Page 75 of Handcuffed to the Bear

She told him the number. Typing into his phone, he said, “I think Cho warned you, also, that we’ll be needing your testimony against the Fallons, probably more than once as they process through the criminal justice system. Is that okay with you?”

“Yes,” she said. There were too many things to think about. Jack. The Fallons. The future.

Avery paused with his thumbs poised over the screen. “I can text you Jack’s number too, if you want it. If you think I’m being a pain in the ass, you can just say no.”

“I ... think I’d like his number very much.”

A tiny smile curled the corner of his mouth. “Will do. I’ll give you the address of his condo too, if you promise not to go all creepy stalker on his ass.”

“I promise.”

Her phone chimed. “There you go,” Avery said. “I’ve either done my good deed for the day, or ensured that Jack will be meddling with my love life until the end of time. Possibly both.”

He helped her get her crutches out of the backseat. “Want me to walk you up?”

“No, thanks. I’ll be okay.”

Casey hesitated, and then, screwing up all her courage, she did something she’d almost never done with anyone but Wendy before: she gave him a hug. His look of astonished pleasure made it totally worth it.

Then she crutched into her building quickly before he could say anything embarrassing.

One thing she hadn’t thought about was the stairs. There were two flights of them. A freight elevator in the back kept the building in technical compliance with ADA regulations, but she decided that she was going to need to tackle stairs sooner or later. The people at the clinic had showed her how to navigate stairs with crutches.

... which turned out to be easier in theory than in practice. By the time she got to the top, she was sweaty and exhausted and, god damn it, hungry again. Well, that’s what pizza delivery was for, and thankfully she always kept an emergency supply of cash in an envelope at the back of the closet, so the fact that she currently had no credit cards or ATM card wouldn’t bethatmuch of a problem.

She unlocked her door and crutched inside. Everything was just as she’d left it: small, dark, dingy, and a little bit messy, with a faint lingering smell of cat pee from the previous tenant. Her apartment had always been more of a place to sleep than a place to live.

And she was unprepared for the awkward sense of dislocation she felt as soon as she stepped through the door. Had it really been only three days since she walked out of this place? She’d been through so much, and yet everything here was?—

—not quite the same, actually. There was a large floral arrangement in the middle of her rickety kitchen table, an extravagant explosion of tiger lilies, daisies, and other cheerful, sunny flowers.

Casey stared at it. Then she crutched carefully around it into the bedroom. The handgun was still where she’d left it, hidden in her sock drawer. She took it out and then realized she couldn’t carry it with the crutches, so she stuck it into a pocket of her sweatpants. Then she checked the closet, the bathroom, and looked out the window, before crutching over to the table and poking at the flowers.

There was a card with them. It read:Welcome home, Casey! I thought you might like something to brighten up the place. Call if you need anything. xoxo -Cho

There was a number below it.

Casey laughed aloud.Notsome sort of homicidal-stalker Fallon thing. And, she thought, with the weight of the handgun heavy in her pocket, perhaps she had a little ways to go before she was all right, after all.

She looked down again at the card in her hand. Welcome-home flowers, for a complete stranger.

Thesepeople.

Standing there in the middle of her kitchen—so familiar, and so different—she finally lost the fight against tears, and she wasn’t even sure why.

CHAPTER20

Time hadlittle meaning for Jack. Recovery was like a kind of hibernation: he’d sleep, roll out of bed, stagger to the bathroom, eat whatever in the kitchen didn’t need more prep than opening a package and/or sticking it in the microwave, then stagger back to bed.

Consequently, he had no idea how long he’d been home (six hours? one day? three?) when the smell of something cooking—something that smelled much better than a can of microwaved soup—slowly penetrated his stupor.

Also, there were voices. It sounded like his condo had been invaded by a very polite block party.

He detached himself reluctantly from his bed, fumbled into a shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and groped around for his glasses. Then he lurched out into the living room.

“Hey!” Cho called from the kitchen, waving a beer at him. “Steaks are on!”

“Yeah, onmygrill, apparently.” The door to the patio was open, and most of the amazing smells were coming from there, where Avery and Mila appeared to be having an argument over the optimal time to flip a rare steak.

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