Give a Ghost a Name

Holland

A painful, ridiculous laugh bubbled up. “You and your animal metaphors.”

“Works in any industry.” He went quiet for a beat, then: “Holland, I want you to hear this the way I mean it.” He looked at the glass, then back at me. “We protect what’s ours.”

The sentence landed like a brick and a blanket.

“I’m not—” The old reflex kicked out, bristling. “I’m not yours.”

“You’re Holland Williams who works in my building,” he said, carefully. “That’s enough. That makes you ours to look after. No debt incurred. No strings attached. No philosophy needed.” He tipped his head, eyes steady. “If you ask for help, we show up. If you don’t ask for help and we see you’re in trouble, we show up anyway. That’s the policy.”

It should have sounded like meddling. Maybe before, it would have. Right now it sounded like someone putting a hand on a door in a storm and shouldering some of the push back for you.

“What if the trouble follows me?” I asked, the question coming out of the part of me that still believed I carried bad luck like perfume.

“Then it learns it chose poorly,” he said, so calmly the words made me shiver.

We stood there for a second in a silence that didn’t feel like pressure. Then a customer came in and the spell broke because that’s what work does—it saves you from having to decide what to do with the truth in front of you.

Remy stepped back to the other side of the counter and let me do my job. He didn’t insert himself. He just existed like a promise you could choose to believe in later if you wanted.

The day limped along and refused to be dramatic. Two more reservations. A man trying to return a truck that had new scratches and pretend we wouldn’t notice. A woman who cried at the counter because she’d already had a bad week and her credit card declined and she needed the truck for her mother’s move and it felt like the universe was saying no on purpose. I knocked a f*e off and told her in a voice I recognized from old nights talking myself through worse that it would be okay. Sometimes you have to pass down the words you were starving for.

Around four-thirty, the light shifted toward late afternoon and my phone lit again with a notification from an account with no face.

New Message Request: I saw you today. Pretty sweater. Missed you, Holly.

I blocked it without opening the conversation and turned my phone off like that could cut the line. My hands shook anyway.

Banks popped her head in with a clipboard and a question about a corporate account and I answered it with a voice that didn’t belong to the body it was attached to. When she left, I put both palms on the counter and breathed until the room sharpened back into things I could name.

Five o’clock came, which meant nothing except that the sign would lie if I left it. It was one of those nights where the last hour took on a long, stretched quality, as if time knew we were inviting it to behave and decided to misbehave instead. Sean stuck his head in around five-twenty to tell me an outside customer might try to sneak into the shop after we closed. I thanked him and double checked the latch on the side door.

By five-forty, the lot had picked up a hush. The winter light went pewter. The orange of the sodium lamps blinked once, twice, found themselves, then washed everything in their indifferent glow. I printed the last of the day’s paperwork, stacked it, counted the cash, wrapped the deposit. Each ritual felt like a small shield, paper and ink against whatever the night thought it could do.

Todd sent a text to the shop line: Need an escort to your car? The offer felt like a held-out hand. I typed I’m okay, thanks, because I am stubborn, because I wanted to be the person who didn’t need it just once.

I turned the lobby lamps down. The ficus looked like it resented working late. I lifted my bag, slid my phone into the front pocket, and did a final sweep with my eyes to make sure the space looked the way it should look in the dark.

The front door glass threw back a faint version of me. Small. Alone. Determined. I locked the cash in the safe, checked the door again because that’s the person I am, and pulled the lobby keyring from the drawer. The metal was cold against my palm, solid. I took a breath that tried to be fortifying.

The lot outside was a grid of shadows and hard edges. Big trucks sleep with their noses pointed outward like they’re all prepared to sprint at the same time. The air smelled like metal cooling and the sharp tang of winter. Somewhere far off, a train dragged its voice across the tracks.

I stepped out, locked the door behind me, and took three steps toward my car.

It wasn’t a sound that stopped me. It was a feeling—the prickle at the back of the neck that has kept people alive for a million years. The sense of being watched pulled my eyes left.

He stood near the far edge of the lot, under the flare of one of the sodium lamps. Hood up, hands in his pockets, that particular tilt of the head that had once been a habit and now was a signature my body recognized like a brand. Even from here I could see how thin he was, how the hoodie hung wrong, stretched where it shouldn’t be. The light bleached out his face and left shadows where eyes should be.

He didn’t move. He let me see him. He wanted me to have that moment. He might as well have held up a sign with my name.

Something deep in me recoiled and tried to run at the same time. I took a step back and my heel hit the door. My hand fumbled at the keys, found the right one by miracle, and got it in the lock on the second try. I yanked the door open and slipped inside, closed it, and twisted the deadbolt so fast my wrist ached.

He didn’t run for the door. He didn’t need to. He stayed in his pool of wrong light and lifted a hand, a lazy little wave like we were neighbors in a sitcom.

Then he called, not loud, not soft, just right to carry across the distance and through the glass: “Holland.”

I couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence because my blood was roaring in my ears. My phone vibrated in my pocket like an animal that wanted out. I took two steps back from the door and pasted both palms to the counter because I needed the feel of wood under my hands to remind me I was there and not somewhere else.

On the far side of the lobby, the shop door swung open. Remy stepped through it at a run that wasn’t a run—controlled, efficient, all the power in the line of his body tamped down for safety. He saw my face. He didn’t ask questions. He crossed the room in three long strides and reached the glass beside me, looked out.

His mouth hardened into something quiet and lethal.

He didn’t touch me. He didn’t order me. He said, in a voice so calm it could have been a bedtime story, “Stay behind me.”

Outside, under the orange light, Robbie tilted his head and smiled.