Pretend I’m Your Dad
At 2:15 on a cold February morning, Sarah Mitchell had learned that there were two kinds of silence.
There was the ordinary silence of a nearly empty diner—the soft hum of refrigerators, the occasional clink of porcelain, the hiss of bacon grease from the kitchen.
And then there was the other kind.
The kind that arrived before trouble.
Sarah was wiping the counter at Sam’s All Night Diner when she felt it.
She didn't know exactly what she was feeling. She only knew that the room seemed to change without anything obvious happening.
The old wall clock still ticked.
The neon sign outside still buzzed.
The coffee machine still hissed.
Yet somehow, the air had become heavier.
Sarah glanced toward the mirror behind the pie display.
Two men had just entered.
Dark jackets.
Dark jeans.
No hats.
No smiles.
They looked ordinary enough.
That was what frightened her.
Ordinary men didn't usually walk into a diner at two fifteen in the morning and move with the slow, deliberate patience of people who already knew exactly what they wanted.
The first man stopped just inside the door.
The second continued walking.
Neither ordered food.
Neither looked at the menu.
Both looked directly at Sarah.
She lowered her eyes.
Her fingers tightened around the coffee pot.
Four days.
She had seen them for four days.
The first time, she had assumed they were truckers waiting for someone.
The second time, she thought they might be construction workers.
The third time, she realized they had never ordered anything.
The fourth time, they had taken the booth opposite the counter and stayed for forty minutes without drinking their coffee.
Sarah had mentioned it to her manager.
He had laughed.
"People are weird," he'd said.
Tonight, she understood.
They weren't weird.
They were waiting.
She reached for a clean cup.
That's when the man sitting alone at the counter spoke.
"You're in danger."
His voice was so quiet that she almost didn't hear him.
Sarah froze.
She looked at him.
He was big.
Not merely tall.
Big in the way that suggested a lifetime of physical work, hard roads, and harder decisions.
His hair was gray at the temples.
His beard was short.
A black leather vest covered his broad shoulders.
On the chest was a familiar insignia.
Hells Angels.
And beneath it, one word.
President.
Sarah's eyes moved back to his face.
He wasn't looking at the men.
He was looking at her.
"Excuse me?"
"Don't turn around."
Her pulse accelerated.
"Who are you?"
"Right now, it doesn't matter."
His eyes remained calm.
"Pretend I'm your dad."
Sarah stared at him.
"What?"
"Smile."
"I don't—"
"Smile."
Something in his voice made her obey.
Sarah laughed.
It came out too sharp.
Too nervous.
Too artificial.
The stranger smiled back as if he'd just told her a joke.
Then he leaned closer.
"Good. Now take out your order pad."
She slipped one hand into her apron.
"Why?"
"Because those two men have been watching you for four days."
Her fingers found the pad.
"And today," he continued, "they stopped watching."
Sarah swallowed.
"What are they doing?"
"Moving."
She looked at the mirror again.
One of the men had started toward booth six.
The other remained near the entrance.
Her heart began hammering.
"What do they want?"
The man's jaw tightened.
"To finish what they started twenty-four years ago."
Sarah stopped breathing.
Twenty-four years.
The number struck something deep inside her.
She had been twenty-four years old.
Her entire life.
She had grown up believing one simple story.
Her father had left before she was born.
Her mother had never explained much.
Whenever Sarah asked, Diana Mitchell had always answered with some variation of the same sentence.
"He wasn't ready to be a father."
Sometimes she had said:
"He made his choice."
Once, when Sarah was sixteen, she had asked if her father was alive.
Her mother had stared at the kitchen floor for so long that Sarah had known the answer before Diana finally whispered:
"I don't know."
Sarah had accepted that.
Or tried to.
Now this stranger was telling her that two men had come to finish something connected to her father.
"Who are you?" Sarah whispered.
The man reached beneath the table.
She tensed.
But he only placed one hand flat against his thigh.
"My name is Hank Reeves."
The name meant nothing to her.
Then he said:
"I knew your father."
Sarah's blood went cold.
The man approaching booth six was eight feet away.
Hank leaned closer.
"Your father's name was Frank Mitchell."