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Certainly not me.

Vera helped Leo to his feet, then took his face in her hands and inspected him from the front.

When she was satisfied with the front, she moved to the back, hissing when she saw the blood.

I inwardly groaned.

“What’s going on here?” Black asked to no one in particular, but his gaze was firmly set on me.

Goddammit.

I crossed my arms over my chest and practiced my Fifth Amendment right.

“She shoved him really hard, and he fell.” Vera pointed her bony-ass finger to me. “When he fell, he busted his head open. Look at this!”

Jesus Christ.

Leo allowed Vera to turn him, mostly because it worked well for his agenda.

Black studied the tiniest of cuts and then said, “You’re not exactly the best person to take a statement from when it comes to Jessamy, Vera.”

No, no she was not.

There were two people banned from The Mercantile. Me, and more recently, Charleigh Kensington.

Charleigh was a Marine that didn’t take shit from anyone. She’d recently started seeing a Dixie Warden named Court. Or, maybe just working with him. I didn’t know, and I didn’t converse enough to ask.

But when you tried to be invisible, people tended to talk.

I tended to listen.

Anyway, Vera had banned her due to some imaginary slight when Charleigh had once worked with her.

Meanwhile, I’d ‘stolen’ candy from her at the age of seventeen and all of a sudden, I was the world’s worst person. The bottom dregs of society with no prospects in life.

Needless to say, she went out of her way to make sure that I was always blamed, whether I did it or not.

I remembered one time last year all I’d been doing was walking past The Mercantile from where I’d dropped my car off to get the oil changed at Pop’s Garage. I’d tripped and fallen, catching myself on the window, and she’d come out of the shop with her broom ready to do war.

Apparently, I couldn’t even touch the damn glass without offending her.

“She didn’t push him,” the strawberry-blonde who didn’t know what trouble she was getting herself into added. “Actually, he hugged her without asking and she pushed away to create space between them. He did the aggressive touching first.”

Black’s eyes came to me.

I still kept my mouth shut.

Less words were better when it came to protecting myself.

“Why are you in town?” he asked me.

I narrowed my eyes.

“What, is she not supposed to be in town? Is she banned from it? Come on, that’s a stupid question and you know it,” the strawberry-blonde kept going.

Fuckin’ A.

I turned to her. “Ma’am…”