When HEROES don't come HOME

Chapter Twenty-Seven – Aisle Nine

The supermarket was a bright, humming engine of ordinary life—rows of polished tile, shopping carts with one squeaky wheel, overhead speakers playing cheerful strings that no one could name. Fog hissed from the produce misters in timed intervals, beading on lettuce like dew in a greenhouse dream. Children pulled parents toward the bakery samples as if tethered by sugar-scented wire; someone in a neon vest stacked pyramids of citrus with battlefield precision.

Emily and Sofia moved through it all with a wire cart and a handwritten list. The list existed mostly to be ignored.

“Tell me again why there’s a new brand of oat milk every week,” Sofia said, steering them out of dairy with the authority of a tugboat captain. “Who is out there milking oats? Who are these people?”

Emily allowed herself a corner-smile. “Unsung heroes. Also, we’re not switching. Last time you said the new one tasted like beige.”

“That was a specific vintage of beige,” Sofia said solemnly. She paused at an endcap display of novelty hot sauces whose labels included screaming skulls and a cartoon devil riding a jalapeño. “Oh, thank God. Pain in a bottle. Civilization is safe.”

They drifted toward produce. The air turned cooler, wetter. Near a crate of peaches, a little boy in a dinosaur T-shirt declared to the world that he would, in fact, be eating cake for dinner. His mother made the international sign for we’ll discuss this further in the car.

Sofia plucked two jars from a display of olives—one stuffed with pimentos, one with basil—and held them to the light with faux-curatorial gravity. “These or these? Choose wisely; my entire sense of self is at stake.”

“Basil,” Emily said. “We’re not hosting an embassy.”

“We might,” Sofia countered, dropping both jars into the cart. “It’s important to stay ready.”

Emily adjusted pace to let an elderly couple pass arm-in-arm. The couple paused to smell a bouquet of supermarket roses as if they were something rarer, something earned. The woman laughed at something the man said; the sound carried like a warm draft. It pinched something in Emily’s chest and then softened it. The last week had been a hard, unbroken line—work, worry, fragmented sleep. In this fluorescent normal, the line curved. She could breathe.

A burst of recorded cheerfulness chirped from the ceiling: Attention shoppers: this week only—two-for-one on paper towels. Somewhere a case of glass bottles clinked gently, as if applauding.

“Look at this,” Sofia said, affronted on principle. “Pre-cut pineapple. Where did the romance go? Buying a whole pineapple used to mean you’d chosen. You committed. Now it’s all tiny cubes. No story.”

“Imagine explaining to someone in 1910 that you’re upset because your pineapple isn’t a narrative,” Emily said. She reached for a bunch of cilantro. The leaves were bright and clean; she shook them free of mist and dropped them in the cart.

Mist sighed again. A fluorescent tube above them hummed and steadied.

Emily’s hand went still.

Two aisles over, half-shielded behind a pyramid of avocados and the cardboard cutout of a smiling cow hawking organic milk, a man stood with a plastic basket and a baseball cap pulled low. Ordinary, if you didn’t know how to look. Not ordinary if you did. Not ordinary if you recognized how he placed himself with a sightline to both ends of the aisle, how his eyes moved in reflections instead of head-on, how his feet were set to pivot in two directions at once.

Reeves.

Water ran off the cilantro stems and pattered to the tile. Emily set the bunch gently in the cart and made the decision feel like nothing at all.

“I forgot green onions,” she said, bright and easy. “Meet you at the bakery?”

Sofia glanced at the list. “We didn’t write green—”

“Bakery,” Emily repeated, smile firming.

Friend eyes assessed her in a heartbeat—do you need me? do you need space?—and then Sofia nodded. “Where the samples live,” she said, and pushed the cart toward muffins with a little hum.

Emily’s steps followed the produce cases. She paused at apples, studied them, as if tartness required calculus. Reeves didn’t turn his head. His mouth barely moved.

“Pick up a bag,” he murmured. “We’re debating Granny Smiths.”

She slid a paper sack from the stack. “Is this how we talk now? Under the benevolent gaze of a rotating chicken-roaster?”

“You’re in danger,” he said, no preface, no ornament. “You need to step back.”

“From an apple?”

