For the next half hour, they chatted about work, and Ellery tried to forget her troubles. Once she pulled her phone from her crossbody purse and checked messages. Nothing from Josh or her mother. There was one from her father, but she wasn’t ready to talk to him, either. Both her parents had behaved badly, and she couldn’t deal with them. She wasn’t sure she could deal with much of anything lately.
“I know a great bar downtown where you can hear decent bands. Who wants to continue the night? After all, it’s Friday, and we are young and mostly single.” Fiona leveled slightly glassy dark eyes at them.
Normally, Ellery would beg off, but what did she have to do at nine thirty on a Friday night? Go home and mope? Yeah, that was pretty much it.
“Fine. I’m in,” Ellery said.
Rachel clapped her hands. “Yay, this will be fun. Let’s get the check, and I’ll get an Uber.”
Ellery smiled, and this time her smile felt genuine. A year ago if someone had told her she would be going downtown to hear a band with a bisexual black woman and a girl who wore socks with sandals, she would have thought they were smoking crack. Yet, at that very moment, even after calling her mother a whore in front of half of Shreveport, Ellery felt better than she had in a long time. Fiona and Rachel made her feel comfortable with herself. They made her feel like a better person. And she really needed to feel that way.
Because she was certain that she wasn’t such a good person. Not if she’d called her mother a whore, lied to her fiancé, and still fantasized about a certain bartender even though she knew she shouldn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Nearly a week after her memorable date, Daphne caught Josh kissing another man in a CVS parking lot.
She’d just pulled in the parking lot of the CVS to fetch the Benadryl her father had requested in a panic at nine fifty-five on a Thursday night when she saw her daughter’s fiancé. There were only a few clusters of cars sitting in front of the twenty-four-hour drugstore. It wasn’t her regular place to grab a prescription or snack, but she’d stayed late at a book club meeting at a member’s house in Keithville and was on her way home when her father called.
“I ate shellfish, Pickles,” her father had rasped, skipping the greeting when she’d answered his call.
“Daddy, why in the world did you do that?” She sighed, glanced at her clock, and then looked for an exit. If she could find a CVS or Walgreens, she could grab an antihistamine and be at her father’s assisted-living apartment in less than twenty minutes.
“Because those little suckers are seductive,” her father managed to impart. Though it sounded more like Sylvester the Cat saying it. Thufferin’ thuccotash. “Gonna need some of that medicine. My lips already look like those women who get all the plastic surgery.”
“Can you breathe okay?”
“Yeah. Same as last time. Just swelling up.”
“I’m on my way now. Hang tight.”
“Thank you, honey,” her father said, the apology in his voice scrubbing away her annoyance. The man loved shrimp even though he wasn’t supposed to eat it. Thankfully, it wasn’t usually a life-threatening allergy, but she knew that allergies were fickle and could turn into something more dangerous. Her father needed to be more responsible.
When she arrived at the drugstore, her lights flashed by an occupied car. She didn’t pay much attention since she was reviewing a mental list. She needed to pick up some creamer for her tea and a roll of paper towels to tide her over. She shut the car off and reached for her purse, her gaze snagging upon the two men arguing in the car. The driver was emphatically gesticulating, and a coil of alarm went up Daphne’s back. There had been a shooting a few nights ago in a different store parking lot. Someone had pulled a gun, and a bystander had been struck and gravely injured.
Just as she was about to crank her car to move it to the other side, the man in the passenger’s seat turned his head.
Josh.
He hadn’t seen her because he was too busy making his point to the driver, who himself was jabbing his finger on the steering wheel and shaking his head.
Daphne grabbed her purse, wondering if she should say hello or just get the goods and get out since the two men seemed