanging in the windows, so I couldn’t see what was going on inside. I had my gun out, and I was worried that would scare people in the store if it was just a false alarm. As soon as I entered, though, I saw him, saw them both…him and your mom.”
“You yelled, ‘Sheriff’s department! Drop your weapon!’ over and over.” She squeezed his hands. “I was so relieved to hear that. I hadn’t thought that help would ever come, and then there you were.”
His lips pressed together until they almost disappeared. “I didn’t see you at first. All I could see was a man with a gun pointed at a woman’s skull. She looked so scared.”
“Yeah, she did.” The story had become hers again, and tears rushed to fill her eyes. Daisy clenched her teeth to try to hold them back, but there were too many, and they flowed over her cheeks and dripped off her jaw. Chris’s eyes focused on her face, bringing him back from that convenience store eight years ago, and he tugged his hands free from her grip.
“I’m sorry, Dais.” He wiped at her cheeks with the backs of his fingers, but tears just kept coming.
“Not your fault,” she said, hating the hiccup that interrupted her words.
Apparently giving up on drying her face, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into him. Daisy rested her forehead against his shoulder and tried to concentrate on how good Chris smelled, like wood smoke and brownies, rather than remembering the acrid tang of urine when she’d wet herself in fear. Even dumb and useless movie-Taylor hadn’t peed her pants like a baby.
“It was, though.” It took a moment for Daisy to figure out what he was referring to. When she finally did, she shook her head against his shirt. Before she could protest, he continued. “When I was in law-enforcement training, we were required to take a basic firearms class. It was the same drills, over and over, and I got bored. Instead of aiming for center mass like we were supposed to, I’d pick some other body part, like the forehead or the crotch, and I’d see how tight I could make the pattern.”
Since she wasn’t sure how to respond to that, Daisy stayed quiet, waiting for him to continue.
“Your mom was small, smaller than you, even,” he eventually said. “He had his arm around her neck and had pulled her up on her toes, and the top of her head still only reached his collarbone.”
As she listened, Daisy grabbed his shirt with both hands, wadding the material in her fists. She’d been focused on the gun, her mother’s sobs, her own terror. That’s what came back to her night after night. The details he’d remembered were different, changing the scene in her head for the first time in eight years. Daisy wasn’t sure if that made it more terrifying or less, but she did know that she had to hold on to something, and Chris’s shirt was the closest grabable thing.
“I aimed at his head. It’s funny that you remember me yelling at him to drop his weapon, since I didn’t even realize I was saying it. It was really quiet for me—quiet and slow and clear. He looked at me, and I saw him decide. I saw it in his eyes that he was going to kill this woman. I saw that, recognized it, and I still hesitated.”
Daisy stopped breathing, her fingers clenching so tightly around the flannel fabric that her hands went numb.