Page 47 of Flirting with Forever

“What’s up?” John asked Beth.

“I’ve been calling you all morning,” Beth told him.

“I had court. My phone’s off.” He pulled it out of the pocket of his black slacks as if to prove his point. He turned it on. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

“Your girl’s shop got broken into last night. Trashed pretty bad.”

His mind stuttered on the wordgirl. Whose girl? His? And then his thoughts tripped over to the wordshop. He knew only one person who owned a shop.

“Mary?” John croaked, his eyes wide, his voice splitting in two different directions.

Richie and Beth nodded at the same time.

“Jesus.” He took a step forward and then an immediate step backward. “Is she all right?”

“She’s holding it together...” Beth said, one hand on the back of her neck and her eyes on the floor. “But it’s pretty bad, and she didn’t call anyone. No friends or anything.”

John thought helplessly of all the friends she’d had over at her beautiful house just last weekend. She hadn’t called a single one of them. Why?

“She’s alone?”

“Yeah. The cops are going to wrap things up for the day pretty soon, but it’s a crime scene.”

And then Mary would be alone at a crime scene, unable to even clean things up. She’d have to leave everything the way it was.

“God. She lives above the shop.”

“Yeah. They broke through her front door, but the cops got there in time and the perps fled. She wasn’t harmed. Just freaked out.”

“Were they apprehended?” he asked in a voice that didn’t quite sound like his own.

Beth pursed her lips. “No. They went out the back while the cops came in the front. They gave chase but lost them. They saw enough to do a rough identification, though, and the vandalism matches a few others that happened up in Williamsburg last month.”

John nodded, trying to absorb the information in a clinical, practiced way, the way he did the details of any case. But he found that he couldn’t. Mary, alone, scared, her shop wrecked.

“Shit. Maybe I should call Estrella.” He pinched his eyes closed.

“John.” Richie’s sharp, rarely used tone had John startling. “Beth didn’t come down here to tell you to call your mother. You need togo.”

Beth nodded.

John didn’t think this was the best time to point out that he and Mary were just friends. Her shop had been broken into badly enough that Beth was here, in his office, and Mary was there, alone.

“Yeah. Yeah, all right.” He turned a circle and grabbed his bag.

“Do you have appointments this afternoon?” Richie asked. “Court?”

John pressed heavy fingers to his forehead. “No court. But I’m supposed to meet with Sarah about that sex trafficking case and then Weathers asked me to consult with him on a B and E. And the rest of the day was going to be prep for court next week.”

“I’ll let Sarah know you had a family emergency, and I’ll take over the B and E consult. The rest you’re just going to have to catch up on this weekend.”

One of the main differences between being a public defender and working for a private defense firm was the hours. John and Richie generally worked a tight eight to four schedule, occasionally coming in early or leaving a bit late. But for the most part, they had their weekends. John would gladly give up his weekend to cut out early and make it to Mary.

“All right.” John nodded dimly at Richie, grateful for the clear instructions, and followed Beth out of the office. She gave him a ride in the squad car down Court Street. John and Mary’s places of work were only a five-minute drive away from one another. A fifteen-minute brisk walk. So close and yet so far.

He jumped out of the squad car and just stared at the outside of Mary’s shop. The security gate was still pulled down, but her large front window was a spiderweb of white cracks. He could see from the scattered glass on the ground that the impact had come from the inside of the shop.

Though it usually glowed, today the lights seemed to be mostly off inside. The shop looked dull and listless, a normally vibrant soul asleep in a sickbed.

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