SHE froze in shock at the sight of the girl standing in the street in front of her. Their eyes met. Emalyn had seen her.
Eliane could think of a few people she would rather not have run into in the street, though most were for very different reasons. She’d promised Emalyn she would never disappear without any word again, and here they were, meeting up on the other side of a two-month break in that promise. She’d had good reasons, but she didn’t think they really mattered in the long run.
She’d thought of seeking Em out now that it was all finished, trying to explain what had happened and why she’d dropped off the radar. Surely she could talk through everything and make amends, make apologies, make up. Harmony knew she missed spending time with her best friend. Em deserved to know what had happened. She of all people.
But then, the image of her brother’s bullet ripping through Emalyn’s father’s head would rise to memory, and she’d tell herself that maybe a clean break was for the best.
Why reconnect if all she did was put her friend in danger? Em deserved to have friends who weren’t criminals involved in the underworld. Safe normal people with safe normal lives. Even with Dier dead, that would never be Eliane. It was best to smother what she personally wanted and let Emalyn go for her own good. That’s what she’d decided was the plan to deal with all of this, and she’d hoped that was that.
Staring her once-best-friend straight in the face, floundering for words at the unexpected encounter, Eliane was reminded that Harmony’s plans were seldom in line with her own.
Emalyn stared. Of all the people she’d run into, on this day, the day of her daughter’s wedding Eliane was the last person she thought she’d see. Several hundred emotions she couldn’t identify ran through her.
Two months. Two whole bloody months of being absolutely worried sick, and this is how she finds her. A random chance. She was angry, of that she was certain. She would have loved to scream her throat dry. Eliane had promised not to do this. The first time had only been a couple weeks, and that hurt enough on its own. But this? This was a whole new level.
So of course she did the only reasonable thing. One moment she stood a few feet away in respect for personal boundaries, the next she had her arms wrapped tightly around her friend, not really certain if Eliane could breathe or not.