The Spark

“It’s late,” she said. “I should go in.”

Her father nodded. He offered a vague wave in my direction, and then he was back in his flashy yellow car.

I picked up the coolers, and we walked to the entrance to her building in silence. The elevator ride up was quiet, too. When we got to her door, she fished her keys from her purse and turned to me.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. If you met my mother, you’d understand why I thought that interaction was pretty damn pleasant.”

Autumn smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “He just…I don’t know. He’s got a warped sense of priority sometimes.”

“I take it from what you said, you don’t like one of your dad’s friends…Silas?”

“Silas was his business partner.”

“Not a fan?”

“Nope.”

“Something happen between you two?”

She shook her head. “Not between me and Silas. I dated his son for four and a half years. Things…ended over Christmas break of my first year in law school.”

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. But then something dawned on me.

“That’s right around the time you also started to have career-decision doubts, wasn’t it?”

Autumn looked down. “I had a lot of doubts that year.” She took a deep breath and blew it out with a forced smile. “I should go in. It’s getting late, and I have an appointment early tomorrow. You can just leave the coolers here. I’ll bring them inside. I’m going to return them to my neighbor tomorrow anyway.”

I hated to leave, especially when she was clearly feeling down, but I thought we’d made a lot of progress the last few days and didn’t want to screw things up by not giving her space. So I nodded. “Okay. But open the door and go in before I take off.”

She smiled sadly. “You’re like a bodyguard.”

“Can never be too careful.”

Autumn unlocked her door, and I slid the two coolers inside. She held the door open after walking in. “Goodnight, Donovan.”

“Goodnight, Red.”

I waited until I heard the lock click closed before I left. On the drive home, I thought back through all the unexpected events of the evening. I’d found out the kid I’d hired to water my plants hadn’t killed one after all, a certain little redhead had stolen it. Autumn had also dropped a bomb on the car ride home—she wasn’t seeing Blake anymore. Then there was her father, who was pretty much what I’d expected from the limited things she’d told me. But even with all that, the thing I couldn’t stop wondering about was what the hell had happened during her first year of law school.