The Outskirts (The Outskirts Duet #1)

I was about to head down the steps when I spotted a line of bright yellow trucks and cars driving down the highway. That wasn’t what grabbed my attention though. That wasn’t what had me flying down the steps in a rush to get to Sawyer.

It was the blue logo each of the vehicles had painted on the doors.

A sun rising over mountains.

He’s here.





Chapter Forty-One





Sawyer





I was on edge.

Something was off. And it wasn’t just that I wasn’t feeling great. I’d been feeling dizzy on and off all day, but it wasn’t that. It was Finn. He’d been acting different lately and when I asked him about it he told me not to read too much into his broodiness. He’d laughed, but it hadn’t reached his eyes.

I knew he was hiding something.

That and he went to run an errand early this morning and I hadn’t heard from him yet and it was approaching midnight.

My mood must have been written all over my face because as I was sweeping up, Critter reached under the bar and pulled out a shotgun. He cocked it and the sound echoed off the walls of the bar. “Where is that son of a bitch?” he asked, heading to the door. “I warned him…”

“Critter!” I called out. “Stop. Wait!”

“Did he hurt you?” Critter asked, turning back around and looking me up and down with murder in his dark eyes. “I warned that son of a bitch.”

“Not in the kind of way that needs resolving with a shotgun,” I explained, pushing the barrel of his gun down.

He raised a bushy brow. “Is there a kind of way that don’t?”

“Yeah, and I think this is one of them.” I crossed the room and continued sweeping while Critter walked back behind the bar.

The shotgun stayed on the counter.

“You ain’t gonna cry are you?” Critter asked, watching me from the bar.

“I don’t cry,” I replied, straightening my shoulders. “Not for a long time, anyway.”

But I do feel like something heavy was dropped on my chest.

“Yeah, but in my experience, being pissed off at a man and tears go hand-in-hand.” Critter pulled down a tumbler from the rack, pouring three fingers worth of whiskey from the top shelf.

“I thought you only drank beer,” I pointed out.

Critter lifted up his glass. “Tonight feels like a whiskey kind of night,” he said, not sounding like his usual happy self.

“I’ll be fine,” I reassured him, hoping that his change in mood wasn’t because of me.

“I know you will be. You’re a tough one, kid. I’m glad you came around. Things wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“Thanks. I feel the same.”

Critter had become family to me. More family than I’d ever had before.

“I hope you always do,” he muttered and I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him right.

“You say that a lot,” I said, spinning around to face him the butt of my broom handle knocked a picture off the wall, sending it crashing to the floor, picture side down. “Shit,” I cursed.

“Be careful. You need help over there?” Critter asked.

“I got it.” I knelt, picked up the frame and set it on the closest table. I swept the shards of glass into a dustpan and dumped it in the rolling trash bin that I wheeled over to the table. I shook the frame over the bin to make sure no broken glass remained. The picture separated from the frame and fell into the bin. “Critter, you never said. Who is it that I remind you of?” I went to reach for the photo on the top of the pile, gasping at the image staring up at me.

Critter’s heavy footsteps sounded behind me. He looked over my shoulder and picked up the photo off the trash pile. He smiled and ran his hands lovingly over the older image of a woman sitting at the bar, smiling at the camera like the person behind the lens meant everything in the world to her.

Critter held up the photo and pointed to the woman. “Her,” he sighed heavily. When he spoke again his voice was scratchy. “You remind me of her.”

And it made sense why.

The woman…was my mother.



Unable to take my eyes off the photo I sat at the bar. Critter stood on the other side and poured me my own drink. He slid three fingers of whiskey in front of me. “Here,” he said.

“I don’t drink whiskey,” I said.

“You do tonight,” he argued, downing the contents of his glass and slamming it down on the bar, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

Critter plucked the photo from my hands. “I was wondering when you’d get here,” he said, but he wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to the picture.

To my mother.

“Those are the exact same words you said to me when I first met you,” I pointed out.

Critter flashed me a sad smile that made my throat dry. “Those are also the exact same words I said to her when she first walked into my bar.”

“That’s my mom,” I said. “But something tells me you already knew that. You lied to me.”

“I omitted the truth,” Critter argued.

I glared at him. “Yeah, I lied. I didn’t want to. Lord knows I hated every second of it. But I thought it was for the best.”

“Tell me more,” I said, not wanting to get caught up in anything other than finding out more about my mother and her time in Outskirts.

Critter chuckled and nodded his head. “Yeah. I know. I’ve always known. You’re just like her. She too went out of her way to point out the obvious.”

I’m nothing like her. I wanted to argue, but I was too taken aback by the way he was talking about knowing my mom. A woman I didn’t even get to know on that kind of level.

“Do you know why we call them tings?” Critter asked, pointing to the ceiling.

“No,” I said, shaking my head and spinning my tumbler on the bar.

“Your mom. She made up that name. She said a ting is the sound you hear when something happens in your life that will change it forever. Good or bad, big or small,” he smiled sadly. “Life is composed of thousands of tings and she wanted people to memorialize the ones they experienced here. Which is why we now hang tings from the ceiling.”

“Wow,” I said, feeling confused and warmed by the knowledge that my mother had something to do with the twirling pieces of paper that have been blowing in the AC breeze above my head for weeks.

Critter cleared his throat. “I know every single person in every picture up on those walls.” He looked at me and smiled. “You may not have her blonde hair and she didn’t have your freckles, but that face you’ve got there? That’s your mama through and through. Thought I was seeing a damned ghost when you first walked through my door.”

“I wanted to tell you a million times about her. Caught myself about to tell you how much you reminded me of her about a thousand times. Like when you talk too fast when you’re nervous or bite your lip when you’re thinking of something to say. The truth is that I didn’t want to scare you off by dumping all this on you the second you got here. I wanted you to find your way. Thought you could get to know the town, get to know the people here.” He looked me in the eye. “Get to know me.”