She thought, but did not say, that she had missed her father too much to risk going to see him, to risk the sting of him sending her away like Daphne had.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Not for an instant did she consider going back inside to pay for them.

Vera purses her lips. After a moment of consideration, she concludes that her options have run out. Arnold is not being careful enough. He is not being quiet enough. He is not listening to her.

Or maybe Francis, knowing he was going to disappear from his daughter’s life, had left these for her to find.

A shiver ran up Vera’s spine. She wanted to ignore it. She wanted to ignore it more than she’d ever wanted anything. When she met James’s eyes again, he was smirking. Oh, she thought. Oh, no.

“You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about. He didn’t leave us, he wouldn’t ever leave us. He’s not like your dad. Something must have happened to him.”

go. “Old days. As if you have a right to talk about the old days. If you want to be a time traveler, maybe you can go back and do what I told you to do,” she hissed. “You have no idea how much I kept everyone away from you. They wanted to run you out of town on a rail, do you know that? They could see the grease inside you.”

He smells like clean sweat and rich earth and something sharp, something that reminds Vera of the way the air smells right after lightning strikes during the summer storms that shake her windowpane.