LITMIR.BIZ

      The café was crowded, noisy and exposed. Liv would have liked a table in a corner, her back to the wall, with a view of the street instead of this one in the center of the room, but it was not to be. Her brain felt too big for her head and her pulse beat like angry, tribal drums inside her ears. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. Boom, boom.

      It was surreal. A dream. It wasn’t reality. She’d had a taste of that once before, of believing in lies and visions. It was a defense mechanism, Dr. Yancy had told her. Her own invention. A protection against her darkest fears.

      Protection? That wasn’t going to help her now. Now, she needed to think about truth.

      Why? she asked herself, seated in the uncomfortable café chair. There was a table of three teenaged girls between her and the window to the street. The girls were looking through the glass and talking about someone named Joshua, who may or may not have been right outside. One of them blew the paper off her straw at one friend who seemed the most obsessed with this guy. They were laughing and teasing and just hanging out. The kind of thing Liv might have done as a teenager if the bright, sassy six-year-old she’d once been hadn’t found her mother’s body hanging from the kitchen rafters.

      To Liv’s left was a table with a middle-aged man in John Lennon glasses and spiked hair, a style way outside of his era. Instead of looking hip, he seemed a little pathetic. He was drinking a Widmer beer and absorbed in the sports page from the day’s paper. The Portland Timbers, the city’s soccer team, had won two nights before in an exhibition game of some kind.

      Liv could feel pressure building inside herself. Looking past the girls and through the window, she could see a lighting store across the cobblestone crosswalk, chandeliers ablaze in the windows. A coffee shop sat next to it: Bean There, Done That. She knew that coffee shop. It had booths with brown leather seats and a dimmer ambiance. She’d already ordered a cup of soup and a can of Diet Coke, however, and when the waitress brought her order, she had her money ready.

      A tempo was beating inside her ear: Get out, get out, get out.

      She couldn’t stay. Couldn’t. Taking a sip of the Coke, she carried the can to the recycle bin, dumped it, then left the rest of the food untouched. She was out of the café, across the street and inside the coffee shop before she had another conscious thought. She took the booth one in from the door, as the couple who’d been seated there were just leaving. Then she realized she would have to stand in line to order. She needed a cup of coffee in front of her so people would know the booth was occupied. She debated leaving her backpack on the table to save her seat, but couldn’t risk it.

      Chafing, she found her place in line, and saw her booth immediately taken by a young couple who slid inside it on one side, laughing together. Damn. Now what?

      The boy got up and stood in line behind her.

      She felt herself start to sweat. A row of glass pendant lights in red shades lined the top of the counter, sweeping a slash of color over her. Garnet red. Blood red.

      Her pulse beat in her head. Boom, boom. Boom, boom.

      I’m going to faint, she thought, just as the customer in front of her paid for his order and moved aside, allowing her to step toward the barista.

      “Coffee,” she said in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own.

      “Latte? Mocha?” the girl asked brightly.

      “Black coffee. Large.”

      “I guess I don’t need your name then,” she said cheerily, plucking a to-go cup from a stack and turning to the machine behind her to serve the coffee immediately.

      Liv felt the boy’s eyes on her neck like daggers. She dared not turn around. Facing forward felt like a supreme effort. As soon as the barista took her money and handed her the brimming cup, the boy shouldered past her and said, “A latte, and a double mocha.”

      “Names?” the girl said, a Sharpie poised over the paper cup.

      “Alana and Mike.” He turned and grinned back at his companion in the booth. “She’s the latte.”

      Liv moved away. To the station that held the lids and cream and nonfat milk. She poured a quick shot of cream into her cup and then reached for a plastic lid. It was all a ploy to pass time until there was a seat. Her hands felt disembodied but at least they’d stopped violently shaking.

      Two men and a woman filed into the line at the counter, but her gaze swept past them as she looked for somewhere to sit. Finally a table opened up. Not a booth, but a table. She hurried over, pulled back the chair and seated herself so she could look out the door and front window.

      “Do you mind if I join you?”

      The male voice brought her up short. She did mind. Very much so. But she couldn’t afford to cause anyone to remember her. Her heart resumed its heavy beating.

      “No, go ahead,” she heard herself say, sounding breathless. No wonder. She felt strangled for air. Suffocating.

      Her new companion was probably around forty, she determined, and looked like he worked out. He was losing his hair and seemed to be sensitive about it because he kept swiping a hand over the front wisps, smoothing them back in place.

      She didn’t want him at her table. She didn’t want his eyes on her. Kind eyes? Or knowing eyes? What those eyes weren’t were indifferent.

      Does he know who I am? Is he after me?

      She tried to act normally, if she could remember what normal was with all the physical reactions wildly coursing through her body: rocketing pulse, shaking legs, fevered brain, hysteria climbing up her throat.

      Stop. Stop. Calm yourself.

      At Hathaway House she’d learned to control her bouts of panic, and she’d believed, wrongly, it appeared, that she’d put them to bed for good. The pictures of Aaron and Kurt and Paul and Jessica’s bodies sprawled over the floor were right behind her eyes.

      A sound on the street caught Liv’s attention and she glanced past the man to the window and the sunny street beyond. A man’s shadow traveled by. She watched fearfully, but it was only in her imagination; gone in an instant. There were, however, people outside stopping to witness the results of a fender bender across the way, from the side of the street she’d just crossed. Two people, a man from one car, a woman from the other, were stepping stiffly toward each other to exchange insurance information.

      Her mouth was dry. The shadow . . . was she being watched? It felt like she was being watched. Gooseflesh rose on her arms.

      “You’re wearing a jacket,” the man observed. He was watching her. They all were. Everyone in the coffeehouse.

      “I run cold,” she murmured. She was sweating inside, though. She hoped it didn’t show on her face.

      The line had grown longer; the barista unable to keep up with the demand, so a sullen-looking, male coworker with dark, suspicious eyes joined her. Liv tamped down the tide of fear threatening to wash over her and picked up her coffee, drinking a slug of liquid as if it were water to a lost desert traveler.

      Her companion’s eyes were on her face. “I’m fine,” she said.

      “You don’t look fine. You don’t have any color, at all.”

      “Did you hear about the killing at Zuma Software?” a voice called from somewhere in line.

      Liv whipped around. It was a woman’s

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