Chapter One
Amara
Why am I not even surprised? Amara Hart scrunched up her nose as she stared at her ex-boyfriend's Tinder profile on her iPhone screen. She'd just been swiping to pass the time during her shift at work when she'd come across him, and now she found herself reading his bio with disgust.
Aaron, 34: Looking for someone who can be discrete. DM for digits.
She closed out of Tinder and opened Instagram, checking to make sure she hadn't completely lost her mind when she thought she'd seen he'd gotten married recently. Sure enough, when she got to his profile feed, there were tons of photos of him and a cute blonde wearing a giant engagement ring on their honeymoon. They'd literally gotten married last week, and he was already back on Tinder? Hell, it was Valentine's Day this weekend!
Once a cheater, always a cheater. Man, she’d really dodged that bullet.
Not that she really considered Aaron to be much of an outlier, though. After Aaron—and a slew of other short-term relationships that had all ended in heartbreak and disappointment—Amara had committed to staying single for the foreseeable future. Hell, maybe forever. Relationships were for people who were willing to settle for mediocre, and love was a Hallmark scam meant to pad the pockets of corporate bigwigs who preyed on lonely people on a commercialized holiday. Bah humbug, or whatever the Valentine's Day version of that was.
At thirty-two years old, Amara knew she still had a lot of life left to live, though she couldn't help but feel like the dating years were behind her. Good riddance.
"Frogger is on the fritz," Jean announced as she walked up to where Amara was standing, leaning against the cash-out counter. "Can you fix it again?"
The young teenager was leaving for college in the fall and Amara wasn't sure what she was going to do without her. When Amara had first opened Rad Retro Arcade three years ago on the west end of Yule Heights Shopping Mall, she hadn't expected her small town in Michigan to respond so well to a room full of original video game consoles and tables. She had everything from Pac-Man to Donkey Kong and she valued her little business as a place to step back in time and leave all her current woes at the door, and thanks to being pleasantly single, she didn't have any woes to worry about right now.
"Did you unplug it and then plug it back in?" Amara asked. That was always her first question, and half the time, it did solve the problem.
Jean rolled her big blue eyes. "Yes. Twice. I think you have to do a system reset."
"All right, all right," Amara agreed, heading over to find the Frogger machine by the SkeeBall ramps lining the back wall, currently packed with four different groups of teenagers all cheering one another on. She smiled at them, glad to see them here having fun with one another in person instead of on their cell phones ignoring the world from separate rooms. One of her regulars sank a high score ball, and she offered him a thumbs-up. "Good shot, Marco!"
"Thanks, Mara!" the young boy called back, using her nickname. "Hey, can we get some cheese fries?"
"Sure, kid." She had already asked the kitchen to prep an order when she'd seen them come in. Marco didn't often have enough money to play the games and order food, so usually he did one or the other. Sometimes she liked to make sure he was able to do both, so she'd send him some free fries from the restaurant down the hall. While she didn't have a kitchen of her own, she had worked out a partnership with The Big Cheese food truck parked in the courtyard, along with eight other food trucks that served all the mall patrons. They provided her customers with a small discount on food, and she let them use her storage room after-hours for supplies.
After a few minutes of fiddling with the Frogger gaming system, she got it up and working again but had lost the last week of high scores data people had been accumulating. She frowned, hating when things like that happened, but thankful that it was only a week's worth. She glanced over at the Ms. Pac-Man game a few rows down, praying that never happened to her high score record there. In fact, she'd once been Michigan's highest scorer for the entire game and she’d been working on making a national title for herself before the championship league had been shut down for lack of funding…and interest.
Story of her life.
"It's working again," Mara told Jean as she returned to the counter. "Can you go check on the last two orders at The Big Cheese? They should be ready for pick up."
Jean nodded, then pointed toward the receiver for the landline against the wall. "Yeah, but you just missed a call from the charmer next door. Don't worry, I got him to call his dogs off."
Mara internally groaned. "Let me guess, he said the kids were being too loud and disturbing his fancy, rich customers?"
She laughed, nodding her head. "I mean, not in those exact words, but I think that sums it up pretty well."
"Go get the cheese fries." Amara ushered her off, chuckling. Complaints from the neighbors weren't entirely uncommon, especially when she'd first opened and had stolen half the mall’s customer base, who now spent hours in her arcade instead of purchasing trinkets from other mall vendors. But these days, the complaints all seemed to be coming from one place—Kisses and Karats Jewelry. She didn't know the store owner well, except for the rumors circulating around the other shop owners at the mall that he was a ladies’ man. In fact, the owner of Tequila Mockingbird on the south end swore he’d broken her heart when he didn’t returned her text messages after a date. One of the hairdressers at Barber Streisand said he saw him making out in the parking lot with the wife of the owner of Son of a Bun Bakery. All that to say, she had no interest in getting to know the reckless Casanova, nor was she interested in keeping her store quieter so that he could sell more diamonds to misguided saps who had too much money and not enough imagination.
Her luck was short-lasting as the entire arcade suddenly went dark.
"What the hell?" Amara stood up straighter, trying to adjust her eyes to the sudden blackout.
"Hey, what's going on? The game turned off!" A kid from one end of the arcade complained loudly.
"Sorry, folks. The power will be back on in a minute," Amara announced, quickly making her way to the back room to find the circuit breaker. The rest of the mall still looked completely illuminated; only her store had gone off. What the heck was happening? She'd never had an outage in here before.
When she arrived at the circuit breaker, it took all her might to pry the metal panel apart, and when it released, it flew open so hard that it hit the wall behind it with a clang. She had never had to look in here before, and none of the switches in front of her were labeled as to where they went as she held her cell phone's flashlight up to the box. She examined it for a few seconds before deciding to just flip all of them and hope for the best.
Thankfully, that seemed to do the trick.
The back room lit up with the familiar fluorescent glare, and Amara sighed at the stack of video games that had toppled over against one wall. She went to pile them back up, not even sure why they'd been left here in the first place, when she realized the back door was ajar. Every store in the mall was connected by a small, dingy corridor that ran the length of the mall and allowed store owners to take out trash or receive shipments without walking it past the customers through the front door. Aside from the nightly trash run, she always kept the door locked, because the retro games she carried at her arcade were expensive, and she wasn't willing to see one of them walk off and end up on eBay for a collector to snatch up.