Free Run From Fear by Jami Alden

dinner until five. “But I was going stir crazy in the house and told Peg to meet me here on her way back from her gardening club meeting.”
    “No worries.” Talia waved him off. Some patrons she would have kept cooling their heels until the last second, but Frank and his wife were a sweet couple, friendly and full of stories of all the places they’d traveled in theirdecades of marriage. And still so clearly in love with each other. Talia liked to study them like she was on some sort of anthropological mission to observe a foreign culture. “What can I get you? Cocktail? Wine?”
    “You choose,” he said with a paternal smile.
    Talia pulled a bottle of red from behind the bar. “We just got a couple cases of this in. Technically it’s not available by the glass, but I’ll let you have it for the same as the house cab. Just don’t tell,” she said with a wink.
    She didn’t know what it was—the weird feelings she’d been having lately, the call from the reporter, the hideous news story—but for a split second, she flashed back to her old life.
    The pulse of heavy techno music as she smiled and vamped for the high rollers. Scoring a thousand dollars in tips on a good night just by keeping the liquor flowing and the girls fawning. A smile on her face even as her feet screamed from the pinch of sky-high heels and her stomach churned at the prospect of
him
summoning her.
    “You okay? You look dizzy.”
    Talia shook off the strange sense of vertigo and pulled the cork from the bottle. Instead of a slick executive or pro athlete who had money leaking out of their pores and women jumping to do their bidding, she was staring into the concerned, lined face of the pleasantly disheveled professor. Instead of a too-tight dress that put her centerfold-worthy body on display, she was wearing jeans, comfortable boots, and a turtleneck sweater.
    She’d never make more than one hundred dollars in tips on her very best night. But she’d take this life over the old one, a thousand times over. The thought brought an odd sense of peace. All of the fear, the paranoia thatdogged her for the last twenty-four hours, faded into the background.
    Soon Peg Everett joined her husband. She greeted Talia warmly before turning to her husband. Frank greeted her with a kiss and asked how her day was like he really cared. Talia shook her head. She didn’t remember much about her father—he’d left before her ninth birthday, right after Rosario was born—but she knew that drunk loser had never been half as nice to her mother.
    The crowd filtered in, and Talia settled into a rhythm, filled with a fresh sense of gratitude that she had the life she did.
    She’d been given a chance to escape, to start over in this nice community full of friendly people who smiled and tipped and wanted nothing more from her than a few drinks and bit of small talk. A place where she could call the cops if she had trouble, and a sense of security could be had with a new alarm system installed by a man who could turn her world upside down with a single look of his ice-blue eyes.
    Rosario called at exactly eleven on the dot, and Talia listened with half an ear as she chattered about a trip she wanted to take with some of her dormmates after midterms were over. She cleaned up the bar and helped Susie close up.
    That night, safe and secure in her house, armed with Jack and Ben’s upgraded alarm system, Susie’s thoughts about Jack came back to haunt her.
    But the dream she had was anything but a nightmare.
    She woke up late the next morning to dark skies and a steady stream of rain, typical for March in Northern California, unable to remember the details. Left with onlyfoggy images and a restless ache, she hauled herself out of bed and forced thoughts of Jack out of her mind.
    She met Susie for a training session with Gus, and shoved aside the surge of jealousy when Susie told her she’d called Jack and invited him to come in for a drink on the house. “I’ll