Before I could ask, Ev hung up and left me staring out the window at my front yard.
Talking to Ev and, yeah, thinking about Parker, had made me all melancholy, and suddenly there were ghosts popping out all over the place, against my will. There was Molly, lying on the grass in the summer, looking at the stars and telling me the stories of the constellations while mosquitos ate us alive. There was my dad, starting a snowball fight with my mom, back when they’d gotten along, before his accident and his drinking had taken him from us, before my mom had left. And Parker was there too. Of course he was. Leaning against the hood of the ancient, bright green, barely roadworthy Dodge I’d just had towed to the house, his mouth giving me shit while his green eyes shined like I was the largest star in his personal universe.
I swallowed.
I’d told Ev that Parker and I weren’t anything to each other, and I’d meant it. He was firmly in the past. But sometimes… sometimes it felt like the past still haunted me.
I checked my phone as white flakes started to accumulate on my windshield. No new messages. Clearly, Brian wasreallyannoyed. But for the first time, I kind of admitted to myself that I wasn’t sure Icouldmake everything better between us… and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
The overwhelming relief of this was probably a clue I was on the right track.
We’d gotten back together because we were both hoping I’d finally be able to commit to him, but apparently I just wasn’t built for that.
I let myself out of the truck into a chaos of falling flakes and collected my winter coat from the back seat before shrugging it on. The neighborhood was silent except for the branches of the giant oak tree in my backyard, which tap-tap-tapped against the house in the wind, like a not-so-subtle Morse code reminder that I’d forgotten to prune the trees last fall.
Even after six years of living here alone, six years of having my name on the title, it was still weird to think of the place asmine. It had been my family’s, and then my dad’s after the divorce. But now there was no one left but me to take care of the trees and the rotting ponytail fence. I’d inherited my dad’s dusty gym equipment, and the photographs that lined Molly’s bedroom walls, and the couch in the basement where Parker and I used to sit and plan our future. I owned the collection of colorful glass bottles my mom had left on the kitchen windowsill when she went to Portland tobe happy, that even now glowed in the light spilling from the window and sent ripples of color across the snow-covered grass.
I stared at the colorful glow for a minute, then I frowned.
The light spilling out of the window?There should absolutely not be a light spilling out of the window.
I froze in my slow walk toward the house.
The kitchen light hadnotbeen on this morning when I left for work, I was positive. And no one else in the world had a key to my house—a fact worth noting, in a place like O’Leary where neighbors routinely had keys to every house on the block in case of an emergency.
But this is O’Leary, I reminded myself.And the wildest thing to happen on this block is old Mr. Bale getting lit on the Fourth of July and attempting to show the ladies of the neighborhood his shrapnel scars.
Then again, the number of kidnappings, murders, and thefts that had plagued this town the past six months were more than all the crimes in the thirty years before put together. And I’d learned the hard way last fall that sometimes the people you least suspected, even a person you considered a friend, could betray you.
For a single second, I debated calling the police station, but Jesus, I refused to be this week’s ridiculous call-out in the police blotter.Local mystery-reader calls cops in snow storm after leaving kitchen light on. Assumed thieves were targeting his old baseball trophies.
Still, I ran back to the truck and grabbed the long-handled ice scraper from the bed, just in case, brandishing it like a weapon as I approached the breezeway between the garage and the kitchen.
I was still maybe ten feet away from the house when I heard the music—some kind of nineties ballad, I was pretty sure—and I got even more freaked out, because I didn’towna stereo, so there was definitely someone in there, and what kind of fucked up thief brought their own tunes to the scene of the crime?
I opened the door to the kitchen and immediately heard movement off to the left, in the dining room. The clink of the plates from my mom’s china cabinet, the scrape of a chair against the hardwood.
Fuck. Someonewasrobbing me.
Without pausing to give the thief a chance to run away or fight back, I charged into the room and hurled my ice scraper like a javelin.
Brian screamed and threw himself onto the ground, while the scraper sailed harmlessly past his head and lodged in the dark red wall.
Holy shit.
“Holy shit!”Brian said from his knees on the floor. He stared up at me with wide, fearful eyes. “Jamie, what the hell are you doing?”
I blinked, then shook my head and blinked again, like somehow that would make the vision in front of me clearer. “Me?” I demanded. “What areyoudoing?Christ, Brian. Why are you naked, man?”
“I brought usdinner,obviously.” He pushed himself to his feet, folded his arms over his chest—his very bare chest—and stuck out one hip, which made his dick—his very naked dick—sway. I looked away, feeling my cheeks get hot—and not in a good way.
“But… Why?” I took a step farther into the room and rested my hand on the carved wooden back of a chair, confusion and adrenaline mixing in my brain. Belatedly, I noticed the table was set with my mom’s old tablecloth and china. In the center was a bouquet of lilies in a vase, flanked by a pair of white taper candles that flickered merrily. A bottle of wine sat on the sideboard. “This wasn’t our plan. Was it?”
“It’s our four-weekdate-iversary!” he fumed, like that was an actual occasion. And, props to Everett, because apparently ithadbeen a month. “No, it wasn’tplanned. I thought I’d surprise my boyfriend. Instead,heshockedtwentyyearsoff my life.”
“Shit.” I sighed, sinking into the closest chair as my heart rate began to slow and the adrenaline fled. I stated the obvious. “I had no idea you’d be here. I thought you were a thief.”
“A thief?” Brian’s eyebrows arched so hard they nearly met in the middle. “Honey, what would anyone steal? The VCR in the basement? Your collection of Precious Moments?”
