Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(Epilogue) Two Years Later

I had always loved when the colors of summer bled into the colors of fall. The bright reds and oranges that cover the sky turned into the color of the leaves splashed against the trees. Once before I had been in Indiana at the time of fall, in the middle of October on a downtime between missions, and I had found a park in the south where the trees were transformed into orange and brown umbrellas over the paths to shield the sun and a large pond in the middle had reflected it back with the same mirage that it would have given the sky. It was then that I had fallen in love with this time of year.

New York was the kind of city I imagined in the winter of in the dead of a tourist-infested summer, and not in the fall months. It was kind of one of those secret beauties of the world, hidden until you unearth it on your own.

The streets of the self-named book district were strung with leaves on the concrete jungle, the sky bright blue as a backdrop to the scene. Every step I made in my high-heeled boots seemed to shake the trees, and the fall colors rained down on me with every move I made forward.

I wasn’t the type of person who immediately could see the beauty in things. I had been desensitized to that a long time ago. But, sometimes, it just catches you off guard.

If you didn’t know how to see some things in New York City, you will never find it. The small century diner was nestled in between a vacant lot piled with old trash cans and black bags and a shop front for appliances that the locals whispered as to truly belong to the mob, the heart beating underneath of the city, the darkness in the streets. I liked listening to the stories now that I could pretend to believe them.

The diner on the outside looked sad and decrepit. The sign that was lit up and dazzling in its prime only had one letter now, an A. the local kids have given it a new name since a movie had come out some summers ago and had something to the same extent as the sign, so the diner was now known forever more to the locals as Avenger’s. Avenger’s has a trailer-like look to it, like it was built straight up out of the ground, and the windows were tinted against the mid-morning sun.

I ducked my head as the breeze took to the streets and wrapped my scarf tighter around me. I took a deep breath and headed to the structure, climbing the rickety steps and holding my hand off of the door knob for a long moment.

The door swung open when I prompted it to, and Avenger’s transformed.

The rusted and dirty façade melted away into an interior with loud wallpaper of a scarlet red, decked out with black and white checkered floors. I would have believed earlier that this combination would have given me a headache, but the more I stood in its midst, the more it became a comfort to me, like a whispered assurance from a trusted voice in the middle of a darkness, like a squeezed hand when you couldn’t think you could feel anything but your fear. There were about eight booths lined against the wall closest to the street and an old-fashioned bar was before me, with stools to sit on. There was a window where I could clearly see into the kitchen, and the register looked ancient, but that made it feel like I had truly stepped through time. I wrapped my arms around myself, tightening my sweater around me, and settled into one of the bar seats on the end, glancing around.

There were three constants that always could be found in their same seats the majority of the time. One was an old man who always ordered the soup of the day, and he would sit there and read the paper front and back, and then he would move onto another one. He sat at the seat closest to the door, and I think it was because of war experience, because once you had the training you always wanted to know the closest exit, and I understood that in a way that it hurt. Another was a young woman nestled into the left corner when I walked in. She was a grade school teacher, and she was either grading papers or writing letters to the parents or reading a book. She usually got a sandwich, and it looked like turkey. She drank on average four coffees a day, and the waitress was constantly teasing her about the health values of it, but she kept pouring her more cups anyway.