“From all of it.” His eyes flicked to the convex mirror dome, then to the polished floor, then to her. “They’re not circling anymore. They’re choosing a target.”

The automatic reply rose—names, grief, the jagged syllables that had been talisman and wound. She let it pass through her without speaking. “Then they can choose,” she said. “I’m not stepping away.”

“You think it’s bravery.” He lifted an apple he wasn’t buying, checked it for bruises he wasn’t seeing. “It’s exposure.”

“You think it’s your call,” Emily answered, keeping her mouth near motionless. “It isn’t. I made mine.”

“Finish what?” he said tightly. “Do you even know how far this goes?”

“Far enough that they’re breaking men and hiding the damage,” she said, sliding the first apple into the bag. “Far enough that a woman died to keep the secret. That’s far enough for me.”

A man in a golf shirt squeezed between them to claim a lemon, murmured “Excuse me,” and coasted on. A child announced an urgent discovery about cookies to anyone listening. Emily added another apple. The paper crackled softly.

“You don’t see the hand behind the hand,” Reeves said. “You think you’re pulling a thread. It’s a web.”

“Then bring me a map,” she said. “Bring me facts. Bring me something that’s more than stay quiet and hope the bad men lose interest.”

A fraction of a wince crossed his eyes and vanished. He had something. He wasn’t sharing it here, not with the convex mirror and the smiling cow and a hundred cell phone cameras waiting to make strangers into stories.

“Buy your apples,” he said finally. “Pretend you care about tartness.”

She did. “You followed me here?”

“I followed the people following you.” His hand reached past her for a bag he didn’t need; the angle hid his mouth from the dome. “Two. Sunglasses and a cap. They’re the kind of sloppy that turns mean when it realizes it’s sloppy.”

“I see them,” she said without looking. “I’m not new to being watched.”

“This isn’t field work with a handbook,” he snapped quietly. “This is HelixCore’s Lab with a line item for bodies and a legal team that sleeps fine.”

“You think I don’t know that name?” she asked.

His jaw ticked. “I think you like that I care enough to try to drag you out of the river.”

She kept her eyes on the apples, because the hurt in his voice would be too much if she looked. “I’m not reckless because you care,” she said. “I’m stubborn because the direction’s right.”

A speaker crackled. Bakery samples available near the cinnamon swirls—

“Bakery!” Sofia’s voice chimed from the far end of produce, stage-whisper bright. “I have found brownies the size of moral dilemmas!”

Reeves’s eyes flicked toward the origin of the sound, then to the dome. Emily caught the men he meant in the chrome curve of a deli case: baseball cap studying a display of grapes with the reverence of a minor prophet; sunglasses peering into his phone as if it were issuing commandments. Neither looked at her directly. Both looked at reflections.

“Keep moving like this is nothing,” Reeves murmured.

“It isn’t nothing,” she murmured back. “It’s my life.”

“And I’m trying to make sure it stays your life.”

“Michael—” she started, softening without meaning to.

“Don’t,” he said, too quickly.

She didn’t say any of the words that would come after his name if she let them. “I’m not stepping away,” she said instead, and packed gravity into the flatness. “Not because of who I am to anyone else. Because of who I have to be to myself.”

He looked like he had three different sentences lined up and strangled all of them.

Sofia swung into the aisle with the cart and a grin turned down only slightly by the shove of tension in the air. “I come bearing irresponsible pastry,” she announced, then did a neat double-take as she registered the man at the apples. “Oh! Hello.”

“Hi,” Reeves said, deploying the neutral civilian syllable.

Sofia’s head tilted, eyes clicking into familiarity. “Mr. Reeves,” she said with delighted certainty. “Taller in person.”

His face didn’t change, but Emily felt the minute vibration of resignation move through him. “Michael is fine.”

“Michael.” Sofia tried it out. “Thank you for your public service,” she added, cheerful as a magazine editor, “scaring off men who think sunglasses make them invisible.”

Reeves blinked once. The corner of his mouth didn’t move. “Your friend is… observant.”

“She’s my closest friend,” Emily said quietly. “She knows the shape of things—just the shape.”

He held her eyes for one long, flat second, disappointment flickering and hardening. Then Reeves gave a single tight nod, shifted his basket to the other hand, and without another word turned and walked away into the slow stream of shoppers.