of getting bit or clawed up. The first time a chicken pecked her, she ran away and never came with us again when my daddy would do his rounds.”
“I used to walk around the neighborhood with my grandpa,” Roxie said, her eyes closing. “He was a street cop all his life. He walked the same beat for thirty years. They tried to promote him but he liked where he was. He knew the people who lived in the neighborhood. He lived there, too.”
“Your granddad took you to work?”
“No. He wasn’t uniformed when he took me. Although it was part of his work,” she said, not opening her eyes. “He would go and check on people. If someone was sick and he knew about it, he would check in. This was a long time ago, when Brooklyn wasn’t Manhattan lite. We were working class. We needed each other. That’s something I do understand, something we have in common.”
Her whole body had relaxed. Normally that would be a good sign, but he’d listened to everything Lila had told him. He needed to make sure this was normal weariness. “You feeling okay?”
“Just tired. Didn’t sleep much this week. So it sucks that you have to watch over me. I can take a nap, right?”
“I can let you sleep for a while as long as you’re not nauseous or dizzy.” He had a list of what to look for. He wasn’t going to get much sleep between checking on Roxie and making sure Daisy didn’t wreck her apartment.
“I like your truck,” she said on a yawn she covered with her hand. “It’s soothing. Reminds me of being a kid. When we would go see my uncle, we would drive out in Granddad’s truck and I would sleep on the way. I could feel the road and he would drive and I would know I was safe.”
It had been so long since she’d really talked to him. He didn’t want it to end. “Sounds like you’re close to your granddad.”
The sun was coming up, and the light hit her face. Instead of moving away from it, she turned her cheeks up as though soaking in the warmth. “Was. He died when I was twenty. I was in the Army. I still miss him. You were close to your dad?”
His heart clenched the way it did every time he thought about his dad. “Very. I miss him, too. I only got ten years with him, but they were great years.”
“I’m sorry about your dad,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry about your granddad.”
She was quiet, and after a moment he realized she’d fallen asleep.
He got the feeling Roxie didn’t fall asleep so easily. She was a careful woman. Even though she wasn’t ready to admit it, she trusted him on some level. Or she was dying. It was one of the two. “Rox?”
“I’m fine,” she murmured. “Just tired. No nausea. Like I said, I haven’t slept much lately. I never do this time of year.”
“What about this time of year makes you not sleep?”
“It’s almost my birthday. I hate my birthday.”
That was something he definitely didn’t know about her. He had no idea when her birthday was. Birthdays were a big thing around town, but he couldn’t remember hearing anything about Roxie celebrating. That meant Armie—who would know—was respecting her choices. “What happened?”
She shifted so she could look at him. “That’s not the usual response. Most people think I hate my birthday because I’m grumpy or I’m being overly dramatic about getting older.”
“You don’t mind getting older. You’re not vain. If you hate something, it’s for a reason, and it wouldn’t be a trivial one. It’s not that you ate bad cake once or a boyfriend broke up with you on that day.”
She was quiet for a moment. “My partner got killed. It wasn’t on my actual birthday, but we’d just had a party. Nothing big. Just cake and ice cream. His wife sent them up with him. Then we got a call and an hour later he was dead. So I don’t like this week much. Bad stuff happens this week, as we learned from the snake.”
“Ah, but you could have been wearing different shoes,” he pointed out. “And you got to save this little thing. That’s a positive.”
Daisy bounced up and down like she knew they were talking about her.
Roxie reached out and gave the dog a pet. “She’s sweet. I’m just going to close my eyes until we get to my place. Okay?”
Lila had told